From Screen to Stage -- "Dirty Dancing" Live

The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.

The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"

I already have published 14 blog articles about the book and its articles:

Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture

Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?

Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing

Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film

Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"

Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing

Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing: Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s

Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Postfeminism and Neo-Feminism

"(I've Had) The Time of My Life": Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s

"There Are a Lot of Things About Me That Aren't What You Thought": The Politics of Dirty Dancing

"It's a Feeling; A Heartbeat": Nostalgia, Music, and Affect in Dirty Dancing

White Enough

Vestron Video and Dirty Dancing

Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "From Screen to Stage: Dirty Dancing Live", written by Millie Taylor.

=====

Millie Taylor

The book identifies Millie Taylor as follows:

Millie Taylor is a professor in musical theatre at the University of Winchester. Her research interests are popular musical theatre, British pantomime, contemporary music theatre and voice. Recent publications include British Pantomime Performance (Intellect, 2007) and Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Ashgate Press, 2012) in the series Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera. She recently guest edited a special issue of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre (Vol. 6/1, 2012) on "Voice and Excess" and is currently working on a text book on musical theatre and co-editing a collection titled Rethinking Musical Theatre: Song and Dance.

======

Taylor's article generally discusses the difference between watching a musical movie and watching a musical stage play. Suppose you have watched the movie Dirty Dancing and then the stage play Dirty Dancing. How are those two experiences different?

Watching a stage play does provide some new, better enjoyment.

The audience of a stage play interacts more with the actors, who are physically present in the theater. At some moments, the actors might enter the audience's space or might beckon the audience to participate by, for example, applauding, singing or dancing.

A stage play involves risks. Characters might flub their lines or fall or make other mistakes. When Baby leaps up onto Johnny's arms, the leap might fail. Watching a risky activity causes an exciting tension in the audience.

If audience members have seen the movie, then they will wonder how the stage play will differ and will wonder how some scenes are presented on the stage. For example, how will Johnny and Baby dance on a log over a river.

The actors are different. The stage play does not star Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze -- but rather stars different unfamiliar actors.

Taylor's article dwells on such considerations.

* She does not express much interest in the experiences of making and watching movies.

* Rather, she is fascinated by the experiences of making and watching stage plays, especially musicals.

=======

Taylor's article treats the movie's story and the play's story as being almost identical. She mentions a few differences -- for example, the stage play's inclusion of Civil Rights aspects -- but does not go into details.

In my blog, however, I have published a series of articles pointing out story differences.

My Review of the Stage Musical -- General

My Review of the Stage Musical -- Race

My Review of the Stage Musical -- Romance

My Review of the Stage Musical -- Comparison of Songs

Taylor's article does not tell anything about the decisions to develop the stage play, beyond mentioning that Eleanor Bergstein adapted her screenplay for the stage.

=======

Taylor does discuss the stage play's treatment of music stagecraft:

One of the few differences from the film is that many of the songs are sung live. Also, the audience is addressed directly by singers and by Kellerman’s entertainment manager, who encourages them to join in ...

The set incorporates a revolving platform so that the many short scenes of the film can transform fluidly into each other. The design incorporates screens so that filmed backdrops can recreate the filmic imagery and (perhaps) reference the medium of the original. Film is used to create atmospheric background, to re-create outdoor scenes (the lake and the wheat field), and in dance scenes to increase the action and energy by doubling the number of dancers through projections immediately behind the dancers.

In direction and design, in the costumes, the body language, the physicality, and the use of key scenes, this show is designed to be a reminder of the film. Scenes and sets such as dancing on the log, Baby dancing up the steps, the famous lift being practiced in the lake (created using lighting and a projection onto a gauze front-cloth through which the actors are lit), the huts, and the ballroom are all re-created to evoke a memory of the film.

I liked that discussion and would like to see much more of it. A written essay is not the optimal means, however, for such comparisons.

Perhaps Taylor -- or some other expert in stage plays -- could make a video essay comparing corresponding moments in the movie and in the stage play. In other words, the movie's cinematography could be compared with the play's stagecraft.

