Cabaret travels 1: Shyamala's response Cabaret in American Films

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Cabaret in American Films: Bob Fosse, German and Indian influences, and fluid sexualities.

In researching cabaret I found myself interested in how the genre is portrayed in American films.  I started with two films that I am familiar with: Victor/Victoria (1982) -which I watched frequently as a youth, and Cabaret (1972) - which has always left an impression on me even though I had only watched it once as a child. 

Cabaret is directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, whose seminal style of subtly gritty jazz is famously recognizable with isolations of the hips, shoulders, inverted knees and the notorious jazz hands.  Cabaret is about a performer in a cabaret, played by Liza Minnelli, who is taken by a rich man who has an affair both with her and her male friend/lover.  Victor/Victoria is also about a woman performer, played by Julie Andrews, posing as a man who is a female impersonator and often performs in cabaret settings.  It is choreographed by Rob Marshall with strong influences from Bob Fosse (but a more sanitized version of Fosse’s movement in my opinion).  Like many copycat choreographers of Fosse, Rob Marshall maintained the signature movements but is missing the darker undertones and subtle sexual tension of Bob Fosse.  Instead it is just big recognizable movements without any character or nuance.  In several sources Fosse’s former dancers emphasize how he was always saying to pull back and tone things down, that “less is more.”   Partially this is attributed to his move from the stage to film where the camera can focus in on the smaller gestures and isolated movements. (http://www.dancespirit.com/2011/10/legendary-moves-nov-2011/, http://youtu.be/cl9Xivexrps, and  http://youtu.be/hcAgZn7rnR8)

 “Money makes the World Go Round” from Cabaret exemplifies the Fosse style of emotion (in this case sexual tension) simmering under the surface with small almost understated movements:

Cabaret takes place in Germany in a kabarett (cabaret).  Like in France, where the cabaret form originated, German kabarett was a variety show in a restaurant/bar, with satirical political commentary along side musical/dance entertainment and was often a place of meeting for artists, intellectuals and revolutionaries.  What was unique about German kabarett was “gallow’s humor” or dark humor around morbid topics such as war and disease.  The movie Cabaret portrays the 1930s with the tension of the Nazi Party on the rise. (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/german/berlin_class/archives/glossary_cabaret.html)

Bob Fosse’s dance style is very compatible with the dark, sensual world portrayed in Cabaret.   While he actually came from vaudeville, from what I understand vaudeville was a stage variety show and thus similar to a cabaret. As Louise Quick, one of his former dancers, demonstrates in the following video: his movements had underlying meanings and subtexts and so knowing the history and context of where they come from is cruxial to getting to the depth of his style. 

Interestingly, Victor/Victoria also has a strong German connection for it is an adaption of a 1933 German film called Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria).  Plot summary is here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024736/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

One of the famous music and dance numbers in Victor/Victoria is “Jazz Hot” where Victoria does her first female impersonation and reveals herself as a man during the bow.   Here you can see the Bob Fosse inspired movements starting around 1:15min:

Also note the “jazz hands” forming a sort of Hindu God like multiple armed image around 1:50min.  Is this a coincidence?

Perhaps not: an interesting theory about jazz hands by a blogger named Minai was brought to my attention by Cynthia.  Minai writes: 

“A nagging theory of mine remains.  One of Bob Fosse's characteristic moves was ‘Jazz Hands.’  Some have said ‘Jazz Hands’ originated from African dance, but was their popularity influenced by Jack Cole's use of Bharatanatyam hand gestures like the alapadma?  Could the ‘Jazz Hands’ derivative ‘Spirit Fingers’ have been popularized by inspirations from classical Indian dance?  A girl can dream! ;)”-cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com/2011/12/choreographerdancer-jack-cole-and-hindu.html (Dec 18, 2011)

While I was intrigued by this thought I didn’t take it seriously at first.  But, according to several of his former dancers in the following talk, Fosse took movements from Jack Cole and then minimized them, thus making them own, while Minai’s blog clearly maps out the influence Indian dance had on Jack Cole and shows examples of the numbers he choreographed for movies such as Kismet which show that he had strong training in some kind of Indian dance, likely Bharatanatyam. (cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com/2011/12/choreographerdancer-jack-cole-and-hindu.html (Dec 18, 2011)

Here the dancers talk about Jack Cole influence from 4:53min:

So, I took a closer look at the jazz hands to see what I thought.  The opening number of Pippin’s “Magic to do” exemplifies the jazz hands that were eventually popularized. Here is a version of “Magic to do” (also discussed in Louise Quick’s talk reference above).  I’m not sure this one was choreographed by Fosse but clearly it is influenced by his style. Check out the first 1min 20 sec:  

 As you can see these hands are quite fluid and have a lot more variety then just the wide fingered jazz hand that I often think of, and does have a potential connection to alapadma. 

