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“SMILING”:

LIFE IN
REVERSE

One of choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s big innovations in Jagged Little Pill is his intricate staging of “Smiling” as Mary Jane’s day lived in reverse. Everyone in the ensemble is moving backward, as if being rewound in slow motion. This number was incredibly intricate to choreograph—every movement has to be razor-sharp and exact (try jump-roping backward in a straight line!). Here is a brief oral history of how “the backward dance” came to be.

DIANE PAULUS (DIRECTOR): I will never forget the day we were in my house, it was Larbi and I think Tom Kitt [the music director] was there, and we were just again listening to the songs. We asked, if this is a song about how MJ lives her life, how would we physicalize it? And Larbi said, “Well, what if we saw her day in backward motion? What if she were reliving her whole journey?” I think I looked at Tom, and we were like, “Genius. Done. Yes.”

CHERKAOUI: I proposed to Diane that I wanted to see a day in the life of MJ. She needs to go buy groceries, she needs to cook. The song is about, like, she’s crashing, but she’s pretending she’s OK. So she’s like, I just go with the flow. But inside, she’s dying. There’s something wrong. And she knows, but she’s avoiding the subject, the addiction, the problem with the drug that’s starting, a trauma she had that’s reemerging. I wanted to show the thing that the book kind of reveals about her, but visually. Diane was helping me be very specific and precise about the order of things.

PAULUS: Oh my God, the hours on that song in rehearsal. Hours.

ELIZABETH STANLEY (MARY JANE): Ah, the backward dance. “Smiling” is the most-rehearsed number in the whole show. When it would be on the rehearsal schedule, we’d be like, “Oh, we’re working on ’Smiling,’” and everyone would be like, “Great, I’ll see you next week!” It’s a brain twist to figure out, “Wait, is that forward? Is that backward? Well, what would this look like in real time?” The constant figuring out of the storytelling, but then also to figure out, “What does that movement look like in reverse?”

PAULUS: It was so hard to do. We would write out, “She woke up. She did this. First she went to the pharmacy, then she couldn’t get the pills. So she went to the coffee shop…” We would then analyze how we would stage it backward, how it would land in the song, which lyrics would be hitting when. The whole backward life of her day, really rigorous.

CHERKAOUI: Elizabeth, bless her, she’s so intelligent. And I was thinking that here, she has to stand still, and all of this is happening around her. Here, she’s the one who’s moving backward, and then things stand still. It was like trying to find a surreal way of seeing that song.

ELIZABETH: I think it’s all Larbi’s brainchild. It’s his pretty genius interpretation of what it feels like when you are going through the motions of your life.