You may think you're watching a bunch of "kids" hip-hopping to Earth, Wind & Fire tunes in
Hot Feet, but one of the dancers was playing Richie in the
Chorus Line tour in 1980 and had a decade-plus-long career as an international ballet star and model before he started dancing on Broadway in 1998.
Like many of Hot Feet's dancers, Ramón Flowers came to Broadway from dance companies, though virtually no one else in the ensemble can match his experience. He's been a member of five ballet troupes in seven different countries and even a minor celebrity in Europe thanks to his affiliation with avant garde choreographer Maurice Béjart plus work as a runway model.
He made his Broadway debut in Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and has since appeared in The Lion King, Cats, The Boy From Oz and The Green Bird. But "this is only the second time that I'm a human being on Broadway," Flowers says. "It's either been a puppet or I'm an animal—a swan, a cat—or I'm covered in something, like white paint to play the 'dancing water' in The Green Bird."
In an otherwise critically maligned show, the Hot Feet ensemble has been greatly praised, with "insanely hardworking" among the choicer kudos (from Time Out New York). Even the snarky Times review recognized their "robust technique and physical prowess." Flowers says he hasn't been exhausted by the energy and stamina demands. "In other shows where I've done less, I notice how tired I am more rapidly," he states. "Because this show is so invigorating, you don't realize how tired you are until maybe two hours after the show, when you wind down, because your adrenaline is so up. I mean, this show's such a high with the music and the type of choreography that it takes a while to wind down."
Beginning in 1984, Flowers was a principal ballet dancer in Europe for 12 or so years. He spent seven years with Béjart Ballet, starting back when it was based in Brussels and known as Ballet of the 20th Century. He was with the company when it relocated to Lausanne, Switzerland, and took its current name. He later moved to Germany to dance with the Frankfurt Ballet and then to Madrid for Compañía Nacional de España. Both Béjart and Frankfurt, where Flowers worked for four years, had seasonal residencies in Paris. He came back to North America around 1996 to be a principal with Montreal's Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, though he knew that was just going to be a way station en route to New York to work in theater.
"I had gotten to a point in ballet where I felt like I did all I could possibly do," Flowers explains. "I knew if I quit to come back to the United States, I'd be unemployed. So I thought, I'll try to make some sort of transition. It would be nice to do my swan song in a company that had the best of all of the worlds that I'd worked in." Les Grands Ballets Canadiens' repertoire encompassed pieces by all the choreographers he'd danced for in Europe, including Béjart, as well as the work of George Balanchine—"which was my first training," as a teenage student in the School of American Ballet. "I'd get to do all those things before I kissed ballet goodbye," he says of his year in Montreal, which also had the advantage of being just an hour's flight from New York and its theater auditions.
Flowers had received his Equity card years earlier when he did the Chorus Line tour—though, in a story that sounds like one a Chorus Line character would tell, that happened by accident. His dance teacher at New Jersey's Glassboro State College, knowing he had Broadway ambitions, had suggested he get some auditioning experience. "She said, 'You're like the best in the class, but when you get to New York it's going to be a completely different story. You're going to see all these amazing dancers; you need to go up there now just to see what your competition is like,'" he recalls.
Then another twist occurred: Working in theater made him realize he'd rather just dance. "I discovered that it wasn't fulfilling enough at the time. In A Chorus Line, for example, there's the big opening number and then you're just kind of standing around and singing and doing step-touch combinations. As a young dancer, it was just not challenging enough. I was younger and energetic and I was like, I think I want to do ballet work—that's like the heart and the meat of real dance for me—and get that out of my system and then later come back to doing the Broadway stuff."
At the same time Flowers got the role in Chorus Line, he was offered a scholarship to Juilliard and an apprenticeship at the Pennsylvania Ballet. He had to turn down Juilliard, but the Pennsylvania Ballet director told him he'd hold his slot for the six months he was contracted for A Chorus Line. So after he left the show, he went right into the ballet company.
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