Getting Dance to Look Right Onscreen

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For roles that require an actor to perform significant dancing, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s in “Red Sparrow,” choreography training can take several months.YouTube

The critic in all of us gets particularly savage when watching a dance film or a musical. We demand great acting and exceptional dancing, seeking both to transport us. During this current resurgence of the musical genre, and as more dance-focussed films emerge, the choreographer has become central to many productions. Her role is clear on a show such as “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which has some of the sharpest plot-driven song-and-dance numbers on television. On a film such as “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” there is a dance coach to work on the subtleties of gesture and the tempo of the actors’ movements. The most demanding job for a choreographer is getting an actor ready for a dramatic dance role, such as in the forthcoming film “Red Sparrow,” in which Jennifer Lawrence plays a professional ballerina turned spy.

In an upper-body shot alone, the fluidity of the arms, the supple curve of the hand, and the angle of the head will tell you all that you need to know about the actor’s dancing ability. It is the dance coaches and choreographers who carefully craft the illusion. Dancers train their entire careers for technical precision, flexibility, and proper posture, so working with an actor toward a believable dance moment on a timeline that is often only hours (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”), weeks (“Goodbye Christopher Robin”), or months (“Red Sparrow”) becomes a high-stakes part of the process. Kathryn Burns, the choreographer of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” usually has less than an afternoon to rehearse and shoot a number. Many, although not all, of the cast members have some form of movement training. (Being good at martial arts counts.) Burns held private ballet lessons for the show’s star, Rachel Bloom, between Seasons 1 and 2, at Bloom’s request. “I, personally, really love when a non-dancer moves. It inspires me because the movement is interesting and pedestrian, and it’s initiated from a feeling first, or an intention,” Burns told me while she was working on the show’s third season. “Sometimes, when an actor is doing what feels right, it inspires, and then I can mold the choreography to how they naturally move, and it gives me a gift and a new palette to work from.”

For roles that require an actor to perform significant dancing, there are important parts of the training that can be accelerated but not erased. The ballet coach Kurt Froman, who worked with Jennifer Lawrence on “Red Sparrow” and Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis on “Black Swan,” spends around five days a week for several months with actors, teaching ballet barre, explaining proper alignment, toning their bodies, covering space in a three-dimensional way, and practicing simple sequences that will grow into the minutes of choreography that the actors need for the film. “In the same way that an actor would want to feel like they’ve explored every avenue possible for that scene, that’s my job as a coach and teacher, to make them feel the extremes of what they can do with their bodies,” Froman said.

When the scene requires a full-body shot of an intricate or more advanced step, a professional dancer is brought in as a dance double. The goal is always to have the star learn the full choreography, if possible—Froman shared that they often do. But this requires the actor to fully commit during her time in the studio and relinquish control. “When you’re at the top of your field in one art form, it’s really hard to let yourself be at the bottom of another art form because you don’t know how to fail anymore,” he said. It’s a delicate and strenuous process.

Sometimes we are blinded by the romanticism that we feel toward the great, golden classics. The musical gods gave us Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers, so we assume all actors could sing and dance back then. But it reportedly took eight weeks and seventy-three takes for Frank Sinatra to dance alongside Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh,” in 1945. In “Easter Parade,” from 1948, Astaire worked carefully with Judy Garland on a now famous dance that would enhance her comedic charm and abilities rather than box her into mere seductive choreography. In a 2002 PBS documentary about Kelly, Debbie Reynolds said, “I do think the two hardest things I ever did in my life is childbirth and ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ ” When she signed on for the role, at age nineteen, Reynolds could only do a little soft-shoe. It was through Kelly’s determined personal training and his bent for perfection, and Reynolds’s own incredibly hard work, that she shone in the iconic role. They shot the breezy and cheerful “Good Morning” forty times.

The influence of classic musicals can be found in many of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” ’s dance numbers, but they are not trapped as little tributes. “I’ve Got My Head in the Clouds,” which premièred in the new season, was a solo tap number that moved through the space, using every inch of the set, with all the playfulness and elegance of the past but in a more contemporary tap-dance style. In the Season 2 song “Math of Love Triangles,” Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) performs a dance inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Rather than being at the center of male desire, as in the original, the legendary scene is manipulated so that all of Rebecca’s male partners’ movements propel her away from the group. There are no syrupy supported lifts; rather, she is bounced around the stage. Burns, who won an Emmy Award, in 2016, for her work on the show, choreographs each number based on the episode’s script. Her work must express the story while also being accessible to the actor. “I try to live correctly in the genre and then surprise the audience with a move that comes from nowhere, so to speak, or is an unexpected little zinger,” she said.

For the new film “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” the movement coach Caroline Pope prepared the actors with a vocabulary of nuanced movement true to post-First World War England. She was in charge of teaching not only the more substantial dances, such as the waltz, but also how one might sit properly and move through a ballroom. While on set with the actors, Pope introduced an intimate familiarity with the movement so that it would become almost instinctual. “It was wonderful to be there for that two-week period because not only was it, ‘Look, we’re going to do a foxtrot and a hesitation waltz and some Charleston.’ I’m going to break those down for you into bite-size pieces so that you realize, actually, it’s a very simple construction, and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You put them together with humor and simplicity, and break it down to the bare bones so that they can build it up again, and forget about it, and just use it,” Pope explained.

Working in movies and television is a complete departure from live theatre, as it allows for multiple takes and camera angles. Yet, while the camera can do wonderful things, it also controls how the movement is perceived. It’s why so many choreographers, such as Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse, also wanted to direct their dance scenes. “That’s the tricky part of choreographing for TV and film: you can create a really beautiful number, but if they’re not capturing it correctly, or if you don’t know the intention of the director or what the frame is, then it’s totally missed,” Burns said.

There are definitely times when the camera can be used to the actor’s advantage. For the dancer who is the swan in “Swan Lake,” the proper extension of the arms behind the torso and the gentle rotation of the shoulder blades takes years to master—it’s the true artistry of the role. So, for “Black Swan,” Natalie Portman opened her arms directly to the side of her body, and the camera angles made us see what we were supposed to see. It’s a trick of the eye that’s a thing of beauty, and there are months of instruction that go into each phrase. For any dance movement, it’s an eccentric journey from studio to set. An empowered and persuasive performance is what’s left to deliver, but, by the time the cameras are rolling, the job of the coach and choreographer has mostly come to a close. “At the end of the day, nobody cares how long you’ve had,” Pope commented on the training. “At the end of the day, it has got to look right.”