neonrendezvous:

Imagine Prince motionless. In death we’re forced to, but in life it was impossible.

That is because he danced, always. Included in his multitude of personas, Prince was a patron of dance, a choreographer, and, as a young man, trained in classical ballet.

Prince’s formal training began at Minnesota Dance Theatre when he was in high school and part of the Urban Arts Program. It was there that he connected with MDT founder Loyce Houlton. “My mother was very, very good at seeing talent and promoting it,” recalls Houlton’s daughter, Lise. Loyce Houlton, who studied with modern dance icon Martha Graham and the father of American ballet, George Balanchine, died in 1995, but she was a friend and mentor from the day they met. Prince even flew Houlton and her husband to Los Angeles for the world premiere of Purple Rain in 1984.

Caroline Palmer, a freelance dance critic who writes for the Star Tribune, says you could see Prince’s ballet training if you knew to watch for it. “If you look at some of his moves you certainly see a little ballet here and there,” says Palmer, who wrote about Prince for City Pages during the 1990s. “Some of his jumps are ballet moves that he adjusted. A particular jump he did sometimes where he fluttered his feet— that’s out of ballet,” Palmer says. “For so many dancers, they may start in one dance form and morph into whatever their art requires. You see that in Prince—ballet in the core, and then he added.”

He added jazz dance, for one thing. Longtime Twin Cities choreographer and director John Command worked with Prince leading up to the filming of Purple Rain. Prince, members of his band, and other actors in the movie took classes with Command for the better part of a year. Command would wait for several hours a day, three days a week, in his dance studio for whomever in Prince’s crew might appear. Sometimes it was Prince, other times Morris Day, The Revolution, or Apollonia Kotero.

“It was all with the movie in mind,” says Command, who now lives in Edina. “Camera technique is different than ballet or jazz, but we would do Broadway stuff, Bob Fosse, Jerry Robbins who did West Side Story. A lot of that is very difficult stuff and he loved it. He was never a great dancer—he wasn’t the one you’d say would go on to be a principal dancer—but the fact that he could do it at all as well as being a musical genius, it was unbelievable.” As Command recalls, Prince showed up to those 1980s jazz dance classes knowing Fosse in and out. (Any Prince fan should take a moment to look up Fosse’s “The Rich Man’s Frug” on YouTube; in it you see so much Prince.) He didn’t stay with Fosse, though; by the time Sign ’O’ the Timeswas released in 1987, Prince had morphed, as many dancers do, from dancer to choreographer.

This was when he craved originality above all. Dancer and now choreographer Cat Glover recalls meeting Prince in 1986 when she was an award-winning freestyle dancer appearing at Chicago clubs and a recent Star Search winner. They later went to a private club and Prince asked her to dance. “I knew that we were compatible from the first time we danced together. It was maybe three songs and I mimicked everything he did, and he was like, Whoa. He whispered something to his manager [and] Prince winked at me. He had big, beautiful eyes, like a deer. He said, ‘You’re going to be in our band.’ That was pretty much it.”

Glover, who lives in Los Angeles, was key to Prince’s dance throughout the Sign ’O’ the Times years. Glover says Prince fed on her street style and was attracted to her originality. “Prince liked dancers who danced different,” she says. “He didn’t like dancers who did the same thing.” Catch a concert from the Housequake era and you’ll see Prince executing half a dozen breakdancing moves, like the one where he’s stomach-up on all fours, kicking and zipping across the stage. In his originality-prizing years he was also carefully following the work of Moses Pendleton, a Connecticut avant-garde dance choreographer who incorporates acrobatics and surrealism. “There’s a scene in [the video for] ‘Lovesexy’ where Prince does this solo, it’s kind of a weird dance—that’s him giving thanks to Moses Pendleton,” says Glover. “There. Nobody knows that but you.”

Dance wasn’t just eye candy for the audience; it was critical to his evaluation and estimation of his own work. Prince would take his music to clubs to see if it would get people on the dance floors, Glover says. “He wasn’t just a musician. For one of his songs to get recorded it had to come with everything. If your feet aren’t tapping, if your feet aren’t bopping, it’s not good enough. If you can’t dance with music then it’s no good.”  

Needing to see his music danced to may have been why, when he opened the nightclub Glam Slam in 1989, he hired a dance troupe to animate it. Former Glam Slam dancer Colleen McClellan Ueland describes the Minneapolis nightclub, which Prince sold in 1994, as a place where dancers were given remarkable freedom. “Sometimes we did performances; sometimes we were go-go dancers,” says Ueland, who today operates a Pilates studio in south Minneapolis. Dancers were given a budget for sets, stages, musicians – the works. There was a professional make-up artist on hand, and costumes were freshly created each night, some out of Prince’s own costume shop, which was in the Glam Slam building. “We were given carte blanche to do whatever we wanted,” Ueland says. The troupe would commission music and put on stage-worthy performances, because Prince created the conditions to do that.

Prince’s support of dancers was by then national. Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet was on the verge of shutting down in the ’90s until Prince donated the rights to his music for a blockbuster called Billboards; it helped save the company.  

Excerpt from 

Prince: Always in Motion by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, 

Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, 2016