The Michael Jackson School of Dance

In a large sunlit dance studio on 3rd Street in Los Angeles, a small wiry blond woman in black Lurex strides back and forth like a lion tamer in the ring. Choreographer Marguerite Derricks is putting three young men through the paces of an athletic music video rehearsal.

The current fashion in male dancers is masculine, “street,” a little raggedy and wild. The preferred studio dress code is high-top sneakers, baggy trousers held up with suspenders usually worn over a bare chest, British skinhead-type work boots and baseball caps worn backward, Dead-End Kid style.

And the dancing in this studio: Not since ballet’s Russian invasion or since Jerome Robbins choreographed “West Side Story” have there been such masculine moves. Driven by Derricks’ relentless counting, the guys prowl like flamenco dancers, spin into triple pirouettes and hurl themselves into Bolshoi-style split leaps. The atmosphere is electric and humid, the funky Brenda Russell track pounds and everybody is cracking discreet smiles when the guys finish and collapse exhausted against the walls.

It’s only an average day in the choreographing of a music video.

While modern dance--once supposed to be the center of dance-world excitement--languishes in a kind of Sargasso Sea of cerebrality, in this often-ignored corner of the dance world pyrotechnicality and heart flourish. The gusto of these young dancers and choreographers recalls the golden days of Broadway and early Hollywood movie musicals. Though music-video choreographers are often severely limited by video conventions (the fast-cut format, for example), their choreography and dancing has an excitement and energy missing from today’s minimalistic modern-dance concert stage.

Still, dance critics and respected artistic directors have a tendency to sneer at music video choreography, calling it repetitive, unimaginative and “commercial.” Commercial is a discreet way of saying they think it unsophisticated--and maybe even enjoyable, a highly suspicious thing to be these days. Faculty member David Hochoy of the American Dance Festival, the 56-year-old institution and arbiter of modern dance trends, called MTV “the worst thing that’s happened to dance.”

“Back in New York, the choreographers who work with N.Y.C. Ballet or Alvin Ailey, I’m sure they wouldn’t see us in the same league,” says Derricks.

But others, like agent Julie McDonald, call the music video industry today’s equivalent of the bustling movie musical industry of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, which provided memorable dancing (as in “On the Town” with Gene Kelly or “Kiss Me Kate,” with choreography by Hermes Pan) and which gave artists such as Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon and Robbins a place to develop their craft.

Music videos, says McDonald, director of the dance division at the Joseph Heldfond and Rix Inc. agency, are a showcase for choreographic and performing talent, a place where kids can hone their skills and, perhaps most importantly, a place where they can make some money. No wonder the migration to Los Angeles and New York these days is as much to get work choreographing and dancing in videos as it is to find a place in a Broadway show or a concert dance company. And with music video as a showcase, they may end up dancing in or choreographing movies, television, commercials and stage shows. For example, the 29-year-old Derricks, a former cast dancer in the TV series “Fame,” is looking ahead to choreographing a musical and a film.

Music video choreographers--fueled by the time and ambition financial security brings--may even channel some of their talent back into the artistically purer form: concert dance. Using many of the local dancers they work with in videos, Derricks and colleague Keith Young are planning an evening-long concert in Los Angeles in October as a benefit to raise money for AIDS care and research. (Derricks did an AIDS benefit about three years ago titled “Life Leap,” using 85 dancers and 10 choreographers.)

Because of the rise of music video cable channels and the increasing importance of visuals in the selling of pop music, music video dancers/choreographers are increasingly influential in the pop-music business. We’re seeing a new wave: Paula Abdul or Madonna (who was a dance major at the University of Michigan), or artists who start out as dancers, who dance as well (or better) than they sing and who can choreograph their own shows.

“I can’t tell you,” McDonald says, “how many calls I’ve been getting saying, ‘Can you get me a dancer who can sing?’ ” Everybody, it seems, wants another Abdul or New Kids on the Block or M.C. Hammer or, of course, another Madonna. The voice can always be augmented in the studio, but not so much the moves--there’s a limit to what one can do with the use of stand-ins and tricky editing.

