In motion
Sonya Tayeh conquered the world of dance when nobody thought she could, becoming a world-renowned choreographer and leading the stage adaptation of Moulin Rouge: The Musical, due to open this month in Melbourne. By Hannah-Rose Yee.
Sonya Tayeh conquered the world of dance when nobody thought she could, becoming a world-renowned choreographer and leading the stage adaptation of Moulin
Rouge: The Musical, due to open this month in Melbourne.
Darkened basements and pulsating speakers and sweaty bodies. That’s what Sonya Tayeh remembers about the moment she realised that she was going to dance forever. She was 22 and living in Detroit, US, and unsure about how the rest of her life was going to look. But there was one thing that she did know: she loved to move.
Most evenings, Tayeh would make her way to an underground club and park herself next to the DJ booth. Techno was her poison of choice. One night, lost in the oblivion of an endless beat, she turned and gazed around the room. “I saw this sea of people,” Tayeh recalls. Speaking over Zoom, early in the morning before she heads to the studio, Tayeh is passionate and animated. As she recounts the energy of that night she rolls her body, indicating a sea of people moving as one. “From all walks of life, all parts of the world, connecting in this way,” she adds. “I thought: ‘This is the feeling I want to make through dance.’”
Tayeh is a long way from Detroit today. She’s a long way from Brooklyn, too, which is where she usually lives: the 44-year-old is currently in Sydney, where she is guiding the local cast of Moulin Rouge: The Musical, a revival of the original Broadway production that is slated to premiere at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre. Tayeh is the choreographer across both iterations, galvanising work for which she has been recognised with a Tony nomination. She is now officially the first female choreography nominee in 11 years.
It is fitting that Tayeh is in Sydney, though, taking the Australian cast of Moulin Rouge: The Musical through their paces. Because Moulin Rouge the movie was conceived in Sydney: first in Darlinghurst at the home of filmmaker Baz Luhrmann and his wife, costume and production designer Catherine Martin and, later, on a soundstage at Fox Studios in Moore Park.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the film, a critical and popular sensation when it was first released that has only grown in impact over the past two decades. It made more than $170 million at the box office, became the first Australian movie to open the Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for eight Academy Awards (and won two) and popularised the jukebox musical for years to come. Tayeh recalls sitting in the cinema, electrified and dizzy, on the movie’s opening night in Detroit. “I remember running out of the theatre, feeling so beautiful, and so excited,” she reflects.
This is the same energy that the musical hopes to convey. For the true Moulin Rouge fans, the stage production offers an opportunity to revisit the doomed love story of Satine and Christian, blown up and stretched out and reinvigorated with even more dance breaks and needle drops than the original film.
“It is extremely entertaining,” enthuses Catherine
Martin, the Oscar-winning costume and production designer of the original film. “It’s very life-affirming.
It’s very inclusive. It absolutely takes the DNA of the original and expands on it, with some new stuff and some surprises.” Yes, Moulin Rouge: The Musical is going to surprise even its most obsessive devotees. Just don’t expect major plot changes or, spoiler alert, a happy ending. “Satine isn’t resurrected, she doesn’t live!”
Martin says. “But what’s fabulous is that it allows you to see the whole show in a completely different way. And it’s lovely to see young people reinterpreting the work.”
Tayeh joined the creative team of Moulin Rouge: The Musical in 2017. Working on a Broadway musical was a pivotal career ambition, after spending seven years as one of the most beloved guest choreographers on So You Think You Can Dance. But the play was the thing for Tayeh. She moved to New York to try and crack Broadway, collaborating on a few shows that didn’t quite make it to the Great White Way. Then she heard from her friend Alex Timbers, the director of Moulin Rouge: The Musical, that he was adapting the film for the stage. “I thought: finally,” Tayeh recalls. “The dance that I want to see on Broadway – this is the show that made the most sense to me,” she adds. “The bigness of the dance. The way that dance is celebrated.” She knew she had to be a part of it.
