Joe Landini Dance Deconstructs Freddie vs. Elvis for the SF International Arts Festival

By Michael Phelan

April 9, 2024—As well as showcasing foreign artists, the annual San Francisco International Arts Festival is an opportunity to see some of the smaller local dance companies that typically perform in less well-known venues. Often limited by shoe-string budgets, they don't get as much advertising exposure as the bigger dance companies. Yet, some have been persevering for decades, performing out of the popular limelight, and often unfamiliar to some Bay Area dance fans. But now's your chance to catch some of these local artists. This year, all eleven of the Festival's performing dance companies are from the USA. Of these, nine are contemporary dance companies, and eight are presenting world premieres.

To find out more about one of the new works in progress, I spoke with Joe Landini, director of Joe Landini Dance, which he founded more than 30 years ago. In 2007, he founded SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts (Saving Art From Extinction), a non-profit cooperative, community art space that hosts residencies, workshops, and performances. Today, SAFEHouse is located in a sketchy neighborhood in the Tenderloin, just around the corner from the Powell Street cable car turnaround, a popular tourist attraction. The small performance space has no stage; a raised platform is set up when performing for audiences, which are limited to 39 people.

Recently, Joe Landini generously took time from his rehearsals to speak with me about his company's contribution to the Festival, the world premiere of Freddie vs. Elvis, which juxtaposes dance works using the music of Elvis Presley and Freddie Mercury of the rock band Queen.

"A lot of my work is deconstruction," explains Landini. "The idea of deconstruction is taking something artistic, taking it apart, and deciding what parts are not useful to you. Not using the whole." For Freddie, Landini used some of Queen's music from YouTube that isolated Freddie's vocals from the rest of the music. "I was fascinated by his voice...and also the big gaps of silence where the music used to be. I thought that was very interesting architecturally, because if you think of the song as a building, these vocals are certain rooms, and the music is certain rooms. When you remove the music, then you have empty rooms."

Landini designed the choreography around both the singing and the silence. "We basically built a brand new house that doesn't really look like the original song. You'll recognize it, obviously, because his (Freddie Mercury's) voice is so distinctive. It was an interesting challenge to take something extremely well known, such as Bohemian Rhapsody."

Landini explains that these iconic songs spark emotional memories. "When you see the work performed, emotionally, the audience will have memories associated with the song, but you will see dancing that doesn't correspond to memories." Landini says, "A lot of my work is built around the idea of taking something that has emotional resonance and creating something new. It's a challenge for the viewer."

Landini chose to light the Freddie performance using flashlights and work lights that turn on and off. "There's a lot of darkness and a lot of extreme light," Landini explains. "Visually, it will be very challenging" to have this unusual visual experience while listening to Freddie Mercury's familiar voice.

With Elvis, Landini took a similar approach. He was fascinated by Elvis' Las Vegas years. "I love the costumes," he says. "I knew I wanted to do a similar deconstruction. We dressed the dancers in Vegas costumes, or things that reminded us of Vegas," that were bought online. Instead of using Elvis' actual songs, Landini has choreographed four ballets to the instrumental music of karaoke songs. Members of the audience will be invited onstage to sing the lyrics while the dancers perform. The singers, he says, "can sing anyway they choose to." Because the dancers are not dancing to lyrics, all four ballets are abstract. "The audience has a memory of what they think the song should look like," he says, "but when they see it on stage, it's not going to look anything like Elvis... We use elements, the seeds, of Elvis' iconic imagery." The audience will remember Elvis, but won't see him anywhere. "It's an experience for the audience to see something deconstructed. We took it apart. I threw Elvis out the window," he laughs, "and now something completely new exists."

How did he get the idea to use Elvis? "The Las Vegas imagery was in my head for five to ten years," explains Landini. "And then on YouTube, I heard Freddie Mercury. I always wanted to do Bohemian Rhapsody, but it's such a cliche song. What can you do to Bohemian Rhapsody that hasn't been done a million times, right?" When SFIAF Director Andrew Wood asked him to contribute to the Festival, Landini wanted to do "something big and that has spectacle to it." The idea of Las Vegas was naturally associated with Elvis. "I don't like Elvis' music. It's not really my generation. So, how can I use this music in a way that would be different from how other people have used it, similar to Smuin," he says, referring to Tupelo Tornado in Smuin's Dance Series 2 next month (see the BayDance.com interview). "She (choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa) probably had the same challenge. You can't just put an Elvis song on stage. It's been done a million times." So he hit on the idea of karaoke, which hasn't been done before.

Freddie and Elvis are from different generations. Freddie Mercury was a gay man with AIDS, and Landini knew his story. Elvis' experience in Las Vegas fascinated him, that he was "sort of chewed up and spit out by Las Vegas. Both men had super challenging third acts. Freddie was hiding his AIDS, and Elvis was hiding his drug addiction. They both died in their third acts." Landini remarked on how society consumes not only music but also celebrities. "We weren't very kind to either Freddie or Elvis, in the end, which I thought was an interesting parallel. In their third act of life, they were challenged by changing musical tastes and had to adapt." Landini thought it would be interesting to put them side by side.

How does Freddie vs. Elvis compare to Landini's previous work? "It's pretty similar. This idea of deconstructing and postmodernism, a lot of that came from studying art in the UK," where Landini got a Masters in choreography at the Laban Institute. In London, he was influenced by the deconstructionism of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s. Laban was about effort and shape—how the dancer moves through the environment—corridors, flat surfaces, floors, and the sky. Effort is fast, slow, medium, or staccato. Shapes are small, medium, or large. He uses this vocabulary when communicating with his dancers. When his group performed the Rites of Spring last year, they danced from room to room in the SAFEHouse studio, with the audience following. "It was a really fun project," he says, "but the Rites of Spring is an exhausting piece. And then we served dinner." At performances of Rites of Spring, the dancers serve dinner to the eighteen-member audience.

For the SF International Arts Festival, Freddie vs. Elvis will be performed at Dance Mission Theater. "Dance Mission will be very unusual for us to have that traditional proscenium," he points out. "It's nice to be in a nice big theater." The use of Dance Mission Theater was arranged by SFIAF Director Andrew Wood, who Landini says has been very generous. "We're very appreciative," he says.

Other contemporary dance companies performing in the SFIAF Festival include the Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement, Aura Fischbeck Dance, Cali & Co., Megan Nicely/dance with Shoshana Green and Kevin Corcoran, Ranko Ogura Dance, Rosemary Hannon & Miriam Wolodarski, and Sha Sha Higby with Keith Evans. The SF International Arts Festival runs from May 1st through 12th, with dance performances at various venues beginning on May 3rd. For more information, see sfiaf.org.