This month, Theatre Under The Stars (TUTS) presents Rent. The musical (based on the opera La Boheme) follows a group of struggling young artists in 1990s New York City. This show features Houston native Monica Josette as choreographer.
Monica Josette began dancing at an early age. “I started dancing when I was like, three,” she says. “I broke my leg when I was one. My mother was a dancer as well, and so when I turned three, my grandmother suggested that my mom put me in dance classes to help strengthen the leg. Not as like, ‘Oh, we want her to be a dancer so bad,’ but to help have a little more usage and really re-strengthen that, because I learned how to walk with a cast on.
Choreographer Monica Josette (Photo By Forward Times Staff Photographer, Medron White)
“I took lessons from Sallie Bowie Daniels, who actually taught Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad. She taught my grandmother; she taught my mom. She’s taught so many people, a few of us who were PVA [High School for the Performing and Visual Arts] alums as well. And it was the Bowie studio.” The Bowie School of Dance was located on Tierwester, in Houston’s 3rd Ward. “I started there when I was 3. I started tap dance and ballet, and she was one of the first African American women to attend Juilliard. So she’s a historical being, and maybe like a year ago I dedicated a film, a tap dance piece to her and her passing [in 2012], because she’s someone who – as I continue to dance through time – is always dancing with me,” Monica expressed.
“She was a huge influence on the start of my experience training as a dancer – and the discipline too, because she was super old-school,” she recalls. “Back in the day when you still got hit with a stick or a lighter under your leg; if your leg wasn’t high enough, you’d feel the heat, so you would raise the leg,” she laughs.
She continued to dance as she entered high school, leading to her entry into High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, known as PVA. “I played several instruments, and I also was an actress as well, because I went to the Ensemble Theatre, too. When I auditioned for PVA I auditioned in theatre, as well as in dance, and also in instrumental music, as a flautist. I actually got in as all three, and I had to choose, so I chose dance,” she says. “I chose dance because I felt like that was the medium that allowed me to express most freely and naturally. I also felt like a natural actor, but I still felt like I wanted to have the codified training in dance as well so that’s where I went.”
She was involved in other dance productions and programs even while studying arts and academics at HSPVA. Was it difficult to balance? Monica admits, “It was. But it also meant that I learned discipline and time management really, really early on. So by the time I got to college, figuring out how to manage schedules and do lots of things at one time was easy for me because I had already been doing that for a long time.”
She continued to pursue dance in college. “I got a BFA, a bachelor in fine arts and dance pedagogy, from the University of Oklahoma,” she says. “I decided to go with pedagogy because I was still able to do all of the performance but I was also able to study pedagogy in a way that put me in alignment with being able to teach and transfer movement to people and to be able to – if I wanted to, at any point – teach on a university level,” she says. “At the time I wasn’t sure that I was aiming to do it; it was just kind of like a safety net. Like, ‘This would be great to have this. And so I should do this, because I’m going to get to perform anyway. So why not also have the pedagogy experience as well?’”
A variety of teachers and genres gave her a wealth of experience to draw on. In addition to Bowie and the PVA dance instructors, “I also had Priscilla Nathan Murphy, from Houston Ballet, who was so fantastic – I believe she’s still there. I was a student of Houston Ballet Academy for a little while, as well.” These experiences enhanced and broadened the skills she learned at HSPVA, making for a rich, eclectic learning experience.
“My experience was very varied. I also come from a lot of cultural dance experience. So, because I am an actress, because I am a dancer that has technically been trained in ballet as well as a lot of the codified modern dance techniques,” she says, “with all of my experience in the cultural and ethnic dances and just in the world, period – in tap dance, musical theatre – my perspective and my gaze on movement is very worldly. I have a lot of information to access to bring to the table, depending on what I’m doing. I have also been a part of the pop world for several years as Santigold’s choreographer as well as dancer.” (Santigold is a Philadelphia-born singer-songwriter whose album Master of My Make-Believe hit No. 1 on the dance chart in 2012. She and Josette have worked together for over a decade.)
The cast of TUTS’ Rent
Monica also mentioned how her vast experience also led her to success in TV and film. “[Working with Santigold] and traveling to over 40 countries and being on tour with different artists, it’s brought even more perspective to the table in terms of movement, how the body moves. I also worked in TV/film. So being able to bring all of that information into that space, I think it’s really valuable for me as well as for the people that I’m working with because I’m not a one-note [performer]. There’s a lot of information over the last 20 something years as a professional to be accessed.”
Indeed. In Atlanta, she wrote and directed a cabaret musical called The Lipstick Junkies featuring Black Caviar and The Ray of Sunshine during 2013-14. That turned into an appearance on the Bravo TV show The New Atlanta. Josette appeared as “Sugar Cane.”
In L.A., she worked as an assistant director and did production work on several short films. But she left the genre “just because it was more clinical; I wanted to move back into artistic,” she says. Josette moved back to Houston after the birth of her son Micah (now 5) and taught dance classes, along with theatre production jobs. She worked on Dreamgirls last January & February for HSPVA. Last fall she worked with the assistant director for The Secret of My Success at TUTS.
