The unexpected choreographic career of Elizabeth Aldrich: an expert on Renaissance dance now creates steps for the ultimate twentieth-century art form.

Later this spring, when Jefferson in Paris opens in cinemas across the country, Elizabeth Aldrich will mark another milestone in her unexpected career as a movie choreographer. Jefferson is her fifth picture as a member of the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory "family" and her sixth film, counting Martin Scorsese's Age of Innocence. She knows her name will be among the credits (although in small print), but she's still amazed by the twist of fate that led to its being there at all.

A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and a student of Renaissance dance, Aldrich got into the movie business by accident. "My good friend Richard Robbins had begun to do the music for Merchant Ivory Productions. In The Europeans, there were a couple of dance scenes so he called me up, knowing full well I didn't know anything past 1580, and asked if I would be willing to do the dances, which were from the 1840s. I said, 'Of course not.' Then he called me again. 'I'd like you to meet Ismail Merchant, the producer. He's going to take us to lunch.' We had a wonderful picnic in Central Park. That was my first lesson in how producers work. Inside of fifteen minutes I had agreed to do the film."

Aldrich doesn't choreograph musicals or big production numbers. In the Merchant-Ivory films that she's worked on (The Europeans, Quartet, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, The Remains of the Day, and now Jefferson in Paris) her assignment is to create dances that complement the action while remaining in the background. The challenge, she explains, is twofold. Not only do the dances have to be appropriate" in terms of period and style; they also have to blend into the scenery, like a sofa or a chair. Sometimes, as in the tearoom scene in Remains of the Day, where the waltzing couple seems to merge into the period decor, her contribution is so unobtrusive as to go practically unnoticed. When this happens, Aldrich counts the job as a success.

She has particularly fond memories of the 1930s prom scene she did for Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. "I worked for a couple of days with about fifty teenagers," she recalls. "They were very energetic but had no sense of partnering. I had to teach them everything, including, if you can believe it, how to hold each other. Between takes, Joanne Woodward, whose performance as Mrs. Bridge was nominated for an Academy Award, went around straightening their ties and fixing their hairdos. She was like a mom to them."

Like most of the "dancers" used in Merchant Ivory films, none of these teenagers was a professional. Part of the reason for using amateurs, Aldrich explains, is economic. However sumptuous Merchant-Ivory films may look, they are nonunion productions made on a shoestring and shot mostly on location; for extras, people living in the vicinity are usually used, which also adds to the realism of the film. Aldrich says, "Sometimes we've literally gone out into the street and asked people, `What are you doing for the next two hours"'"

For The Europeans, she needed sixteen men and sixteen women for a quadrille and a galop. She recalls, "Since we were filming in Boston, Richard Robbins said, `Well, we'll just go to the Boston Conservatory.' Directors usually are very clear about the kind of people they want. Jim [Ivory] didn't want anyone who would stick out, no matter how well they danced. They had to look like New Englanders. So we went to a class and started pointing: you, you, you."

Whenever possible, Aldrich likes to have a hand in casting. "For the 1950s rock-and-roll scene that was cut from Remains of the Day," she says, "we were filming in Weston-super-Mare, a wonderful old seaside resort near Bristol. The casting director had gone on ahead to sign up dancers. Since it was a rock-and-roll scene, obviously I wanted teenagers. The first group of ten young women came in, and they were fine. Then I noticed that the back of the hall was filling up with people I assumed were their parents, coming to pick them up. Lo and behold, I discovered that this was the second group. So we went to a local dancing school and picked out some younger people. Since we needed bodies to fill the huge space, we put the older ones in back."

Scorsese's Age of Innocence was a different experience altogether. Since it was a union film, Aldrich only received credit as a consultant; all of her previous jobs had been on nonunion productions, and these didn't count toward union membership. (Sometimes, she notes, nonunion choreographers take second- or third-assistant-director credits.) Moreover, the extras, including the dancers in the ballroom scene, had to be members of the Screen Actors Guild. So, instead of grabbing people off the streets, the producers sent out a casting call. Because she wanted dancers who didn't look like dancers, Aldrich asked for actors with ballroom experience. "I try to stay away from dancers," she explains. "Their body stance isn't natural; they don't look like real people. Even if it takes longer to teach nondancers the steps, I prefer taking the time, because in the end the effect is more appropriate. And they're so enthusiastic."

After the director, the most important person on the set is the cameraman. "He's the one who sets up the shot and decides what goes into each frame," she explains. "In Quartet, the second movie I did, I had concocted a cabaret dance for the singer that required her to move around a lot. When I got to the location where we were shooting, which I hadn't seen before, I found they had constructed a glass runway that was barely three feet wide. The cameraman came up to me and said, `She's going to stand here.' So there went all my great choreography.

