GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Jeffrey Page of 'Fela!'

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.

Prior to Fela!, Page was last on stage at the DanceAfrica festival in Brooklyn in May 2008, when he performed with Forces of Nature, a dance company he’s belonged to since he was a college freshman. (Several Fela! castmates are also company members.) Though Fela! is his Broadway debut, his career has entailed theater as well as concert dance. He choreographed Little Shop of Horrors at Orlando’s Plaza Theatre in the fall of 2008. As a performer, he did a 2008 showcase of Eve’s Turn, a dance play with Broadway aspirations. He was seen in NYC in 2003 in Brown Butterfly, a dance play about Muhammad Ali, with choreography by Marlies Yearby and music by Aaron Davis Hall. That year, he also was in the chorus of a Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Oedipus Rex, directed by Michael Kahn and presented in Athens, Greece. He worked with the Jazz Actors Theater, under the direction of Ernie McClintock, at the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina and performed in Soul Possessed, a Louisiana bayou-set dance musical created by Debbie Allen, at Atlanta’s ALLIANCE THEATRE and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

During his freshman year at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Page performed in Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity, directed by Walter Dallas for Philly’s Freedom Theatre. In high school, Page had appeared regularly in musicals at American Cabaret Theatre, a regional house in his hometown of Indianapolis. He also trained and performed at Asante Children’s Theatre in Indianapolis. (He recently returned to Asante to co-direct shows called Hip Hop Be Bop Doo Wop and Soul Clap and Dance.) As a teen, he danced in the musical Eyes, an adaptation of the Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. That show was directed by New Federal Theatre founder Woodie King Jr., who’s remained a friend and mentor. (Last spring, Page was assistant director to King on the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of Sundown Names and Night-Gone Things, by Leslie Lee.)

Page attended a performing arts high school in Indianapolis, concentrating on dance his first three years and theater during his senior year. He’d begun dance lessons at age 10 after spotting a flyer recruiting kids for a “hip-hop African dance troupe.” Page enjoyed hip-hop and had been doing it for fun at home and with friends. Once he joined the dance company, run by a woman named Saundra Holiday (she now goes by Mijiza Soyini), he discovered “she tricked us. She didn’t do hip-hop dance; it was just the African. But I was intrigued by it, because my body felt good doing it.”

He became so enamored of African dance, eventually Mijiza’s studio wasn’t enough. Page started traveling around the country to study, in Cincinnati, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. “Anywhere that I could find good training, I would go,” he says. “My parents were very supportive and  instrumental in me getting the type of training that I felt was important.” Having a performer in the family was new to them, though: Page is the middle of five brothers, and almost all his siblings have followed their father into computer engineering (his mother’s a social worker).

By the time he was 15, he wanted to go to Africa to study. He raised money by placing “Send Jeffrey to Africa” collection boxes at store checkouts all around town and was able to join the Cultural Arts Safari, an annual trip led by Chuck Davis, founder of DanceAfrica. That was Page’s first time outside the United States, and it would be the first of many trips to west Africa. He’s gone there as frequently as twice a year as an adult, for research and training in traditional dance of Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. (He gets around with the help of a French phrasebook. “I know enough French to not be hungry,” he says.)

Page has taught African dance at Alvin Ailey, UCLA, Long Beach Ballet and Brooklyn’s Creative Outlet, among other places, and served as a west African dance consultant for the Cirque du Soleil show O. When he was still in high school, Page founded his own youth company, Dance Afrique, and was artistic director of an adult troupe, Omo’Arrah. While attending the University of the Arts, Page taught at the University of Pennsylvania and directed its African Rhythms dance company.

Though he worked as an instructor, choreographer and dancer throughout college, he managed to graduate a semester early, receiving a BFA with honors, in 2002. For Page, just being part of the Philadelphia scene was a vital education in itself. “In Philly the theater community have a calmness about them that New Yorkers don’t have,” he explains. “But at the same time, they have this very raw, passionate talent. In New York, it’s very seasoned, it’s very honed; in Philly, it’s seasoned, but it has a different face. That ‘Philly soul’—the actors and the actresses carry that with them.”

