On Broadway, This Goofy Dance Might Break Your Heart

Inside Significant Other‘s wedding choreography

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You wouldn’t think a goofy wedding dance could break your heart, but here we are. Early in Significant Other, which is at the Booth Theatre, three college friends are gathered for another friend’s wedding, and at first, they’re far too cool for this particular school. Hanging on the edge of the action, they joke about everything from the bridesmaid dresses to the groom.

We also know this might be their last hurrah. After all, their fourth friend, the one who’s getting married, isn’t dancing with them. She can’t. Her life has pulled her somewhere else.

He had to ask that question, of course. He’s the play’s choreographer.

First and foremost, Pinkleton knew that honoring the story meant avoiding “sophisticated” choreography. “The point of Significant Other is not at all to make spectacular dance,” he says. “It’s about the moment when the night turns a certain way, when you’ve had the right amount of rosé, when you’re feeling honest with your friends. You can reveal yourself in nerdy and truthful ways that you could not do with words. And that’s the only thing I care about with this: It’s a willingness to let yourself look like a fool and to express something without self-judgment.”

To get the cast to that free-and-easy place, Pinkleton had them run through a particular game in rehearsals: He would throw out prompts – fake ballet! Britney Spears video! – and have them copy each other’s moves.

If you think about, he says, that’s the game we’re all playing when we dance at weddings. “People who are not conditioned to be dancers are looking for an idea somewhere else,” he explains. “If you’re on the dance floor, you want to pick up somebody’s move, or you want to throw in your own move for somebody else to pick up. We’re all copying each other, and that creates community on the dance floor.”

To that end, he didn’t want the actors to worry about looking silly. “The thing we kept talking about was, ‘As these ideas come to you when you’re dancing, you have to believe that they’re the greatest dance moves ever and no one has ever looked better doing them than you do.’ It’s the non-vomitus version of ‘dance like nobody’s watching.'”

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“My job is to put human beings on stage as themselves,” he says. “In a way that’s like, ‘I’m a person with all of my weird tics and strange body things.’ The thing I’m interested in, and that I’m decent at executing, is, ‘What if we meet them as themselves?'”

He continues, “If everybody’s coming at dance in their own way, then what becomes unexpected about it is, ‘Oh god, I never thought that person would move that way, and they did this crazy thing.’ My favorite dancers in Great Comet are the guys with bellies and mustaches, and they’re the ones I make do the craziest shit. Because at first glance, you’re like, ‘Oh, that looks like my cousin Ted.’ And then he’s standing on his head. And to me, that has a little electricity in it that you don’t have when somebody walks on stage presenting, ‘I am a dancer, and I came here to do magnificent things.'”

Which isn’t to say Pinkleton scoffs at highly trained dancers executing remarkable choreography. “I will never forget watching the end of Act I of Anything Goes and weeping uncontrollably as these people were moving like machines,” he says. “It was so beautiful and mathematical, but I actually don’t have the skills to do that. I would get cut in the first round of a Kinky Boots dance call.”

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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for ‘Significant Other.’ Go here to browse our current offers.

Follow TDF Stages editor Mark Blankenship at @IAmBlankenship. Follow TDF at @TDFNYC.

Photos by Joan Marcus. Top photo: Gideon Glick.

MARK BLANKENSHIP