While living in L.A., Jeffrey Page was choreographing for a music superstar, Beyoncé, and for one of TV’s most popular shows, So You Think You Can Dance. The native Midwesterner liked it out there in sunny SoCal, where he had a roomy apartment in the heart of North Hollywood.
It would take a lot, then, for him to give it all up to move—just as a chilly winter was approaching—to New York, where artists have to work harder for less money and everybody has to make do with less space than they need.
Actually, it took only two things. One was the suspicion that his comfortable California lifestyle was making him complacent creatively. “In L.A., everything fits into a box, so once you find a box into which your ‘product’ fits, all you have to do is follow the formula [to get hired],” says Page. “In New York, everybody is doing everything, and nobody is doing nothing, all at the same time. You have to think in the box but outside the box at the same time, which keeps you on the edge. If you don’t stay edgy in New York, you will get swallowed.”
The second, and greater, thing that motivated Page to come back east was seeing Fela!, Bill T. Jones’ biographical dance musical about Nigerian musician and activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Page caught the show on a visit to New York in September 2008, when it was playing off-Broadway at 37 Arts. “I fell in love with it and I immediately said, ‘I am doing this show,’” recalls Page. “I had kind of told myself that I was finished with dancing, just because I had made a good career of choreographing and directing. But this show—everything in this show—was so inspirational. The story, the vision of the story, was mind-blowing to me; it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It hit the markers in my mind of how I would imagine Fela’s story to be.” An African dance specialist, Page has been a fan of Fela Kuti’s music since college. “Me and Fela, we’ve been good friends for a long time,” he says. As soon as a Broadway transfer of Fela! was announced, but before auditions were even held, Page made arrangements for a cross-country move.
In California, where he’d lived for seven years, Page was one of the resident choreographers of reality sensation So You Think You Can Dance—he was responsible for the African piece performed by Season 5’s top five men last July. He was a choreographer on Beyoncé’s 2007 world tour (in support of her album B’Day), having danced with her at promotional appearances for her earlier album, Dangerously in Love. In 2006 he helped choreograph Beyoncé’s performances of “Déjà Vu” (featuring her future husband, Jay-Z) at the Fashion Rocks benefit and the World Music Awards and of “Ring the Alarm” at the MTV Video Music Awards. He also co-choreographed the opening of the 2005 BET Awards for Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and the finale of the 2005 Billboard Music Awards, in which R. Kelly and a gospel chorus sang “Let Your Light Shine,” Kelly’s tribute to Hurricane Katrina victims.
Coincidentally, Jay-Z and the Smiths are now producers of Fela! In the show, which re-creates an evening at Fela’s nightclub The Shrine circa 1978, Page is the first cast member (or clubgoer) the audience meets. He wanders on stage, smoking a cigarette, a few minutes before Fela enters. Then he goes to an upper-level platform stage right and starts dancing. Page also has a brief solo at the start of “Water No Get Enemy,” the first song in Act 2.
He covers three performers with more demanding roles: Ismael Kouyate, who plays several featured parts, and Corey Baker and Daniel Soto, the principal male dancers in the ensemble. To be in shape for all that dancing, Page had his work cut out after years as an L.A. choreographer. “I was used to sitting and telling people what to do,” he says. “I did not have a dancer’s body. I could dance, but it was just a little extra work gettin’ that leg up and gettin’ those turns around!” During rehearsals, Page went to the gym on his lunch breaks, and he’s kept up the workouts—consisting of crunches, weights, treadmill and swimming—since Fela! opened in November.
