Q: In your Chat Box series talk you said, “The temperament of the music can be the beat of social unrest” can you elaborate on that? And speak on how music and the performing arts can be a platform for social justice issues?

This virus will inspire many different reactions. People haven’t necessarily figured things out, but they can pose their work as open ended questions to address inequities with racial issues, gendered issues, etc. In reaction to those inequities, music changes, fashion changes, hairstyles change. Those aren’t always final arguments, they’re not the final thesis—just posing questions. [For example], we don’t have the answer to this current unemployment problem, and I don't have the answer for lack of freedom of speech. So, the music that appeals to the masses right now is the music where someone else screams the same questions you have, because you listen and can say, “That is exactly how I feel.” That is why you listen to those songs and make playlists. I listened to an acoustic mix on Apple Music and all the first five songs that came up had the word “break” in the chorus. That is how everyone was feeling, they were feeling broken. Popular music is very finger-on-the-pulse, and pop dance forms follow popular music. This present circumstance we’re in is going to completely influence pop culture in different ways. There will be a wave of reactionary art made for this. This art may be about overcoming obstacles, or facing a brick wall, but there are many different ways into the same conversation.

Q: In your Chat Box talk you spoke about how life acts on the body and the body responds. When creating movement to reflect the times or how a certain emotion manifests in the body, how do you take individuality and identity into account?

That is a tricky question. The first part of the answer depends on how you use the ensemble. If the dance is with more than one person, you have to decide if all the individuals hold their own individuality, or if they are a frame for something else. So, I can walk with a limp for the entire show if that’s my character, but if I am meant to be some kind of a framing device for something else, I can lose the limp, so to speak. The important thing then, is that the unison step matched. In general, once a character develops individuality, they should try to hold on to it. That could be, for example, a character always keeping their chin down because they’re pessimistic, or a character always keeping their chin up because they’re optimistic. In the Heights is a perfect example of this. When everyone is on the street in the opening number, the characters that we see on stage should never lose those personalities. The point of the opening number is that everyone there is in the same exact situation. As a choreographer, you have to pick something that everyone can do, even Abuela and Mom and Dad. So, maybe everyone moves with an aggressive choreography that’s in profile, but Abuela may just turn profile so she doesn't lose the individuality while still matching the core of the idea.

I am about to start a piece of choreography this week where the man should be like 70-80 years old, and he can't do much. So, that puts the challenge on me to make the choreography really honest and heartfelt; I want to express the depth of this man's soul, and though he can’t do a grand jete or a pirouette, I want to double the movement of the character in the show who learns about this old man in a way that touches his heart. I can let the 20-year-old boy duplicate the old man's dance in a closed captioned way; the 20-year-old can represent the depth of the old man's feelings, even though the old man isn’t actually the one dancing. So in that way, I will hold on to individuality and as a tool to figure out how to cheat and even show more of that individuality.

Q: Can you speak a bit about the orchestration of music in relation to film direction and framing? How do you transfer a close up camera angle to the stage?

In the world of film, there are so many devices you can use to guide the audience and make them feel how you want them to feel. Soundtrack is a huge device. It tells you the temperature. It tells you if you should be anxious, or resolved, or if trauma is about to happen. All those things happen with film scoring. All those things can also happen in the speed of a cut, like if edits happen in jagged ways your anxiety goes up. The movie ‘1917’ has these long 20min shots where the camera goes over hillsides, and you feel like you are on a journey, and then you are intentionally pushed down a hill. The director set you up to be startled by the opposition to the long shot that took you in. I was editing something last week, and I was enjoying the camera shots going in and out of focus. Usually, when editing, you try to stay focused, but this character was getting confused. So, I thought the blurriness of the transitions were helping us understand how confused he was getting. In life, when you get confused, you don’t see things clearly. I was mirroring that by making the shots blurrier, in order to make the audience feel that confusion. I don't think that, in terms of song scoring (film soundtrack), there have been many broadway musicals that don’t take advantage of that theory. The art of underscore, the art of transitory music is basically film scoring. We live in a place where the underscore affects you in an integral way.

Q: How does that translate to the stage?

It is sort of the same technique, but I don’t have a camera. So, the lighting is huge. In my first pass in lighting a show, I always make it too dark; I want to limit where an audience can look. Light is an easy focus. The color of light is also an easy focus. Blue can make you feel one way, red makes you feel another. Light can determine reality. I can make something look underwater, but it could be happening in a classroom. All of a sudden, that tells the audience that they’re not in the reality of a classroom. It pushes reset. Also, the shape of the light on the floor can affect the audience. I did this ballet last year where we were framed in a very hard edge light cue. The hard edged black-to-white look made the audience feel the anxiety level of the dancers being stuck in a prison. If it would’ve just been in a normal light cue with soft edges, that softening zone would not feel like parameters of a prison. So shape can affect a lot for an audience. I don’t have the camera edit to help me in staging, so I tend to move really jagged when I want to make the audience feel anxiety levels, and I move square when I want them to be calm. So, I change it up in a similar way to camera edits.