He decided to settle in L.A. after college in part because artists generally don’t struggle so much there to make ends meet. He recalls how an encounter in New York with his friend Obediah Wright, a director and choreographer, helped point him west: “Obediah was driving down the street, he saw me and stopped and started chatting: ‘Yeah, I just came from the doctor…’ I remember saying to myself: He’s somebody I’m looking up to. His [work] has given him a car and health insurance. In my brain, I’m saying, ‘If I have a car and health insurance, I’ve made it!’ And then another side of my brain said, ‘Jeffrey, regular people have cars and health insurance. That’s not making it.’”

He was ready to transition away from performing—“I lived a dance career while I was in school”—and he felt less conflicted about choreography as a commercial venture. “Dancing is so personal for me,” he says, “sometimes I feel uneasy about putting it out there and selling it: I need to pay a bill, so I need to dance. Choreographing is a passion, but it’s something I don’t mind putting in a box and selling.”

The first jobs he got in California were dancing, but they helped him make contacts and gain exposure. That’s also how he met people who gave him invaluable guidance in repositioning for the West Coast market. “They’re so laid-back, so chill; a New Yorker comes in and they’re, [growls] ‘Aaaah…I gotta get it!...I have to work!’ L.A. folks get turned off by that. It’s like playing really loud music to a very delicate flower,” says Page. He was also taught other do’s and don’ts that differed from New York, like don’t submit black-and-white photos for a job, don’t go to auditions in dance clothes, and do make sure you always look like you’re dressed to go somewhere, even if you just run out to get the paper (an occasion in New York when you might just throw on sweats).

One highlight of his work in L.A. was receiving an Emmy nomination for choreography, for a number on the 2005 NAACP Image Awards featuring the cast of Rize (David LaChapelle’s documentary on krumping) that he staged with Anthony and Richmond Talauega, the film’s producers. Page was bested for the Emmy by Olympic figure skating champion Christopher Dean’s Stars on Ice production but still remembers: “It was the most wonderful feeling in the world hearing my name on the loudspeaker...even though I had some shoes on that were so uncomfortable.”

He may be proudest, though, of another L.A. project: creating a blues musical called The Hole in the Wall, which was initially performed by unprivileged youth in Inglewood to whom Page had been teaching dance and theater. The school district funded the 2008 production, co-presented by Ebony Repertory Theatre and associate-directed by TV actress Vernee Watson. Page has continued to develop the play and would now like to get it produced on a professional level (click here for more about Hole in the Wall). 

Another item on Page’s to-do list is going back to school. He was accepted in NYU’s MFA program before he got into Fela! and has had to defer his enrollment because of the show. He plans to pursue a degree in performance studies at NYU, but ultimately would like to get into Yale’s directing program. His career goal is “to create productions, to choreograph and direct—whether for film or stage.” One thing he isn’t really interested in doing is forming his own dance company—as, for example, Fela! creator and director Bill T. Jones did before bringing his talents to Broadway. “I like to create and go,” says Page. “I don’t know if sustaining a group of people is my specialty.”

He does look to Jones as a role model as far as the type of work he creates. As a choreographer/director, Page doesn’t have a preference between concert dance and theater. “In my brain, it’s no different,” he says, pointing to the “way that Broadway embraced Bill.” Fela!, according to Page, “is a concert dance piece, it’s the same type of piece that Bill’s company would do, except it involves another layer on top.

“I think choreographers make the best directors because it’s about taking some images from your mind and putting movement and texture together, whether it be a vocal texture or a spacing texture,” he continues. “I think Fela! has been a hit because it’s playing with a wide variety of textures that Broadway hasn’t seen. And that’s my love: I have training as an actor, I have training as a dancer, I have training as a director, and I have training as a choreographer. So why can’t I put all of these things together?”

Page recently was awarded a Fund for New Work grant by Harlem Stage, which he plans to use on further development of The Hole in the Wall. Also upcoming for him is the summer release of the feature Step Up 3-D, the latest in that film franchise (and the first 3-D dance movie); Page helped choreograph its opening number. This summer, Page plans to stage a fund-raiser—featuring benefit performances “with big names in dance”—for the people of Guinea, a nation ruled by a military junta that has suppressed pro-democracy movements through murder and rape.