Dance is at the heart of the original film. Under Luhrmann’s watchful and operatic gaze, characters move through each scene in a whirl of ruffled skirts and frenzied quick cuts. Tayeh ups the ante in the Broadway production: the opening number is a heart rate-elevating 13 minutes long, with 36 gravity-defying high kicks from each individual cancan dancer. It’s athletic and sexy and a little bit messy, the energy of the Moulin Rouge distilled into one high-octane prologue. Then there’s the crucial tango in act two, set to a slicked
“[Moulin Rouge] is very lifeaffirming. It absolutely takes the DNA of the original and expands on it, with some new stuff and some surprises”
“The idea that everyone that has a heartbeat is welcome in the bohemian life – there’s nothing more exciting than to walk into a space and tell an audience that”
back Roxanne by The Police, in which dancers slide and twist, together and apart, without a single word of dialogue for four solid minutes. “Dance can hold the narrative on its own,” Tayeh stresses. “The body can tell so many vivid stories, so to watch that dance break in Roxanne … is monumental. It makes my heart sing, because that is my belief system.”
Moulin Rouge: The Musical is a phenomenal undertaking for every dancer on stage, which means it’s an even greater one for the choreographer. Tayeh spent months working on each routine. “I work in excess, I create a lot of ideas,” she admits. “I film them, I watch them incessantly, and then I pull the sections that feel like they have a pulse, and then I build off that pulse.” Some four years later, Tayeh’s steps are being tackled by the 34 Australian cast members. At the time of this interview, Tayeh is in the middle of rehearsals with them – which, given the Covid lockdowns in Sydney, are taking place safely masked up. Each day is a “full bodied experience”, she shares. “You turn on the engine and it just goes. It’s a full day of work that doesn’t stop. It’s highly physical. It’s highly challenging.” By the end of rehearsals “everybody is absolutely exhausted, but every inch of your body has been alive,” she reflects. “Beautifully exhausted like there’s nothing left.”
The show itself is like that too. “It’s hot-blooded, hyper-dynamic, outrageous yet subtle and beautifully diverse, where all are welcome,” Tayeh muses. “That’s a really, really big one for me. The idea that everyone that has a heartbeat is welcome in the bohemian life – there’s nothing more exciting than to walk into a space and tell an audience that … It’s a really big statement. Because as a queer Arab American woman, I haven’t always felt welcome.”
Tayeh has always danced, but she was 17 when she first tried to take professional lessons. Studio after studio knocked her back in favour of others who had been enrolled since they were children. “We don’t know what to do with you,” was a refrain she heard a lot in those days. “That would rock me, because I knew what to do with me,” Tayeh recalls. “I just needed people around me to believe in me.” So she consulted books about dance, kept moving her body every weekend across sticky nightclub floors and enrolled in a respected dance program at university. In 2008, she joined So You Think You Can Dance and quickly proved one of the show’s most popular guest choreographers. From there, she went on to work with Madonna, Miley Cyrus and Florence Welch on routines for tours and live events. Then came Broadway. She spent years trying to break on to centre stage, making her way from off-Broadway to the main event. Next, she hopes to conquer the world of film.
Tayeh has one message for those who told her that, at 17, she was beginning her dance journey too late. “There shouldn’t be an age limit, or preferred starting place for a dream, or for something that you feel in your gut that you were meant to do,” she stresses. Her hope is that more female choreographers get to work on a production as big as Moulin Rouge: The Musical, and for them to be a valued member of the creative team when they do.
“It is a quest in my life to not have to constantly lift my voice a little louder in a meeting to make my voice heard,” Tayeh says, something she has had to do at various points throughout her career and which, she adds, is exhausting. “Every human with a brain has the capacity to create. Every human with a pulse has the right to create.”
Tayeh is passionate about her work on Moulin Rouge: The Musical; she has been living and breathing it for the past four years. So much so that she flew halfway around the world in the middle of a global pandemic, quarantining in a hotel for two weeks and overseeing the first block of workshops via live streams, all to play a part in a production that speaks to the broader purpose of everything Tayeh does. When the lockdown in Sydney threatened the rehearsal process, Tayeh had flashbacks to the Covid-mandated Broadway blackout, which began in March 2020 and will only ease, allowing theatres to return to full capacity, in September. The past year has been an “unnerving reality”, she says. “[People] questioning that art isn’t an essential job; that artists aren’t essential workers. It’s frustrating,” Tayeh reflects. “We are part of keeping art alive, and keeping these cities that thrive on art alive … but we just push forth because it’s employing so many people. It’s keeping people working. It’s keeping people inspired.” Moulin Rouge: The Musical is due to premiere at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre on September 4. Go to moulinrougemusical.com/australia.