GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Ramón Flowers of 'Hot Feet'

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.

In an even earlier twist, Flowers had stumbled—metaphorically, of course—into dancing. He entered Glassboro State (now known as Rowan University) as a theater major and as such was required to take a course called Movement for the Actor. "The teacher thought I was in the dance department. She was like, 'What are you doing in this class?' She thought it was too basic for me. She basically let me know that that was my calling." The teacher told him to try out for the dance department's semiannual concerts, and he immediately won principal roles in them. He was spotted during a performance by Diane Hull, a visiting artist who had taught at the school. "She said, 'I would love to use you in my company, but you have this raw, funky thing that you need to clean up with ballet.'"

Now, more than a decade and a half after redirecting into ballet, he's got that "raw, funky thing" back for Hot Feet. He started taking hip-hop classes over a year ago, before he even knew about Hot Feet but was "seeing that that is the way of the dance world," he says. "With so much ballet training, I find that I look wrong at certain Broadway auditions when it's sort of street dance, or jazz. I always stand out because I'm so pulled-up [posture-wise]." In Hot Feet, "you get to use everything that you have," says Flowers. "It's rare that they ask you to hold back. Almost every show that I'd done so far, they'd tell me I'm doing too much of something."

He still attends ballet class almost every day, and his work ethic has not gone unnoticed by his younger castmates. "Some of the dancers come up and ask if they could join in my warm-up," says Flowers. "I let them know that doing a show eight times a week is a lot different than being in a concert world because you're going to be repeating things. Even if it's the easiest step, it can become difficult after a while because it's wear and tear on certain muscles. So I explain the importance of cross-training and warming up and taking class.

"You never want to 'run after' your show," he continues, "and by that I mean thinking that you're in shape just because you're doing a show eight times a week. Especially a show like this. If you're struggling, that's when you get an injury, because you're tired and you're pushing and you don't have the strength to execute."

Any instruction he's given castmates has been informal, but Flowers has also taught in an official capacity—at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in western Michigan, New York City Ballet's summer program in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and the Koresh Dance Company of Philadelphia.

Outside of dance, he's a student himself, working toward a bachelor's degree from City College in French, with a minor in Spanish. After getting a head start on Spanish from his Puerto Rican grandmother, Flowers learned to speak Spanish, French and German when he lived in Europe ("French director-choreographers don't like to speak English; I was obliged to learn French or I was completely lost"), and now he's finessing his grammar and written skills and thinking about a career as a U.N. interpreter in the future.

Not that he's giving up performing anytime soon. In the past couple of years, he filmed roles in two movies: Little Manhattan, an adolescent love story starring Cynthia Nixon and Bradley Whitford as the boy's parents and John Dossett as the girl's father, and Across the Universe, the Beatles-scored project by Julie Taymor, who directed him in The Lion King and The Green Bird. Whether he actually makes it to the big screen, however, remains to be seen. He was edited out of the theatrical release of Little Manhattan; go to "Dance" in the widescreen DVD's deleted scenes to see him, in white pants, as part of a musical romantic-fantasy sequence, shot outside the subway station at 72nd Street and Broadway. And he's heard that "Come Together," his number in Universe (scheduled to hit theaters Nov. 3), may be cut too.

But Flowers has had plenty of lucky breaks to counterbalance disappointments like those. For instance, he had quit The Lion King after four years to do Masada, a musical planned for Broadway that died before rehearsals started. "I have a guardian angel or something," Flowers says, "because the day I got the call for The Boy From Oz, three minutes later—I kid you not—I got the call from Masada saying it was canceled."

There were also the connections he made on one job that led to another. He was introduced to Béjart by a former Béjart member who joined the Pennsylvania Ballet. "He saw my progress and after a while he said, 'Béjart would love to have a dancer like you because he can create for all your special qualities.' In classical companies, men are normally not that flexible, so they would always tell me to bring my legs down. They would tell me my arms were very exotic, because in classical ballet everything has to be exactly the same, in the line with the corps de ballet. Most classical ballet," says Flowers, "the male dancers—you're the human crane, you're just behind the girl all the time. This guy told me how much male dancers shine in a company like Béjart because he uses unique stuff like that."

Dancing with Béjart, he got to know Gianni Versace, who designed the troupe's costumes. That led to modeling in Versace shows in Milan and Paris—and becoming "really good friends with him before he died." He also did Issei Miyaki's shows in Paris and Tokyo. Flowers has been to Japan 11 times for modeling or dancing. He's also performed in China and many other places around the world—including, perhaps most memorably, on a stage set up in front of the Pyramids in Egypt.

But even before that engagement at one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Flowers had discovered how specially ballet dancers are treated in Europe compared to the U.S. "In Europe, ballet is a part of the culture. It's government-funded. You're taken care of 12 months out of the year; you have one month paid vacation in the summer, two weeks for Christmas, a nice pension plan, everything is covered—health, dental. Whereas here, it's so hard for a company to survive. You're constantly being laid off and you don't have the benefits you have over there." The financial stability allows European ballet companies to be "more open-minded to their creative possibilities," adds Flowers. "They just go for whatever they want to go for and hope that the public will embrace it, and if they don't, they've taken a chance. Here in the States, choreographers are pretty much guided by what society will accept...I think it's mainly out of fear, because they have to answer to someone."

At the Frankfurt Ballet, Flowers danced for experimentalist William Forsythe, who permitted "a lot of improvisation, but in the classical setup. He might choreograph, but he would say, 'Okay, add yourself to it. What would you do to make this look more like you instead of looking like me?' For a dancer, that's the best thing a choreographer could say to you," says Flowers. But Nacho Duato, the artistic director at his next company, Compañía Nacional de España, was more restrictive. "That freedom had become fun, and then I go to a place where Duato wants to put me back in a box. So I decided, Maybe it's time for me to go back to Broadway."

Coming back to theater brought Flowers, after years of living overseas and traveling the globe, close to his hometown. He had grown up, the middle of five children, in southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, and admits he started performing because "I liked attention." But his childhood didn't revolve solely around acting and dancing; he also studied karate (he's a black belt) and was on the gymnastics team.

Flowers still occasionally travels for work. Last December, before Hot Feet went into rehearsal, he was in a production of Aida in Arvada, Colo. And he has performed the last three years at the annual Dance Stars of the New Millennium gala in Allendale, Mich. For the 2005 show, he did an original solo dance to Aretha Franklin's recording of Puccini's "Nessun dorma" that he choreographed with Gregory King, a dancer in The Lion King.

Photos of Ramón, from top: in his dressing room with his costumes; performing in Hot Feet; dancing to Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun," as choregraphed by Maurice Béjart. [Hot Feet photo by Paul Kolnik]