Retitled Event Honors Achievements in Choreography

With the fervor of a revival meeting, the fifth annual American Choreography Awards honored dance achievement in film and television on Sunday during a three-hour celebration at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Formerly named the Bob Fosse Awards--and before that, the L.A. Dance Awards--this evolving and expanding event was retitled this year to avoid confusion with other Fosse-related projects.

Co-produced by the L.A. Dance Foundation and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, the awards invite large peer panels of entertainment industry dance professionals to nominate and select winners in five categories. But the name remains a problem, since the awards focus on industry media and don’t give recognition to American concert dance, Broadway shows, Las Vegas revues or touring rock extravaganzas--but do encompass creativity from outside the U.S. Indeed, in a tie vote, the 1998 motion picture award went to British and Argentine artists: Yorkshire’s Suzanne Grand for “The Full Monty” and Buenos Aires’ Pablo Veron and colleagues for “The Tango Lesson.”

After smiling through the first of the evening’s 10 standing ovations, host Shirley MacLaine made a sly joke of the name game. “I was speaking to [the late] Bob Fosse on my way over here,” she said. “He doesn’t understand why you changed the name.” She also shared her belief that “God is a choreographer,” a conclusion appropriate for an event in which many of the honorees and celebrity presenters generated levels of enthusiasm approaching acts of worship.

Nobody received more of a love-blitz than those dance veterans announced in advance as receiving three special, noncompetitive honors. These went to Stanley Holden, Southland ballet teacher and former Royal Ballet character-dance specialist (educator award); Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, co-choreographers for such films as “The Sound of Music” and “Mary Poppins” (career achievement award); Cholly Atkins, tap dancer, Motown dance master and inventor of “vocal choreography” for singing groups (innovator award).

Marguerite Derricks and Kenny Ortega won two of the television awards by parodying show business pizazz and placing series stars in unlikely musical comedy numbers. Both Derricks’ promotional spot for the NBC sitcom “Jenny” (commercial award) and Ortega’s staging of “Luck Be a Lady” for the “Brain Salad Surgery” episode of “Chicago Hope” (television episodic award) emphasized the fantasy of ordinary people suddenly dancing and exploited an endearing klutziness. That quality also colored other entries in several categories. If the 1988 American Choreography Awards reflects a trend, this may be it: that drop-dead virtuosity won’t get you nearly as far in media dance these days as staying cute or cuddly as you muddle through.

Like all the music-video competitors, the winning Travis Payne choreography for “Jump Jive ‘n Wail” (with the Brian Setzer Orchestra) depended more on second-by-second film editing choices than dance imagination. Payne may be a genius, but who could tell from this pileup of discontinuous motion-fragments? At the other extreme, Keith Young’s winning choreography (television variety or special) for “Christopher Reeve: A Celebration of Hope” was left unmolested by the directing and editing honchos, making its effect through the sustained, lyric interaction of a performer in a wheelchair and two conventional dancers.

The event also included entertainment segments: a “West Side Story” suite staged by Alan Johnson in tribute to the late Jerome Robbins, a Stanley Holden classical pas de deux danced by Victoria Koenig and Lawrence Blake, a Debra Brown trampoline solo performed by Alisoun Payne, and a hip-hop ensemble choreographed by Fatima, Swoop and Ed Moore. Shanda Sawyer directed the program and also supplied witty film sequences introducing the award categories.