At the present time, however, relatively few video clips of the stage play are available for such comparisons.

======

Much of Taylor's article is theoretical. I myself enjoy and learn from reading such discussions, but such reading must be intelligent, slow and attentive. For example, here is a series of three paragraphs:

A cognitive approach suggests that, when presented with a network of spaces or images, the audience processes the images, maintaining a blend so that interpretation and response are playful and continually in flux. Amy Cook refers to Gilles Fauconnier to suggest that “while any particular blend might vary from individual to individual, the network of spaces prompted in a given situation is more powerful as a process in flux, a series of variables, than simply a final blend.” This might be interpreted in relation to Dirty Dancing to suggest that in the course of the performance the blend of images from film and live performance will continually alter the potential meanings of previously presented images. At the same time, the individual will continue to respond to the full range of images and materials, performances and atmospheres, blending them according to personal choice within context. Memories of naive teenage foolishness and infatuation are incorporated, for example, in the watermelon moment. Furthermore, what blending theory suggests is that extraordinarily complex information is assimilated using more of the brain but no more time. It is possible that some people might find that the more textured performance, that consciously taps into layers of memory and experience, that activates more parts of the brain and increases the intensity of the brain activity could also produce a greater sense of pleasure.

Long before the recent discoveries in neuroscience, Roland Barthes theorized in relation to language that “the logic regulating a text is not comprehensive … but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities. carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy.” The text is plural, not simply in that it has several meanings, but in that it is irreducible, an explosion or dissemination. He suggests that “the plural of the Text depends … not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers.” This plurality is “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages … which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony,” He suggests that such a. text is playful, and that the reader plays twice over in reproducing it both as an inner mimesis and in the musical sense of playing. Such a text, he argues, is “bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation.... [T]he text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where language circulates.”

Barthes’ theorizing refers only to language and not to performance; nevertheless, it is possible that he and others have predicted in theory processes that have now been observed in scientific experiments. The idea of a circularity of language can be read alongside the idea of a playful performance text whose images and meanings actively recall earlier performances. This process suggests that the way meanings are interpreted in a performance can be plural and simultaneous rather than individual and separate, and that the process of recognizing and assimilating this plurality can be pleasurable and playful.

The entire article is not like that, but much of it is. After all, it's a scholarly article, written mostly for other scholars. (This is true also of other articles in the book.)

======

Here is the article's conclusion:

What this chapter argues is that there are ways in which the live experience of Dirty Dancing is an ontologically different experience from watching the film. There are many similarities with the communal experience and emotional connection achieved when watching the film, but there are also differences resulting from the involvement with and danger of live action and the spiraling of energy between audience and performers. The stage show of Dirty Dancing functions on many levels, levels that audiences read and blend as they choose.

The stereophony or multiplicity of the associations created both within and without the text allows the audience to be entertained. The cliché of musical theater making audiences laugh and cry in a cathartic excess is enacted here through an excessive, dynamic range. Moreover, the audiovisual combination produces synchrony in interpretation that allows audiences to experience the pleasure of bonding even as individual interpretation offers different blends of the plural, libidinal, and dynamic text. This combination of stereographic plurality; libidinal excess, and dynamic range might begin to account for the ability of the stage show to continue to attract audiences.

Understanding of cognitive processes begins to account for experiences that have been theorized in the past. The minor neuron system s activated so that audiences do not simply watch the performance, but sing, dance, and re-enact the experience, empathetically connecting to the emotions of the performer/characters in a contagious spiral of response. This, of course, also depends on the skill of the performers and the quality of the performance.

However, through conceptual lending the experience of watching a stage show made famous on film and deliberately revisited onstage is one in which the viewer is conflating both the present experience and the past memory to create new composite that is neither one nor the other, but both, stimulating imagination, memory; witnessing, and presence in an intense and heady mix of the personal and communal. The stage show is a deliberate evocation of the film, but the experience is much, much more.

I did not find Taylor's article on the Internet. As far as I know, it is available to read only in the book.

=======

Here is a video of Taylor lecturing about musical theater (beginning at about 3:30 in the video)