And perhaps there’s other loose connections as well.  As another of his dancers wrote: “Fosse dancers must be able to isolate everything, right down to their eyeballs, elbows and fingers. When a Fosse dancer learns to focus her energy in stillness, she can grab the audience with a simple flutter of her fingers.” ( http://www.dancespirit.com/2011/10/legendary-moves-nov-2011/ )  These same words could easily be a description of Indian dance.  And in one of the comments for this Legendary Moves article, Donna McKechnie says “I'll never forget rehearsing the Coffee Break number in How To Succeed.......(with Gwen acting as dance captain) rehearsing eyeball movement in unison! Wonderful.”(http://www.dancespirit.com/2011/10/legendary-moves-nov-2011/ )  Not only could “rehearsing eyeball movement” be a description of an Indian dance style, but I have never heard a description of any western dance (except a post modern one) as emphasizing eye movements.  And this could be a coincidence, but Louise Quick also described his style as having lines going on into eternity (6:25min: http://youtu.be/XqNIRxsi-pc).  I have definitely heard Bharatanatyam described in this way and it is probably applicable to other Indian dances as well.

Along the Indian connection, I found the following clip from the 1995 stage version of Victor Victoria.  Rob Marshall was still the choreographer, but this time he showed a little more of the sexual innuendo in the Bob Fosse style movement he portrayed.  And is it just me. or is her costume more orientalist then the film version with the diagonal garment like a sari over the shoulder? And is it too much of a stretch to say that from 4:32-4:40 min that the side and diagonal arm movements are reminiscent of Bharata Natyam?  Check in out: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgsfg_victor-victoria-le-jazz-hot-live_music#.UZ6RTOtyRS4

So, if Jack Cole was so clearly influenced by Indian dance -Minai makes a very compelling documentation of this, and if Cole was a strong influence on Fosse as his dancer describes, then its likely that Fosse’s work also has elements of Indian dance in it (of course African origins are clearly traceable as well).

Fosse’s style of dance is considered one of the major building blocks of jazz dance and jazz dance is often described as one of the off-springs of American cabaret.  So perhaps Indian dances influenced jazz dancing and how we know it today!

A final observation about the movies… Both films represent sexuality quite fluidly which was new in the 70s when Cabaret came out, but Victor/Victoria was part of a “breathrough cycle of mainstream Hollywood studio movies featuring gay parnerships and drag characters” in the early 80s. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084865/trivia)

William Luhr and Peter Lehman wrote a very interesting article on gender and sexuality in Victor/Victoria.  Here is one dance moment at a cabaret they highlighted: 

Four performers—two apparently male, two apparently female—dance slowly onstage, facing the audience and the camera. Suddenly, continuing the dance, they turn around, but we do not see their backs as expected; rather, the males have miraculously become females and the females males in face and costuming. We soon realise that the dancers are made up and costumed in such a way as to present completely different sexual identities from the front and the back—they wear masks on the back of their heads to present a different sex than their faces indicate, and their costumes change, front and back, to maintain the illusion. It is jarring to see them whirl around because the sexual change is so instantaneous, and it takes time to realise which “male” or which “female” is a mask and which is a made-up face. We never actually learn the sexual identities of the performers. During the number, the group of four at times splits into two “couples”. When the tempo is slow, the audience can begin to fix the sexual nature of the façades of the performers they see, but suddenly the tempo speeds up, and the performers whirl wildly about, making the number a crazed emitter of conflicting sexual cues. All certainty is gone. Then the tempo slows and the illusion of a measure of certainty returns.

Only in this number does Edwards significantly undermine the sexual perception of the film’s spectator…

-http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/04/%E2%80%9Ccrazy-world-full-of-crazy-contradictions%E2%80%9D-blake-edwards%E2%80%99-victorvictoria/

They write more about many more ways that the film brings forth the complexity of gender and sexuality and reveals the performance of them both for people who do drag, but also the everyday performance of those trying to maintain their closeted identities, and even the performance of gender and sexuality for everyone and the powerplays involved in that performance.  

Cabaret, as mentioned before, also deals with sexuality with a love triangle between a woman and her two male lovers who also have slept with each other.  I don’t know if these themes are inherent to cabaret performances in general, but perhaps the cabaret as a place of political satire and performance may have allowed a space for non-conforming identities?  Perhaps it depends on which cabarets in which communities. 

For a plot summary of Victor Victoria go to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084865/plotsummary

For a synopsis of Cabaret  go to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068327/synopsis

For a biography on Fosse go to: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/bob-fosse/