Something happening underfoot

As much as every dancer strives to push the art form -- leaping higher, pirouetting faster and tossing off ever more buttery-soft landings -- there is one constant in dancers’ lives besides the pull of gravity: the floor.

Dancers have spent centuries performing on mostly wooden floors, floors affected by the vicissitudes of temperature, time and use, floors that warp, splinter and have no mercy, whether the steps executed on them are ballet, tap, flamenco or modern dance.

Probably every dancer has some painful memory of a difficult surface beneath his or her feet. Retired L.A. ballet teacher Stanley Holden, now 77, spent 25 years as a member of England’s Royal Ballet, beginning in 1944, and recalls: “At Covent Garden, they just put wood on top of cement. The floors were hard, no question about it. There was no resiliency, and it was like dancing in the kitchen. But that was the way it was, and we didn’t think about it.”

Former Joffrey dancer Josie Walsh, artistic director of the locally based Myo Dance Company, remembers performing in Switzerland on the uber-raked stage of the Zurich Opera House: “I kept thinking I would fall off. I was leaning like crazy and was sore and out of whack after six performances. But you adapt to anything to make it work.”

No doubt raked stages will forever remain a bugaboo for itinerant dancers. But in other respects, dance floors these days are on a technological roll, one in evidence at two new Los Angeles facilities. As Holden summarizes it: “Floors are sprung. And it’s wonderful.”

As essential to contemporary dancers as glamour is to Hollywood, the sprung floor is a kind of “floating” subfloor created by attaching synthetic material -- neoprene pads, for example -- to a bottom layer such as plywood. To complete this “sandwich,” a top floor is laid over the padding.

An ideal sprung floor combines two elements: area elasticity, provided by the “give” over the whole section where a performer lands, and point elasticity, or the compression at the actual place of contact. These elements are crucial. The area elasticity needs to be reasonably limited to the vicinity of the performer, to avoid disturbance to other dancers, and there can’t be excessive rebound, also known as the “trampoline effect.”

Stages of invention

The sprung floor is but the latest stage in a lengthy evolution. To chart it, you need to go back at least to the latter half of the 19th century and the spread of linoleum, a surface the ballet community embraced. According to Bob Dagger, president of the New Jersey-based American Harlequin Corp., one of the world’s largest dance floor manufacturers, people turned to the new product for a number of reasons.

“It was predictable, it didn’t get splinters, and you could roll it away,” says Dagger. “But the downside was that it cracked easily in the cold and you couldn’t use it more than 20 or 30 times without it breaking up. In the late ‘40s and ‘50s, vinyl came in -- PVC -- and people began dancing on it.”

The next turning point came in 1973, when Marley Floors, an English company that produced vinyl flooring, was asked to make a double-sided product. It complied, and that kind of floor quickly became so popular in Europe and the U.S. that it was generically referred to as “Marley.” Much as Kleenex became a synonym for paper tissue, the term eventually became standard for all stage floors. When the Marley company stopped making commercial flooring a few years later, Dagger, the firm’s export sales manager, decided to strike out on his own.

“We set up business in 1979,” he says, “and I thought there would only be a demand for double-sided floors. But in the early ‘80s, people wanted more, such as special hard surfaces for tap dancing, faux wood floors and padded floors that were tough and could have heavy scenery wheeled over them.”

The late Rudolf Nureyev was among the people with requests. He wanted a softer yet “danceable” floor in place of the hard stage at the Opera Garnier in Paris. “Nureyev was artistic director of Paris Opera Ballet and didn’t like the double-sided floor,” Dagger says. “He was picky, and we knew by talking to him and his technical staff that he wanted a slip-resistant floor with padding. So we developed a floor that provides extra cushioning with mineral-fiber reinforcement.”

Harlequin began with just two kinds of floors, Dagger says, but now produces eight models. Varying according to thickness and the type of padding material and top surface they feature, as well their methods of installation, these floors can be portable as well as permanent. But it’s their ability to absorb and dissipate force and/or safely return it (with what’s known as “resilient energy”) that is paramount. If a floor can’t do that, a dancer’s body becomes a shock absorber, and the results are fatigue, pain and injury.

