Gillian Lynne/The Choreographing of Cats

"The choreographing of Cats" by Gillian Lynne, from Cats: The Book of the Musical (1981).

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The choreographing of Cats is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your everyday games. To borrow from the words of one of T.S. Eliot's marvelous poems seems the most apt way to describe my task in staging the songs and dances for Cats. Staging, such a seeming all-purpose word, is taken to mean many things to many men. In my case what you see is what I begat. The process towards the birth meant certain limitation and peculiarities for my choreography (and staging) as one of its duties was to tell clearly the story of each song and not interpret it at will, because the book of the show must live within the songs and dances. Sometimes I thought my mind would burst with the pressure of the invention needed in two and a half hours of staging. The range necessary to satisfy the eye and the mind yet remain true to the titled characters had to be conjured from my past and future, and not be swayed by my ever-present nightmares. I wanted to use known and accepted dance forms in a different way; as it were putting a feline wash over them, and adapting them to a style and energy we could call our own. This meant vigorous exercises of an unusual nature, leading eventually to total freedom of what we could attempt physically. Having observed that cats are at one aloof, hypersensual, cold, warm, completely elastic and very mysterious, we found the goals we set ourselves to be physically daunting in the attempt to translate T. S. Eliot's words in an exciting, theatrical, witty, yet feline way.

I fell in love with Andrew's music the minute I hear it, and building the numbers with him, when the music needed extending to allow more dance, was hard and thrilling work. Sometime I could not always explain what I wanted convincingly enough and then I and my little skeleton crew would dance my ideas flat out for him, trying often to look like twenty-five people. A choreographer working out the numbers for a new musical needs a skeleton crew just as a writer needs pen and ink. This little band usually consists of one's assistant, a boy and a girl dancer, the dance captain (male or female) who will then remain and take care of the show, and of course a brilliant and creative pianist. It is meticulous, nerve-wracking (will the ideas come up out of the blue?) and tiring work, mentally and physically, for this is the time when all the movement styles for each character have to be discovered, and many of the ideas for the staging and graph of each number start to be built in. I was lucky with the original London production of Cats; my crew were so sympathetic, patient and tireless. Lindsay Dolan, my assistant and Finola Hughes and John Thornton, who were in the show, put up with my endless probing, frustration, despair, breakthroughs, joy and long, long hours of work, and I shall be grateful to them always. Equally I struck lucky with my American crew, Bonnie Walker, Rene Ceballos and Tim Scott, whose support and dynamism were an inspiration. Joanne Robinson, who looked after the London Cats became my right arm on the American production; she is an indefatigable friend as well as brilliant assistant.

Creating the Jellicle Ball was the hardest and most exciting task of all. Firstly the poem 'The Song of the Jellicles' places such an intriguing set of images in the mind, secondly the Ball is pivotal to our show, and we knew in the beginning that if we were to achieve our aim of producing England's first dance musical we had to succeed there or die. I know I had to extend T.S. Eliot's beautiful poem and find a dance poem that carried on the ideas he suggested, to become a piece of exciting theatre whilst showing the cats at the height of the passion, dancing their most private, energetic and anarchic rituals. The day when my crew and I danced the whole thing for Andrew and Trevor, playing all the parts, trying to show the total excitement and mystery we were hoping to create, indicating where the acrobatic tricks would come (we couldn't quite manage those!) and when eventually they saw what I was after and agreed to it was an incredibly tense and rewarding occasion and worth every bit of the sweat and exhaustion that inevitably followed. John Napier's and Trevor Nunn's brilliant conception of the world in which we were the make Cats come alive was full of such exciting possibilities and also some difficulties. Dancing in the round, which was the shape of our London auditorium, can sometimes create havoc in the push and thrust of section, as you have to turn the corner at the end of it just as the climax is reached. Also, as we have no wings as such everyone has to be choreographed for every minute - you can't happily reassemble them in the wings for their next leap-ons. On the other hand the immediacy of the space means the audience can feel the energy of the performers and become part of it. At the Winter Garden John created another phantasmagorical world, wonderful to explore but demanding different texture from the staging. The thrust stage makes energy excitingly apparent, but it follows that the shadowy moments where our cats must be remote, wary and introspective are harder to achieve.

Making a worth attempt at the exotic theatre of Growltiger's dreams of the Siamese, building a savage and believable cat fight for Macavity, trying to make the cockroaches succeed in a beetle' tattoo that might have echoes of Busby Berkeley, finding dance characters for the Tugger and the Pekes and Pollicles, and a sad memory of the Ball dance for Grizabella, while lighting the jazz-classic fireworks for Mr. Mistoffelees; indeed, trying to do justice to the variety of T. S. Eliot's characters in as wide as pan of dance styles has been a fascinating and frightening task - but with two such brilliant teams of performers and the joy of working again with our production team, one of the most exciting and rewarding I can remember.