Broadway's Lion Tamer.

After his Tony-winning Broadway triumph choreographing The Lion King, Garth Fagan returns to jazz for City Ballet's salute to Duke Ellington this month.

Last year, Garth Fagan won the Tony Award for his choreography for the blockbuster Broadway musical The Lion King. In a brilliantly creative act of hiring, Disney brought this most idiosyncratic of concert artists into mainstream theater. There Fagan proved the breadth and flexibility of his artistry and introduced a whole new audience to his very special imaginative powers. Relying on his extensive African, Caribbean, and modern dance vocabulary, he made it possible to see hyenas and giraffes dance and prance, to see grass come alive in an utterly believable fashion. Fagan's ability to integrate movement into every stage moment propelled the show like a warm breeze--an amazing achievement. His previous theater work had been limited to choreographing and staging the Duke Ellington street opera, Queenie Pie, in 1986 at the Kennedy Center, and choreographing A Midsummer Night's Dream for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1988. This month Fagan returns to the Duke for New York City Ballet's spring season; he's among the choreographers contributing to the company's Ellington salute that premieres June 3.

Did Broadway fame turn Fagan's head? In fact, he resumed work with his own twenty-eight-year-old company with great relief. "I'm extraordinarily proud of The Lion King," he says in his musical Jamaican accent, "but what I really love is concert dance, where I have a clear canvas and can show off my beautiful dancers unencumbered." In The Lion King, the dancers move with seeming ease while wearing incredibly elaborate costumes--massive headgear, ornate masks, flowing robes, and, in one number, trays of grass on their heads to symbolize grasslands. What Fagan prefers, however, is an almost completely unadorned body, so that the lines he creates are clearly apparent.

Fagan's dancers were equally happy to have him back. "Garth always presents us with a challenge," says Norwood Pennewell, who joined the company twenty years ago. "He knows what we can do and never takes a chance on our losing our self-confidence. He nurtures us. Through the years, in our straggle to survive, he never lost his sense of humor. Every day he comes to class in a terrific outfit, just for us. It's that spirit that makes him so good at what he does." Dancer Natalie Rogers adds, "He gives us a focused, stable environment in which to work. He says `Through discipline comes freedom,' and he proves it to us every day. On top of this, he's a mentor, a father figure, witty, and extremely well educated--just a joy to be around."

To understand Fagan, it helps to know his background. "I'm a Caribbean man," he asserts. "I spent my childhood surrounded by mountains and sea." He danced first with the National Dance Theatre of Jamaica in his hometown of Kingston. When he left the island, he enrolled in Wayne State University in Detroit to get "the American and Motown experience." His many subsequent trips to Africa taught him about the animals and people of that continent, knowledge that was put to good use in The Lion King. Although studying or dancing the works of Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, Alvin Ailey, Jose Limon, and Katherine Dunham had inspired him, it's Caribbean and West African traditions that define his dances. His house in Rochester, New York, is filled with exotic reminders of those influences, such as rattan furniture and tropical birds. The upstate city is home of Garth Fagan Dance and the branch of the State University of New York where he holds the position of Distinguished University Professor.

Fagan developed a critical following in the 1970s, when he began choreographing works for Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Limon Dance Company. What made him so original was his fusion of diverse elements--the sense of weight of modern dance, the torso-centered movement and energy of Afro-Caribbean dance, the speed and precision of ballet, and the experimentation of the postmoderns. He broke the roles with his dizzyingly held balances, abrupt standing jumps, and the recurrent juxtaposition of quiet and tension.

"I like unisex dancing in the best sense," he says, "with women able to dance with the fierceness of men and men with the gentleness of women. Even when I don't mean to, I make dances about myself, my family, and the landscape that formed me. Maybe an artist can never do otherwise. It's as if I've been giving myself therapy through my dances. My pieces don't really have stories, but they resonate with human experience."

His Moth Dreams, made in 1992, is particularly autobiographical. The three parts are entitled "His Dream (Father)," "Their Dream (Son)" and "Her Dream (Mother)," with music provided by Andre Jolivet, Thelonious Monk, and Wynton Marsalis, respectively. It begins with a portrait of a father who, though capable of passion, chooses to remain aloof. This is evident in the lack of interaction between the lead couple. Being a rambunctious and curious child in Fagan's household was not easy--his grandmother told him that he was "like a moth attracted to a flame." His father, an Oxford-trained intellectual and educator, didn't take kindly to this behavior, says Fagan, for "he was the most critical person alive. He could spot a fly in ointment. We were supposed to do everything perfectly. We had to be the best."

Fagan describes the second part, performed by the eloquent Pennewell, as "a beautiful nightmare to solo piano." He presents his parents' and relatives' view of him as a jaunty, carefree young man. Dancing to the bluesy, languid sounds of Monk, Pennewell, in gray overalls and baseball cap, punctuates loose-limbed swings and turns with quicksilver changes in dynamics and speed as well as stunning moments of silence. The music seeps into his muscles and calls him to dance down a long road that leads away from home. He moves in stages from tentative youthful wonder through exultant freedom of discovery into reflective maturity.