“If you can’t dance, forget it.” says Derricks. “Music is so visual now.” “You should see some of the people I’m working with now, people you’d never imagine calling (in) a choreographer--like heavy metal groups.”

Derricks is choreographing for Brenda Russell and Tyler Collins, and has worked with Pebbles, Tone Loc, Taylor Dayne, Debbie Harry and Barry White. A few other choreographers from this invisible but powerful army are Keith Young, Anthony Thomas and Barry Lather. All have very different backgrounds and--despite the accusations of homogeneity and repetitiveness in video dance--very different choreographic styles. Music-video choreographers are often thought of as “upstarts” or people who don’t have the background to work in “real dance”--concert dance. Young, 37, bucks this stereotype.

In 1974, Young received his master’s degree in art education and was doing a little construction work to make ends meet. One site where he worked turned out to be an incipient dance studio and the prospective teacher, a disciple of Merce Cunningham; Young was offered classes in Cunningham technique in exchange for the carpentry jobs. Having caught the dance bug, Young moved to New York where he studied on scholarship at the Cunningham studio and from there was recruited by Twyla Tharp. During his six-year stint dancing with the Tharp company--”blissful,” Young calls it--he discovered the pleasures of choreographing for film (the Tharp company was filmed frequently) and eventually left the company to become a free-lance choreographer.

Since his first video job, “Basketball” for Kurtis Blow, Young has choreographed videos for, among others, Phil Collins, the Jacksons, Babyface, Natalie Cole, Tears for Fears and Talking Heads.

Videos, he says, are like three-minute movies; they’re a “way to marry the lucrative side of commercials and the integrity of art” and he loves their reach. “More people,” he says, “will see a video than Merce Cunningham or anybody else from ‘the pantheon.’ ” Still, treading between what he calls the two camps, the artistic and the commercial, is not always easy.

Working in the commercial world, Young says, “enables the mass audience to see, to either like or dislike. Being an artist is great, but if you’re off in some little tunnel somewhere reading your palms . . .,” he says, thinking of some of the odd locations modern dance/performance art has been staged in New York, and some of the mundane, everyday activities that performers now expect audiences to watch rapturously.

On the other hand, “oftentimes all (some people in the commercial camp) see is the dough or how can I make more for doing less,” he laments.

“TV likes tricks, they like the kick, they like the smile,” he says with some weariness. “I just insist on expressing something about human nature,” he says. “It’s often much softer, less percussive.”

Even those who only glance at MTV probably know the work of Thomas, the choreographer of most of Janet Jackson’s videos, including “Rhythm Nation,” for which he has been nominated for a 1990 MTV Best Choreography award. (The MTV awards show will be shown on the cable channel live from the Universal Amphitheatre Sept. 6.)

Thomas’ style is precise, intricate, robotic, even militaristic, with echoes of break-dancing and the ‘70s dance club moves like “the robot” and “the Moon Walk.”

Thomas, 25, started dancing at 8 in Oxnard, largely by imitating what he saw on the afternoon TV show “Soul Train.” When he saw the Lockers, a famous television and club act of the time, he said, “I’m going to learn to do that and I’m going to dance on TV just like them.”

At 16, he began commuting to L.A., started hanging out in clubs to be with other dance people and going to auditions. He joined a troupe called the LA City Rockers, and began getting work dancing (including the role of the Tin Man in a local production of the musical “The Wiz”). His new visibility led him to Janet Jackson. Though he had never choreographed a video, he was asked to collaborate with Paula Abdul on Jackson’s video “Control.” Apparently, they clicked. Thomas has choreographed for and with Jackson since, and is a lead dancer in her touring stage show.

Thomas says he gets his moves from everywhere, that he just “retains a lot of information, going to clubs, hanging out with the kids.” But his major influences, he says, “have been James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince. Their rawness intrigues me.”

