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“HAND IN MY POCKET”:

SINGING
WITH THE
BODY

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui served as the movement director and choreographer on Jagged Little Pill. Cherkaoui creates dances for companies and artists including Beyoncé, Cirque du Soleil, Joe Wright, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Pilobolus, Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project, and Martha Graham Dance Company. He has received ballet commissions from Paris Opera Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte- Carlo, and the Royal Ballet in London. Cherkaoui is the artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders and his own company, Eastman.

Was Jagged Little Pill an important album in your youth?

Yes, it was. Alanis is two or three years older than I am. It was something none of us had heard before. I was living in Hoboken in Belgium, a suburb of Antwerp. And I was impressed by the power and the range of her voice. She was wild, but she also knew exactly what she was doing. And if it was angry, it was relatable. I had just come out of a personal situation with a boyfriend, and I could really relate to “You Oughta Know,” which is a love song, in a way.

Tell me a bit about your background in dance.

I was always influenced by pop artists, like Kate Bush or Madonna, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, anything where there was choreography involved. I used to learn every single choreography on television. I would tape it on VHS and then just keep practicing. I only started formal training at seventeen.

For my parents, it was just not in their cards to be thinking that their youngest son would go into the arts. People are very good at discouraging, by saying, “Yeah, you started too late, you’re not going to make it. You’re not that special.” But then at the same time, there was something very small, a little deeper that just knew like, I don’t give a fuck. I’m going to do what I do. And I knew deep down that I wanted to be an artist. I felt like I wanted to express myself, I wanted to liberate myself. I knew I was gay since I was eight. It took me up until I was seventeen to dare to come out.

I did one very important contest, which was the Best Belgian Dance Solo. It’s like winning So You Think You Can Dance, but in Belgium. So that opened a lot of doors. I went to study in P.A.R.T.S., which is a contemporary dance school in Brussels. That’s when I decided to make a career in contemporary dance.

There is so much contemporary dance in this show—a lot of free-form, experimental movement. It’s different from what a lot of Broadway actors are used to. How did you get the actors to be comfortable with your style of dance?

I remember Lauren Patten got quite emotional about it, because she said, “I’ve done the dance classes and stuff,” but she never felt like it was actually allowing her to tap into a place where she felt really at ease with the choreography. On the contrary, it always felt a little bit oppressive. And I realized, it is kind of paradoxical when you think about how free they are when they’re singing. They have found their voice, and when they sing it’s not constrained. It’s free. And I was like, your movement can be like your singing. You can literally just listen to your body react. Let it happen. It sounds so corny and easy, but it’s the hardest thing because you don’t know what’s going to come out so you’re not in control.

I love that the choreography for “Hand in My Pocket” feels so free—it veers from a rock concert to stepping to a full-on party.

It’s kind of like a queer fantasy in a very, very straight world.

I know you, Diane Paulus, and Alanis worked hard to develop this idea of “doubles”—every main character has a dancer that acts as a kind of id. This is especially powerful in the song “Uninvited,” when Elizabeth Stanley dances on a couch with her double Heather Lang, who represents her alter ego as she is experiencing an opioid overdose.

“It’s kind of like a
queer fantasy in a very,
very straight world.”

We discovered that in the room. It just appeared to us, it demanded itself. Right away, I had that idea of a person fighting herself. It’s like a conversation with yourself that you always lose. She’s seeing herself on the sofa, but she’s having an out-of-body experience. So she’s trying to pretend it’s just her mind playing tricks on her. And then slowly she’s praying, let’s hope this goes away. Then it’s still there, and she’s trying to reach it, but it’s like a mirror. She’s reaching; she sees it coming back to herself. I said to Heather always, “You are the real one, and you are not her demon. She’s yours. Actually, you think she’s the one who’s not real.”

During the dance for “Predator,” you have Lang also serve as Bella’s double and show Bella’s sexual assault happening during a very intense dance sequence. How did you