I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [183]
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Over the next years, I did my best to bring the world our NDI children in New York City. “Think globally, act locally,” was the mantra, and NDI fostered thrilling international exchanges with Australia, Israel, Ireland, Russia, Indonesia, Africa, Mexico, and India. In our performances, we explored the themes, stories, and cultures of those magnificent lands. In organizing these exchanges, Carrie traveled with me to all the countries, photographing and keeping diaries. We didn’t dance together anymore, just toured. Except once.
Leaving Moscow to go to Leningrad (setting up an exchange with children from the then Soviet Union), we were dropped off at the Moscow train station, and went out to the platform early. The wide expanse of the empty platform stretched into gray non-horizon. A few shafts of light came from above, a stage set waiting for action. A Russian locomotive, twice the size of others in the world, stood idling in the station, hissing clouds of steam. It began to snow. I took Carrie in my arms, and we waltzed up and down the platform, in and out of steam clouds while snowflakes, little wet kisses, covered our faces and hands.
The idea of getting Soviet children to come and dance in New York was sparked by the original production of The Shooting of Dan McGrew. The original, and precursor, to our Soviet production originated in 1985 at P.S. 29 in Brooklyn, at the corner of Baltic and Henry streets.
In the spring of 1983, Joseph Papp and I were collaborating on a project, a revival of the musical Roberta, when he suddenly queried, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” “Sure,” I replied, “I always wanted to do the poem ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew,’ by Robert Service, and utilize an entire school as the cast. How does that grab you?” “What’s it gonna cost?” “I don’t know, Joe, it’ll take about fifty thousand bucks and most of a school year.” He sat down and wrote the check.
The school I picked in Brooklyn, P.S. 29, had a principal, Mrs. Zagami. Unfazed when I explained that I wanted to take over her whole school for a month, she responded, “Are you kidding? I’m from Italy! Calabria! I can handle anything!” In the production, she performed as a blunderbuss, with her kindergarteners and first graders (tiny tots) as her buckshot. Some four hundred second, third, fourth, and fifth graders were snow, wolves, reindeer, miners, dance-hall girls, piano notes, and assorted Alaskan riffraff. The teaching staff, I dressed in sandwich boards marked “Whiskey,” “Vodka,” “Rot Gut”—bottles lining the bar. But, in their scene, the tiny tots stole the show. A miner has caught Dan McGrew, played by the superb artist Donlin Foreman, cheating at cards, and in the ensuing confrontation, McGrew maneuvers his accuser so that Mrs. Zagami has a clear shot. She fires her weapon, the blunderbuss (constructed from a French horn on a stick), and blows the victim away—and for close to a minute, streams of buckshot (tiny tots dressed in gray jumpsuits with silver football helmets) gallop over his prone body, gleefully treading on him as the audience howls with glee.
Rehearsal for The Shooting of Dan McGrew on the roof of P.S.29, 1985 (image credit 19.4)
Joe had produced the original production of Hair at his Public Theater, and put me in touch with its composer, Galt MacDermot. Galt’s thrilling score used lyrics from “Dan McGrew” and various other Service poems, and he conducted the orchestra and singers for performances that took place on the playground behind the school. An audience of one thousand filled the playground each evening for a week. Seated on portable bleachers, they cheered and cheered, as did family members crowding the windows in buildings abutting the playground.
So successful was P.S. 29’s Event that we revived it in 1990, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Majestic Theater (now called