The 82-year-old Jamaican-born creator of Garth Fagan Dance, which consists of dancers from their teens to their early 70s, revealed the key to a successful intergenerational troupe: not just physical resilience but also spiritual and intellectual soundness.
“You get youngsters with all their bounce and carrying on, and adults who are just making it work with great difficulty,” Fagan added.
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In addition to being the longest-running Black choreographer in Broadway history thanks to his work on “The Lion King,” Fagan, a choreographer, is recognized for incorporating ballet expertise and discipline into his Afro-Caribbean dance. In 1998, his choreography for that show took home a Tony Award.
His extensive body of work caught the eye of the Library of Congress, which revealed this week that it had acquired a collection tracing Fagan’s legacy. This collection includes early photographs of Fagan as a young dancer and complete visual recordings of pieces like “From Before” and “Prelude.”
The archive contains audio recordings, handwritten rehearsal notes, programs, posters, correspondence, and more than 30 years’ worth of video documenting Fagan’s collaborative process with dancers.
Ailey, Bob Fosse, Erick Hawkins, and Martha Graham are just a few of the notable dance artists whose works are already available in the library.
Since “The Lion King” has been staged on every continent save Antarctica and brought in close to $10 billion in revenue, Fagan’s choreography has been seen all over the world. Playbills, posters, and souvenir programs from “The Lion King” can be found in the library’s archive.
“I’ve seen it and rehearsed it all over the world in different languages, cultures and I get the same thrill every place I go,” according to Fagan.
Gia Kourlas, the dance critic for the New York Times, described Fagan’s techniques as “impossible until you see them with your own eyes” when his dance company, which was created in 1970, performed six pieces at the Joyce Theater in November.
Fagan emphasized the need for dancers to develop lower back strength as part of his choreography. The organization’s executive director, William Ferguson, previously used crutches to perform a piece called “Dance Collage for Romie.”
Ferguson remarked that the chance for the method to be saved forever was, “One of the things that really inspired me to work to get our archive at the Library of Congress: the opportunity for the technique to be preserved in perpetuity.”
After fifty years of leading a modern dance group, Libby Smigel, a curator of dance at the Library of Congress, claimed that Fagan was now receiving the attention he deserved.
“What we really don’t have is this hybridization of traditional forms with the classical ballet training, which now can train artists like racehorses,” according to Smigel.
Smigel said she was impressed by the strength training and wavy movements characteristic of Fagan’s choreography that maintains the dancers’ muscles supple far into their elder years. Most dancers retire around age 40.
She remarked, “I wish I had been doing it all this time.”
