The parenthetical “(My Fair Lady)” refers, of course, to the music. Having opened the door to dancing to music with The Disco Project, for my second dance to music I generated much of the movement material in this work via videotaped improvisations to the soundtrack of My Fair Lady, another very personal musical reference. My Fair Lady was the first movie musical I ever saw, at the age of five (I immediately fell in love with Audrey Hepburn, little realizing that it was a love of identification: what I really wanted was to be her). So my choice of music was, in part, autobiographical. The Disco Project referenced one era of my life, the gay scene before knowledge of AIDS. Part Three (My Fair Lady) called upon my childhood as a little gay boy, and the seeds of my love for performance.
Too, there was something about performance in my use of the My Fair Lady soundtrack, as well as the briefer snippets of a Judy Garland recording I also placed in the work. I remember being crushed when I was told that Audrey Hepburn didn’t do her own singing in My Fair Lady, that it was dubbed by Marni Nixon. Around the same time, my mother said “look Neil - that’s Dorothy” while we were watching the adult Judy Garland performing on her television show (Garland had played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, should that be necessary to point out). I think both these cognitively dissonant loss-of-innocence experiences made me aware that these were performances, that Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland were performing. Just as there was something about the impulse to dance, and the function of dance, in the musical choices for The Disco Project, I think there was something about the function, and fact, of performance in Part Three (My Fair Lady).
Credits
Support
Press
Ann Daly, Dance Theatre Journal, 1997
Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times, 1997
Don Daniels, Ballet Review, 1997
Additional Links
Excerpt from Part Three (My Fair Lady)
Excerpt of improvised material used in Part Three (My Fair Lady)