'Flashdance The Musical' and Ballet X

This month Broad Street was filled with exuberant young dancers stretching the boundaries of what we expect from classical dance forms even farther. Flashdance— the 1983 movie— broke ground in its time by contrasting what might now be called hip-hop with the ultimate classical art form: ballet. Now companies like Philadelphia’s BalletX take the field in the opposite direction, putting dancers on pointe wearing the torn rehearsal clothes that the film made popular and executing the angular movements of street dancing.

What has become of traditional art forms? And isn’t change exciting?

Non-stop celebration

As Flashdance The Musical wends its slow, almost Exodus-like way, from London’s West End across America to the eventual promised land of Broadway, it may suffer from the very success of its namesake predecessor. Familiar songs are blended with new ones, roles have been expanded or combined, and a team of talented dancers keeps the energy going. The additional 16 numbers turn the musical into a non-stop celebration of dance in the clubs and in the streets, but they also undercut the premise that ballet is the sine qua non of dance.

When you’re inundated with all forms of dance, ballroom (on “Dancing with the Stars”), hip-hop, jazz, ballet (on “So You Think You Can Dance”) and who knows what at Abby Lee’s Dance Studio (on “Dance Moms”), the premise that a young steel worker dreams of becoming a ballerina is rather hard to believe. Given today’s environment, I began to wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better to tell the story of a young ballerina who strives to become a street dancer.

But then, she still wouldn’t have to stretch very far. Alex, the heroine of Flashdance, would have been ideally suited to try out for BalletX, whose ballerinas often wear socks instead of ballet slippers and perform slow motion hip-hop on pointe to fluid electronic music.

Class struggle

Flashdance The Musical is a story about contrasts. It depicts the class struggle between the workers and the boss, the strippers and the flashdancers, the ballet dancers and those who lack formal training. Alex Owens (Jillian Mueller), the welder who would be a ballet dancer, and Nick Hurley (Corey Mach), the boss’s son who wants to support the workers, both find themselves at odds with the worlds in which they were raised. Their struggles to improve themselves and help those around them form the core of the story.

It’s a challenging show for the performers, especially Mueller, who not only must sing and dance and outshine those around her, but also must be doused with water to recreate the movie’s iconic scene. Unlike Jennifer Beales in the movie, Mueller has no film editor to splice her movements with several body doubles to create a breathtaking performance in which she seems to fly across the dance floor. It’s all Jillian.

Morphing into modern

BalletX offers another sort of challenge to its Classically trained dancers. They must incorporate modern dance forms into their repertoire.

Instead of holding familiar poses and dancing along side each other, showing off the lines of the dancers’ bodies and the carefully composed arrangement of forms, they interact, entwine, embrace. Classical steps morph into modern. A simple port de bras becomes a windmill of arms on steroids; a grand jeté resembles a gymnastic leap; a graceful pas de deux ends with feet flexed instead of extended.

Before the performance, the dance critic Elizabeth Zimmer moderated a discussion with the choreographers whose works were being premiered that evening as part of “The X Process,” an audience outreach program funded by Dance/USA to expand the audience for live dance performances from its current 3% of the population— a surprisingly small number in light of the size of the audience that watches dance on TV.

While the choreographers discussed their personal creative processes, their costume and music choices, and their personal vocabulary of movement, the essential question concerned what ballet looks like right now.

“I believe that ballet today is striving to pull from its classical roots a more accessible way to communicate emotions with audiences,” said Christine Cox, co-artistic director of Ballet X. “We’re trying to expand the vocabulary of dance for all audiences.”

Nothing but feet

The program of three world premieres by choreographers Adam Barruch (If the Heart Runs), Gabrielle Lamb (Heedful Needful), and Matthew Neenan (There I Was) mixed Classical dance movements with modern and jazz. Each choreographer spoke with a personal voice, through non-traditional costuming, lack of dance shoes and choice of music.

Neenan even had dancer Colby Damon play guitar to accompany much of his work, which began with only the dancers’ feet visible and ended with Tom Waits’ “Lost on the Road to Peace.”

Whether you prefer classical dance or hip-hop, or you just enjoy any form of movement to music, the exciting thing about dance today is that you don’t have to choose— you can have them all. And sometimes all these genres come together to create something new and exciting, like a hip-hop dancer who loves ballet or ballet dancers who turn into choreographers. Or all of the above.