Another key figure in music video choreography is Lather. Though he has collaborated with performers ranging from Tom Jones to Sting, Debbie Gibson to Gregory Hines, like so many music video choreographers, a larger public first saw his face when he accepted a best choreography award for Janet Jackson’s video “The Pleasure Principle” on the MTV Music Video Award show of 1988. They may see it more frequently now, with the recent debut of the video “Love in the 3rd Degree,” promoting his first record album, “Turn Me Loose,” on Atlantic.

Lather is a prime example of the “give-me-dancers-who-sing” phenomenon. Only 23, Lather grew up in Atlanta where his father sold dance supplies and his mother was a free-lance dance teacher. Lather studied ballet as a child for six years, hated it and eventually started teaching jazz dance classes in his small town and in neighboring towns.

“As a kid I was locking and doing the robot and street dancing and all that. . . . I was the kid who was doing dancing and sports, dancing and sports.” After a while, the dancing took over. “I was teaching when I was 15-, 16-years- old, and then all that break-dancing stuff came out which was right up my alley because my style is really kind of street.”

Still, the years of ballet training show in his effortless control, in the ferocity with which he can pitch his long, gangly body into multiple turns and Nureyev-like jumps.

One sees some of Lather’s most exciting work in the Sting video “We’ll Be Together,” directed by Mary Lambert, for which he won Billboard magazine’s Best Choreographer award in 1988. Lambert wanted something “bizarre,” and Lather used six dancers, some chairs and a lot of off-center, tipped, drunken-looking movement to create a Magritte-ish surreal look.

“We’ll be Together” displays some of the purest dance in videos; it contains some of the longest unedited stretches of dance in any video, shot “full body” or “proscenium”--the best way to film dance. That the video ended up with so much unedited dance is a credit to Lather’s talent--it takes a good choreographer to make a director cede the forum to another artist.

Young, Derricks, Thomas and Lather say that directors usually give them fairly loose instructions for their choreographic work--”I want to see Janet dance by herself for four minutes,” Lather was told when he choreographed Janet Jackson’s “Pleasure Principle” video. “They might ask for a certain mood but that’s as specific as they get,” says Derricks.

All of the choreographers, however, had complaints about what happens to their choreography when the video is shot and edited.

“Once I do my job, it’s in their court. Most directors don’t have a clue about dancing. In a way why should they? Directing is their thing; dancing is my thing,” says Young.

Still, this “not having a clue” can lead to some hacked-up movement.

“We work for hours and hours on what we’re going to do and then it gets cut out,” says Derricks. “I think a lot of directors are afraid to compete with (long) stretches of dance. They just want to show off their artistic lighting or their special effects or the way they cut; maybe they don’t want to give the credit to the dance.”

Lather agrees: “It’s the choreographer’s nightmare, how the choreography is going to be edited. They can shoot it brilliantly, but if you see on the set that everything’s looking great, and you’re happy, then you start worrying, ‘God, I hope they don’t chop it up.’

“You rehearse for like three days or a week at times, all for that one thing,” says Lather, “and then it gets nailed in the editing. I know certain people feel it needs to be movin’, it needs to be real busy. You need to see a hand, and a head and then some hair and a foot, but you watch that and you say, ‘What am I seeing?’ ”

It’s the eternal dilemma: being broke but an artist or accepting the bucks and the inevitable loss of control. Young, for one, seems to have made a certain amount of peace with the conflict.

“After awhile I understood that to be an artist, you didn’t have to be a real Bohemian, struggling and crawling, unwilling to reach the masses,” he says. “It’s possible to marry the two worlds, the commercial and the artistic.

“I try,” he says, “to bring the integrity of the stage.”

Recently, Young was working in a stark Hollywood studio with the three-woman pop group En Vogue, trying to create some synchronized movement for the singers to perform while they lip-synced their number “Don’t Go.” The singers could move, but they weren’t trained dancers.

“Look,” Young says, “this gesture here,” demonstrating the way he wanted the arms to slowly slide up the body and end reaching towards the audience.

“It’s a pleading situation. When you’re pleading you’re not angular. The neck is exposed; your back is supple; it’s mostly in the shoulders; the arms are merely incidental.”

“Come on,” he insists, “let us see the music in your body.”