In the last section, Fagan celebrates his mother, whom he describes as "a woman who felt that a kind word and good meal could heal all problems." Her dream, a surrealistic world, combines some of the cultural influences in Jamaica: the lively, irrepressible spirit and the stiffer, aristocratic Episcopalian tradition. It takes place on a busy street, dominated by gaudy and gorgeous individuals and a peanut vendor. Fagan's dancers wear an assortment of incongruous costumes: a fur stole, a bridal veil, a motorcycle helmet. "The women in my family," says Fagan, "were very strong and very feminine. And the men spoiled them with maids and shopping trips and lots of attention." They also introduced him to all the arts, making him a jazz and classical music lover from childhood. Vivaldi, Brahms, Dvorak, Miles Davis, Harold Arlen, and Ellington are among the composers he uses. By the close of this dance, we better undertand Fagan, the child, trying to find a course between the dissimiliar pillars of his world.

In 1977 Fagan made the dissolution of his marriage the subject of a dance, Untitled, set to the plaintive music of Keith Jarrett, one of his favorite jazz musicians. Over its course, a dazzlingly confident man and woman begin an affair. As they explore and rejoice in each other, they show their feelings in a series of affectionate and passionate movements. She becomes wistful; he looks earnest, traversing a multitude of emotions. But then invisible obstacles suddenly interrupt the flow of movement. They begin to move apart. "Sometimes it upset me too much to keep it in the repertory," says Fagan. "When my ex-wife first saw it, she ran out of the theater crying. Afterward she said, `How dare you put our lives onstage?' But now she understands. It's tree and kind and one of my beloved pieces."

Among his most celebrated works is the ninety-minute tour de force, Griot New York, with a tuneful and witty score by Marsalis and a series of imposing, abstract sculptural environments by artist Martin Puryear. It premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991 and was telecast by PBS in 1993. In West African tribal cultures, a griot is an oral historian and poet who interprets events in terms of their deepest, most enduring values. "I desperately love New York," says Fagan, "and I know how tenacious you have to be to survive there."

In Griot New York he emphasizes the pace, the tension, and the often bewildering elements of city life to show the contemporary African-American experience from a mythic perspective. Fagan evokes the experience of the disenfranchised--the immigrants, the homeless, the sick, and also the hopeful. Although the style is abstract, the work nevertheless presents his concern about the treatment of outsiders, his enormous affinity for Native American culture, his nostalgia for Jamaica, and his belief in the healing nature of love. The section called "Sand Painting" celebrates his love affair with Native American culture, which, he says, "claimed me a long time ago when I visited a Montana reservation." In "Oracabessa Sea," he revisits one of his island's most ravishingly beautiful blue lagoons.

Griot New York, more than most of Fagan's work, contrasts his moods and movement. The effect is all the more profound because he surprises. He gives us the agony of a slave, the twitching body of a homeless man, sidelong split jumps, couples in erotic combinations, and angular reaches into space. Obviously these contrasts parallel those of big-city life, but they also reflect the emotional contrasts that Fagan experienced--the push and pull of his parents' influence that he reveals in Moth Dreams, as well as the fulfillment and the lost love of his marriage.

Impressionistic as Fagan's work can be, it sometimes suggests a narrative. During his company's winter season at the Joyce Theater there was a pair of world premieres, each particularly striking in its combinations of very different types of music. First was Nkanyit, the word that the Samburu people of Kenya use to mean "all-encompassing respect for life, elders, and each other," set to music of the late jazz singer Betty Carter and the National Percussion Group of Kenya. The other work was Two Pieces of One: Green to sacred chants by the sixteenth-century composer Cristobal de Morales, complemented by the jazz of Tony Williams. Jazz, one of Fagan's passions, has been a mainstay of his work.

"I was inspired to do Nkanyit," says Fagan, "because I've been outraged by all the stories of parents neglecting and killing their children--the madness, the disrespect for life. Early in my marriage, my wife and I lost our child, and the pain stays with me. That anyone could hurt a child is something I can't fathom. So the heart of the piece is about the crucial importance of family."

At the end of the opening-night performance, the audience rose to give the dancers a very vocal standing ovation. After several curtain calls for his cast, Fagan finally appeared, his ponytail swinging beneath his red, green, and black cap, a broad smile on his face. Taking the hands of his dancers, he gave a deep bow and repeatedly thanked the audience to demonstrate his relish at this homecoming to the concert stage.

But his Broadway days are not over. The Lion King has whetted his appetite for a return to the Great White Way--on his own terms. In the next three years, he plans to create a show that will be all his--a combination of theatrical and concert dance that turns the traditional hierarchy upside down: dancing will predominate, followed by the music and the drama. "I'll never stop experimenting," he promises. The dancers at New York City Ballet should be in for a rousing assignment this month.

Contributing editor Valerie Gladstone' a coauthor of Balanchine's Mozartiana, is currently at work on a book about black American dance in conjunction with an upcoming PBS series, Free to Dance.