Contemporary solutions

For the latest in state-of-the-art flooring, architects at UCLA’s newly refurbished dance building, Glorya Kaufman Hall, spared no expense in bringing the former women’s gym, built in 1932, into the 21st century. The Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell executed the renovation of the 80,000-square-foot building, which is being used by students and faculty but won’t open for performances until the fall.

Chief architect Buzz Yudell says extensive research went into the flooring decisions because of the diversity of dance forms the building needed to accommodate. “We looked at systems throughout the country, including Lincoln Center’s State Theater, which is home to New York City Ballet, and at Juilliard,” he says. “We had an acoustician and structural engineers involved, and it became this complex intersection of art, craft, technology and science.”

Yudell explains that the basic system these consultations resulted in was a four-tier basket weave. “It was expensive, but to use less expensive systems like rubber pads, plywood and Marley wouldn’t have nearly the performance benefits and the resiliency.

“Like a violin, a subfloor gets better with time and can last 100 years.”

Basket weave is, in fact, a misnomer, because no weaving is involved. Instead, this means of support consists of multiple layers of flexible wood battens, laid in rows on top of and perpendicular to one another (Yudell says a four-layer grid of 1-by-3 pine slats was used). The resulting spring comes from the natural flexing and recovery of the layers of battens, which is enhanced by shock-absorbent pads. The benefit? There’s no one point where the foot doesn’t get some cushioning. But although the extra layers improve the spring, they also increase the floor’s thickness.

Kaufman Hall’s three main theaters were laid with flooring that measured from 4 to 5 inches thick and was then finished with 7/8 inch of maple to which a polyurethane finish was applied.

Slipperiness, or the coefficient of friction, was also a factor in the designers’ decisions, as different dance genres dictate different surface needs. While many ballet dancers prefer Marley because of its nonslip surface (two studios in Kaufman are equipped with semipermanent Marley), those dancing on wood generally need to use rosin on their shoes, as sweat changes the wood’s surface texture. Barefoot idioms such as modern and world dance, meanwhile, require smooth but giving surfaces so the floor doesn’t cause injury to the bottoms of feet, such as friction burns.

At about $25 per square foot, the 15,800 square feet of dance space in Kaufman Hall cost roughly $400,000, with the entire renovation priced at $35 million. Yudell says the planners started with full-scale mock-ups made with the actual materials, so that dancers and choreographers could test the floors before they were laid to allow for adjustments he likened to “tuning.”

David Rousseve, chair of UCLA’s department of world arts and cultures, is pleased with the results. “Having lived through injuries from bad floors, we were picky about the spring,” he says. “But if it’s too sprung, you go flying into the air. We also wanted the floors to be durable, and after a lot of testing, we came up with sprung floors that feel so good, some days I’ll just go in and jump.”

Also enjoying new floors is Lula Washington Dance Theatre, which recently moved into a $1.3-million building in the Crenshaw district. According to Executive Director Erwin Washington, the company installed permanent sprung floors in three studios (about 4,200 square feet), though it opted against basket weave, which was deemed too thick. For top surfaces, the choice was bamboo, which Washington characterizes as “a highly polished, pretty, light-colored wood that is very strong but pliable.”

The company also rents out a portable Marley floor, as does David Plettner, president of Southern California’s Loretta Livingston & Dancers. Says Plettner: “Often stage floors are beat up with splinters or nails. We provide a service to dance companies that can’t buy their floors, and the Marley works well for toe shoes, other dance shoes and bare feet. It’s pretty sophisticated stuff.”

For some dancers, performing on the perfect floor requires extra effort. Consider tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, the youngest performer to have danced the lead on Broadway in Savion Glover’s “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk.”

“Being a tapper, you have to dance on a variety of surfaces -- concrete, carpet, wood and tile -- so I sometimes bring my own,” he says. “The best is oak or maple, because it lasts the longest and has a great sound. But you have to get a hand truck and a friend to help carry it.”

As for floors of the future, Dagger says he continually listens to dancers and adjusts his products accordingly. “The key issue is health and safety,” he notes. “Dance companies know what they want rather than what we inflict on them, but the future still looks to be basket-weave and sprung floors.”

Even as dancers seek to defy gravity, what goes up must still come down, so the lowly floor is likely to command ever more attention. As Yudell likes to say, “Here’s this beautiful surface -- with all this complexity and dialogue buried beneath it.”