Q: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you as an artist and choreographer?

There are a lot of different things. There are a lot of sides of this conversation, macro and micro. Number one, I was blessed in my situation because I was not in production or rehearsal. I was supposed to go to LA and open Hamilton there, but I cancelled trips. I had nine shows open when this hit and within 48 hours, everything closed, so that became unemployment. As a business person, I am now in a waiting game of not knowing how or when mass events like theater will come back

As an artist, I was lost in where I was in my projects, in pre-production. Most of pre-production is me working on my own. I was about to start to work two days a week with dancers to start this new musical, Only Gold. I don’t start choreographing until July but I was going to start some advance work with them. During this time, I can work as a director as opposed to a choreographer. As a choreographer I’m going to be in the studio. I’m going to be dependent on my dancers, I’m going to be at the gym everyday. I have a dance studio here, but it's different because I can’t work with my dancers. As a director, I can get almost all my work done. Just before I called you I was working on a scene in a script; I just finished a rewrite that was a month long. I work five hours a day on that. In that way I can continue to be creative. The other thing that has been interrupted is my creative urge to make something. What I felt [instead] was the urge to reorganize and clean up files and proofread scripts, and that is creative in a limited way. When you are truly creative, you have to make something out of nothing. With the parameters we are in right now, it’s hard to make something out of nothing because we are so distracted. We’re distracted by the weight of people dying, my child is homeschooled 5 ft away on his computer... All those different that ways life has changed makes it hard to make something out of nothing. I have spent hours going through old videos, and that has been really productive. I would have never reserved time to do that. I have gone through and re-processed footage, partly to teach the choreography and partly to clean the files. It has helped me restart my creativity in a way.

Q: What does a daily routine look like for you? What have you been working on during this time?

I am a creature of a daily routine. We wake up an hour later than we usually do, my kids start home school at 9:00 (as opposed to 8:00 for regular school) so we wake up at 7:30. I workout after breakfast, just PT exercises and a short dance warm up, and then I usually work. I change my clothes a lot. I can’t write a script in sweat clothes. I will change clothes and I will write, do emails and business. I have lunch with my family and then I warm up again at 1:30/2:00 and I go ride my bike. Then, I warm up for another hour, and I teach. I teach everyday at 3:00 on Zoom. I dance everyday, which is rare for me, I usually don’t dance that much. After that, I usually finish work for another two hours, non-creative work, answering emails or dealing with collaborations, and then my family and I eat together. The real blessing in being isolated is that we have all our meals together, and we are lucky with where we live, so there’s a sense of celebrating one another and staying close together. I Pinterest for an hour after dinner. I have boards for all my shows, and costume designs, and things like that.

Q: What social changes and responsibilities have you seen the performing arts community making during the pandemic? Do you think the pandemic will make us a more socially conscious society?

There has been a lot of giving back. I feel the need to do what I can, especially for people who are missing out on mile markers in their life, to keep people's inspiration up, their creativity, their hope. That started with me teaching for my close associates. I do the Zoom class every day for dancers in my shows and for my assistants. In that way, I feel like we can keep working together. I think there has been so much inspiring payback in that way. I did my first ballet last year, and it's in jeopardy of not reopening after this. They called me and asked if they could stream the ballet for free, and I said absolutely. I think that is a very necessary step: for these organizations to have hope to re-open. Like, in the first two weeks of this isolation, my kids were doing interactive art class with a famous artist at the Kennedy Center. Before this, my kids did not have the opportunity to do that. Even live tours at the Louvre Museum—there are interactive ways to do things like that, that were never available before.

I am not even on social media. I don't see what is happening in terms of pop artists and movie stars putting things into the world. I am oblivious to that, and even here in the woods I see a lot happening.

Q: Using the idea of “worldmaking” how do you imagine the performing arts world after the pandemic?

We all have a nervousness in theater. I am lucky to work in film and TV and the theater, but I think the theater is at risk right now. My heart lies with theater. Streaming can be so popular.  People have been creating great art for Netflix and streaming services. I think the artistic world of film and TV will come back to life, but the theater is at risk. It will come back, but might take a little longer than we think. I am tentative about that, but I have learned that this is a time to boil down what we think is important. The ideas that will be pitched after this will be really potent—there will be great work that will come out of this. We just finished a rewrite of the script I’m working on, and it's the best version that it's ever been. I think that will happen a lot. The stuff that floats to the top will be really jam-packed with excitement, and so there will be a lot of good work after this. Also, there will not be as much produced after this, and because of that, we need to make sure the things produced will be at the highest quality. For example, we are blessed to have the Hamilton franchise. Hamilton will reopen and there is a sense of responsibility to put that work into the world, and we won't push out something cheap. Everyone will pay attention. Lin, Tommy, me, Alex, the producers, we will take it so seriously. When someone from St. Louis comes to the theater, we want them to know that it is worth it, and we want to see people step up and see their best work after this, which is inspiring to be a part of.