How he moves them
“Once you know why, then you’ve got the how”, the choreographer of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ tell Olivia Stewart.
Award-winning English choreographer Drew McOnie mightn’t be well-known to dance audiences in this country – but that’s about to change. Our stages will host the 39-year-old’s work for the first time when the Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar’s internationally-acclaimed revival premieres this November in Sydney, with Perth and Melbourne following in 2025.
The show has taken a long journey to get here – geographically and chronologically. It won Best Musical at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards back in 2016, then the 2017 Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival. It’s spent three years touring North America twice, played on the West End and travelled to audiences around the UK.
For such accolades and continuing global demand to have sprung from an experimental five-week season at London’s Regents Park Open Air Theatre is “what is magical about Jesus Christ Superstar”, McOnie declares.
Superstar’s six 2017 Olivier nominations included Best Theatre Choreographer for McOnie, who’d won the previous year for In the Heights.
Eight years on, Superstar remains one of his proudest achievements, but during its creation McOnie was pushed out of his comfort zone and convinced he’d failed woefully. He hadn’t believed director Timothy Sheader would actually pursue his concept “to have everyone in the cast dancing” and “for it to feel like a rave and mean absolutely nothing” so when Sheader handed over to him on just the second day of rehearsals, the unprepared McOnie was forced to create differently.
Instead of his usual well-researched and detail-driven approach, “I was just responding to the music, making up dancing on the spot. It was all sort of pouring out of my body,” he explains.
The process was so foreign and the movement so unfiltered and frenetic that McOnie was certain his work was terrible and would ruin him. “Then the best reviews of my career came out,” he recalls, “and I was like, ‘What is happening?’”
It was only on closing night, after having moved on to his next job, that he managed to watch with a sense of perspective. “I burst into tears about eight minutes in because I realised it was best thing I’d ever done, and that actually the reason I (hadn’t been able to) look at it was my own anxiety; it was weirdly too personal to look at,” he notes.
‘It was exactly what Tim had asked (for), which meant a lot to me, and therefore it has this connection with the audience.”
The construct tapped into the role of dance in spirituality, and the bounds of the human experience.
“There’s a lot of research about how different faiths and communities get closer to God, and dance has always been a centre of faith because when you get really exhausted, you’re sort of hallucinating and you speak to whoever your version of God is,” McOnie observes.
“There’s a lot of repetition in the material that is purposely designed to exhaust the dancers. The point isn’t to see perfectly achieved choreography, which it sometimes can be in musicals. It can be ‘make it look easy’, ‘smile on top of the pain’. Whereas there is no acting in Jesus Christ Superstar – the dancers turn up eight shows a week, and they put themselves through a series of ritualistic repetitions that get them to the point of near-collapse. You see the human experience being tested on a nightly basis.” . . .
This is an extract from an article in the Oct/Nov/Dec print issue of Dance Australia. Read the full story - buy your copy from your favourite retailer or subscribe or buy here or individual copies here. Print is for keeps!
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