"I was able to have a little bit of input in The Age Of Innocence," she continues. "Scorsese had the vision of a whirling' ballroom; that was the word he used. He had cameras installed overhead (which is why a ballroom was built for the scene at the Astoria Studios in Queens), and an enormous platform set up at one end of the space for another camera.

"In the movie it looks like the entire group is waltzing continuously. Actually, the dancers had to come to a dead stop, walk behind the platform, and then start waltzing up the other side. To make matters worse, the camera was constantly moving, and the floor behind the platform was strewn with electrical cables. For the dancing to look continuous, the entrance of each of the couples had to be cued. The problem was I couldn't do the cuing; nonunion people aren't allowed on the set during filming. So in the end, I taught the counts to the assistant director, who did it for me."

After the famous picnic that convinced her to do The Europeans, Aldrich headed straight for the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. There she found the social dance manuals that enabled her to choreograph the film's ballroom scenes. For the rock-and-roll number eventually cut from Remains of the Day, she went to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City to look at American Bandstand, Dick Clark's hit teen dance show of the 1950s. "Boy, was I shocked," she says. "The girls all wore tight skirts, and the dancing was very upright; not `down' at all. I couldn't believe I had ever danced that way. Good thing I looked at those broadcasts."

Although Aldrich does her homework, she's no stickler for authenticity. In fact, her movie jobs have caused her to question the fetish for authenticity among reconstructors of historical dance: "In my early years as a Renaissance scholar, I worried mostly about the authenticity of steps. When I did The Europeans, I was terribly concerned that the carefully arranged sequence of the figures had disappeared because of the way the scenes were edited. Did that mean the choreography wasn't authentic? My feeling now is that a dance has to work within the context of the film and that it has to please the director. If it happens to be authentic, good. Clearly, I'm not talking about something outrageous; I wouldn't substitute a tango for a quadrille. The music, the decor, and especially the costumes pretty much dictate what the overall picture is going to look like."

Sometimes there is nothing more to go on. In Jefferson in Paris, for instance, there is a scene where Sally Hemings, the slave woman said to have been Thomas Jefferson's mistress, dances for the future president. Aldrich hunted high and low for information about what a female house slave in late-eighteenth-century Virginia might have danced, only to discover that there were very few sources. Relying on the music, the style of the production, and the personality of the character depicted in the script, Aldrich crafted a dance that seemed appropriate to the situation at hand.

Still, Aldrich does take authenticity seriously. She describes, for instance, the fuss she made about the music for the ballroom scene in The Age of Innocence. A music consultant had been hired, and he thought that Chopin was just the thing. Aldrich pointed out that Chopin's waltzes were never used as ballroom music and that the period was wrong. So the consultant came up with another suggestion: Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Dance. Best known to ballet buffs as the music for Le Spectre de la Rose, the piece, as Aldrich patiently explained, was composed years before the movie's protagonists were even born. "How about something by Johann Strauss?" she asked. They finally compromised on Strauss's Tales from the Vienna Woods, which still bothers Aldrich, since it was composed a few years after the scene actually took place.

Costumes can also be a touchy point. For the same scene Scorsese had imagined the women in swirling skirts a la Gone with the Wind. However, ball gowns of the 1870s had slim skirts and three-foot-long trains. "I had to figure out a way of making the scene look like what he wanted, despite the constraints of the costumes. So I kept the dancers moving very symmetrically, and had them turn only to the right, at exactly the same time, which created an impression of swirling." If less than totally authentic (nineteenth-century waltzers covered the entire floor and turned in both directions), the solution not only worked but also helped make this one of the film's more impressive scenes.

The picnic that launched Aldrich on a movie career changed her professional life in other ways. Prior to The Europeans, she had worked exclusively on Renaissance dance. Now she had discovered the nineteenth century. For someone interested in social dancing, this was virgin territory. "`Well,' I said to myself, `there could be a career in this.'" And so Aldrich embarked on the research that led to the founding of the International Early Dance Institute, as well as the publication in 1991 of From the Ballroom to Hell, a highly regarded study of American social dances viewed from the context of nineteenth-century manners and mores. This, in turn, led to her present research project, a book about nineteenth-century table manners and food.

Although she has completed five chapters, the manuscript has temporarily been shelved. The reason is her present one-year job at Oxford University Press as managing editor of the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Dance, nursed through the years by Selma Jeanne Cohen.

At present, Aldrich has no movie assignments lined up. But she's ready for any job that comes along.