Dance return to Broadway: Lar Lubovitch, onto the stage.

When Lar Lubovitch was asked to provide new dances for the Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (opening April 11), he was fully aware that his competition on the stage would be Jerome Robbins's highly touted, award-winning choreography that graced the show when it opened in New York in 1951. Not the least bit fazed, Lubovitch took on the job with alacrity and elation.

"Jerry's dances for The King and I are superb," he says. "Our effort was to present his work in its optimum form and to cast the very best dancers we could possibly find. Jerry himself is not connected to the production. The teaching of the choreography was put into the hands of Susan Kikuchi, who danced the lead for many years and is the daughter of Yuriko, who created the role back in the fifties and handed it down to Susan. But even as Susan was teaching it, I coached it and advised on dance technique and on how to present Jerry's choreography in the most fluid and beautiful way possible. As to my own choreography for the show, it consists of new dances that did not exist in the original--for scenes that didn't have dances but could have used them."

With The King and I, Lubovitch will complete his fourth assignment for the musical stage, which began some six years ago with the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical drama, Into the Woods, continued with the ill-fated The Red Shoes of two seasons ago, and was followed more recently by Oklahoma!, a touring production in England directed by Christopher Renshaw (the director of The King and I).

Though he was a longtime director of his own company (the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company), Lubovitch says that choreographing for the musical theater does not hold a different set of principles from choreographing for the concert stage. "When I create a dance I follow the strictures of my creative conscience in exactly the same way, whether it's for the Broadway theater or an abstract dance piece," he says. "Whatever I'm doing, I use my aesthetic and apply it as I always have to creating a way to see the music. So if I'm creating a way to see Brahms as I did in Brahms Third Symphony for American Ballet Theatre last season or if I'm creating a dance section for The King and I, it's always a way of seeing that music. Of course, the forms differ--one is concert music. However, the input is identical for me. It's a way of visualizing the music."

If visualizing the music is invariably the sum and substance of all choreography, the question remains, How is the visualization achieved? For Lubovitch, being literally "inside" the music goes back to the days when, as a very young dance student, he supported himself as a go-go dancer in the hot New York discos of the sixties--places like Trude Heller's and the Peppermint Lounge. It was an apprenticeship that prepared him for the alluring diversities of high and low art.

Says Lubovitch, "During my period as a go-go dancer, I discovered something that altered my viewpoint both as a dancer and a choreographer. I discovered that I enjoyed myself deeply. It was an enjoyment that came from the gut. It was a very intuitive response to the music and it didn't require brooding, intellectualizing, or Sturm-und-Drang-ing. It was a primal response that was full of energy and passion. It's been my relationship to music ever since."

Still, when Lubovitch first began work on Into the Woods, he found the experience jolting. He came to realize that working on a show was not entirely about his own aesthetics. "I had to create a choreography that deferred to another taste, another way of thinking, another way of creating images. I came to realize that my objective was to understand the Sondheim-Lapine vision and to choreograph the dances as though they had choreographed them. What ultimately became clear to me was that musical theater was a matter of collaboration, and collaborating was something I had little experience with. I found it to be a fascinating exercise in creativity."

Lubovitch agrees that The Red Shoes, his next musical theater venture, was not a very good show, but admitted that creating its dances was entirely satisfying: "At the risk of sounding self-complimentary, I will say that the choreography for The Red Shoes was highly successful--so successful that the central ballet for it was taken intact into American Ballet Theatre and also called The Red Shoes. The show was really about dancing, and it was about the very great love people had for the original movie on which the show was based. I had an obligation to put my very best creative effort into it. That was my goal."

The choreographer's work on behalf of Oklahoma!, the trailblazing musical originally choreographed by Agnes de Mille, did away with de Mille's dances altogether. Still, her name appears on the show's programs and posters.

"De Mille had it in her contract that any and all future productions would have her name as original choreographer," says Lubovitch. "It's a very great sacrilege for me to say this, but her choreography does look dated. I mean, while being wonderful for its time, it just didn't match our version of this show, which is a very different look at Oklahoma! So permission was given at the request of the director to create new dances that were more in keeping with a more contemporary vision of the show."

An illustrated souvenir program of the musical seen in England offers color photographs of Lubovitch's choreography that suggest immense energy and drive, with dancers whirling in space, their faces flushed with excitement and exuberance.

"It was tremendous fun to do," maintains Lubovitch. "But with it all, I did what I believed in. I didn't alter my aesthetic. I didn't pander to the audience. I did what was right for the show and what was right for the director."

The choreographer recently celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, which has enjoyed a considerable reputation as one of the country's best modern dance companies. Last year, however, he announced to the press that the company would stop touring altogether. In short, the Lubovitch company would no longer be as we knew it.

Lubovitch revealed the motivation behind this radical step: "I took the step because I felt we were repeating ourselves and had been for some time. Money was not the reason why I came to my decision, although, like everyone else, we did struggle. Still, we were doing well enough, and touring a good deal, the quality of my dancers was extremely high, and I continued to do new pieces. But the overall definition of what we were doing had remained the same for a number of years. We were doing this ad infinitum, and I would say ad nauseam. I felt it was not interesting to continue doing this forever--the way one is expected to. I felt we were existing in order to exist. That was not a nice feeling. It was a suffocating feeling.

"But there was another reason why I decided to reassess my relationship to dance--and that was a delicate and controversial matter. Part of what I retreated from was what I think of as the terrifying grip that corporate money has on our own dance world. At the risk of receiving criticism in return, a great deal of dance that I see I've had to begin to call corporate dance, because it seems sorrowfully motivated by the need to maintain the support of corporate sponsorship. And this support requires a certain aesthetic that the corporations will support as opposed to an aesthetic that they will not support. The point is, I'm tremendously dismayed at what I see as an erosion of absolute free choice in the creator's effort to create.

The reason I bring this up is because I myself have had a very strange experience on the subject of corporations--but I can only speak of it in general terms. Not too long ago we were encouraged to apply for funding from a very major corporation. And so we did. They then saw a concert of my work, and word came back to us that they considered my work obscene and would not fund it. Now, anyone who has ever seen my work would never apply the word obscene to it. But that's not even the point. The point is that judgment was passed, and that funding was controlled by that judgment.

"The questionable and awful part came next. A dance company requested a work of mine--a work that had been seen by this corporation. As it turned out, this dance company was receiving sponsorship from the corporation, and it told them that they would withdraw their funding if they danced this specific work of mine. This I found frightening, because it meant that dependence on corporate funding ultimately meant a sacrifice of absolute freedom that artists must never, never, never allow, because that is the very symbol of our life in America--to be free."

Clearly, the corporate experience has colored Lubovitch's attitude toward continuing his company. What, in effect, will he be doing without a company?

"The company has not been entirely disbanded," he stresses. "I'm continuing to work in the studio with dancers with whom I have worked for a number of years in order to maintain the practice of creating choreography--to keep the craft going--to keep the ideas flowing. Also, I've been working with ice skaters, something I've been doing throughout the years and that I enjoy enormously. Just recently I completed a work based on Gustav Holst's The Planets, which is a piece for ice skaters as well as dancers. Doug Varone did the dancing sections and I did the ice-skating sections. The piece, which lasts an hour, was shown on television and won an International Emmy award.

"The fact is, I love the possibility of stretching myself outside the pure-dance field. Working in the fields of musical theater and ice skating gives me that opportunity. Of course, I continue to create my own pure-dance works and although there is to be no touring company and no plans for a New York season, I most definitely and most decidedly plan to keep on with my life in dance."