Good Advice from A Chorus Line

Dance auditions for A Chorus Line, the dance audition musical, is very meta. The auditionees are portraying a dancer needy for a job, giving it her all, which is what you actually are at the moment. Baayork Lee, Connie in the famed original cast (the short Asian 'Peanut in Pointe Shoes') recreated Michael Bennett's choreography for the recent Broadway revival, and she enthusiastically leads the audition for the first national tour. Most of the dancers at this audition already know the choreography, from auditions for other productions or (in my case) from performing it at a young impressionable age for a musical theater revue. These jazz hands, jumps and pivots to the familiar pounding piano perch along side Jerome Robbins "America" from West Side Story as mainstays of musical theater dancers' vocabulary, feeders of our childhood dreams and reminders of past failures.

Baayork encourages us to cheer, clap, and call 5-6-7-8 as we feed in quick successions to do the short combination two at a time. Then we dance two at time with Baayork and her assistant sitting at a table watching us, taking breaks in between duets to whisper and point. At the end, as always, they name the few dancers that they want to stay.

Then Baayork leaves the rejected with some sage advice.

"Take ballet," she advises us despite the decidedly unballetic nature of this classic jazz routine. "and lose weight."

"It's important to be slim and svelte under the lights. Not all of you need to loose weight of course, but you know who you are. Just look in the mirror, you can tell."

While there are a few in the room that could use a little toning, especially when wearing the leotard-and-tan-tights standard uniform for this audition, there are also too-skinny, bony girls who already have confusing relationships with their bodies and can not 'just look in the mirror;' the mirror lies to them. The over-disciplined dancer is the prime demographic for anorexia. I hope this blanket statement didn't echo in the wrong ears.