He’s been planning the Guinea fund-raiser for a while, but says he will now probably make it a joint benefit for Haiti earthquake relief. Page had a firsthand experience with the Guinea police state in 2007. He was walking with friends in the capital city Conakry when a black van pulled up beside them. The men inside asked to see identification, but Page’s passport was in the nearby home where he was staying. He was taken into the van and held there, surrounded by military personnel with their guns drawn. “When I tell you they held me, this isn’t like the United States, where they need permission to shoot you. This is like: If we want to shoot you, we’re gonna shoot you,” Page says. “I wasn’t talking; I was scared that if I said something, they would know that I was American and they would have more reason either to ask me for a lot of money or to kill me. I thought that I was going to die that night.” He was released, unharmed, after about six hours.

Page faced a different kind of predicament on a subsequent trip to Africa. A couple of years ago, just hours before his flight was to depart the U.S., he discovered that due to a direct-deposit snafu, he had no money in the bank. He had to go to Africa with only the cash he had in hand. “It turned out to be a life-changing experience,” he says. “I did not have the money I was supposed to have; therefore, I had to figure out how to get through. The times that we don’t have, those are the times that we learn the most.” Instead of flying between points in Senegal, he took a bush cab—a bus-like service in which as many as six passengers ride in a car meant for four, with their luggage piled up high on the roof of the vehicle.

“I learned the things that we value in our lives, we value them for a reason, but we have to be open to somebody else’s different value system,” remarks Page, citing another incident from the trip. Dining in a village in Guinea-Bissau, he saw that children would eat whatever was left on his plate, even slurping up gravy. So he decided to buy the entire village beef for a dinner. He doesn’t eat beef but declined the villagers’ offer to prepare something else for him. “I have to put my values aside for a second because they put their heart and soul into this, and I don’t want to sit on my pedestal,” he says.

“That lesson rings true for now,” Page adds, explaining how it translates to his work on Fela!: “Bill, Maija [Garcia], the associate choreographer, and Niegel [Smith], the associate director, gave me a lot. Every night that I do this show, I’m full with things they have instilled in my brain. If I was too good to not accept the things that they value, I don’t know if I could be on stage every night giving what they want to give. I would be giving what I felt like I should give.”

In the bigger picture: “The humble life of an artist in New York, not having the help of Beyoncé or any big production, has taught me so much on that same lesson in terms of value,” Page says. “I think making this circle, and coming back around to just being this very small pebble in the bottom of the ocean, it’s really beautiful for me.”

Photos of Jeffrey, from top: outside the Eugene O’Neill Theatre after an Actors Fund benefit of Fela! last week; bottom right, with (from left) Fela! producers Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Jada Pinkett and Will Smith and castmates Sahr Ngaujah (sunglasses), Kevin Mambo (cap),  Talu Green (mustache) and J.L. Williams; with Woodie King Jr. (right) and Stephen McKinley Henderson on opening night last March of Signature Theatre’s Zooman and the Sign revival, directed by McKinley Henderson; learning traditional dance in the Gambia, January 2008; unwinding in a midtown diner after a show in January; on a 2008 visit to Senegal, with children in the southern region of Ziguinchor; dancing (left) in the Gambia on that same trip.

Updates on some previous Gypsies of the Month:
· Michelle Lookadoo, who returns to Mary Poppins in March, has launched a blog, New Every Day In New York 2010.
· Jim Borstelmann is in the cast of Broadway’s The Addams Family musical, set to begin previews on March 8.
· Cody Green, last seen on Broadway as Riff in West Side Story, is slated to be part of Come Fly Away, Twyla Tharp’s new Broadway show, opening March 25.
· Lorin Latarro is choreographing the Encores! production of Fanny, playing Feb. 4-7 at City Center. She was also just announced as a cast member of American Idiot, the Green Day musical (for which she’s associate choreographer) scheduled to open on Broadway on April 20.