Then she was approached about choreographing Rent. “I was super-excited about it,” she says. “I remember being at PVA, and at my high school graduation, the vocal department’s song for graduation was “Seasons of Love,” she recalls. “So it’s a full-circle moment.”
The cast of Theatre Under The Stars’ production of Rent during their first week of rehearsals. (Photo by Ruben Vela)
In more ways than one: two decades ago, her first professional show, Singin’ in the Rain, was at Theatre Under the Stars. Now she’s returning to TUTS as a choreographer — “which is another full circle moment,” she muses. “It actually feels pretty surreal,” she says, “When I got that show 20 years ago, I never considered or even thought that 20 years later, I’d be sitting at the creative table implementing and bringing Monica Josette to any show here. So it definitely feels surreal. But it’s also pretty satisfying.”
Josette says the process included several interviews with the director, “trying to understand his vision, understand how he works. Him understanding how I work and what I bring to the table, what makes my gaze unique or different from others and how we might be able to work together, because we didn’t know each other.” But the collaboration worked.
“I think Ty [Defoe] has really great ideas,” she said. “I also love the way he works; he’s very collaborative and he allows my perspective, input and gaze to be part of his process, and I really appreciate that in him as a director,” Josette expressed.
Though she was familiar with the musical, Josette had never worked on a production of Rent. “Being able to look at the text again and to really understand this story, and to be able to enhance the story with movement has been amazing. I’m really grateful to the director, Ty Defoe, and to TUTS for allowing that expression to be something that could be realized this time, with this production of Rent. I think it’s a different Rent than the Rent that we’ve seen before, but I’m really excited about it. I think that the movement, some of the vocabulary that I’ve included really speaks to the ‘90s,” she says. “I think when
people see this one, the first thing they will see that is obviously different is the set. That’s the first thing that’s going to be like an obvious shift. And I also think it’s going to be obvious, the way we’ve incorporated movement,” she adds. “You might even see people doing the butterfly,” she laughs.
Josette, whose older sister is part of the LGBTQ community, worked to incorporate dance forms like vogue and ballroom without appropriating them. “I have been very intentional in my research and the dramaturgy in terms of how people moved during that time,” she says. “There are all these moments to incorporate too, like house and ballroom and voguing. I had to do a lot of research, because I did not want to have a moment where I was imitating something that I was seeing or assimilating. I wanted to make sure that it was coming from an honest place and that the actors who were involved also had input in terms of what I was doing.”
Josette continued speaking about the importance of her intentionality and research: “I mentioned before in hip-hop culture how it was assimilated so much and appropriated. And you know that when you see it and it’s not coming from an authentic place, right then it becomes caricature. I wanted to make sure that that was not happening in some of the moments where I wanted to include some of that house [and] ballroom. I am an ally of that community, but that is not my community…As an African American woman, I understand very well what it means to be able to be an ally and make sure that that community’s culture is protected as it’s translated to stage.”
Josette further explained why it was important to include those dance forms into TUTS’ production of Rent: “I think that if you’re adding a movement character to a piece, then I have to think about, ‘Well, what movement was prevalent at the time?’ So you’ve got to kind of dive into the dramaturgy of what was popular at the time. What was popular in the Lower East Side [of New York] at the time? What was going on in the house and the underground ballroom scene? Also, what’s going on in the hip hop scene at the time? I took a ballroom class for like three months because I also had to incorporate some tango into ‘Tango Maureen.’ So while I was familiar, I went ahead and took an official class so that I could be more authentic about what things I was choosing to put on the actors.”
Teresa Zimmermann as Maureen and Simone Gundy as Joanne in Rent at TUTS. (Photo by Melissa Taylor)
The actors are working with challenging material: the show deals with sobering topics like poverty, homelessness, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “This is very heavy material. You have to be able to move the energy out of your body,” Josette says. She brought her meditation practice to the actors to help them do that. “I have my own practice called ‘The Magic of Movement,’ and the magic of movement is a movement meditation practice where I use somatic breathing and I use movement meditation exercises. Basically, I have three iterations. One iteration is to move pain and trauma through the body for pain and trauma release; another iteration focuses on the sacral chakra and our ability to tap into our creativity, our joy, how you make money…all of those things are connected in that space,” she shares. “I also have one for people who maybe have never done movement meditation before.”
All of this took place over an accelerated timeline. “I think we’ve had about 4 weeks,” Josette says. “Three weeks of rehearsal, and then we have one week of tech. So about 4 weeks total – which feels lightning fast when there’s so many things to do. It’s not just choreography; they’ve got to learn music, they’ve got staging…so it’s a lot of information to absorb in a very short amount of time,” she says. But the actors are “absolutely phenomenal, amazing storytellers. I can’t wait for the Houston audience to see these actors. And so many of them are local!”
Josette says she hopes the show will provoke hard but necessary conversations. “I’m really excited for Houston to see Rent 2023 in the space of what’s going on nationally; what we have going on politically, as well as what we have going on in our state, specifically,” she explains. “I’m excited for the conversations that are going to be happening and I’m also excited for them to experience the show with movement, more movement, and more ways for people to connect with the story. I’m excited to know what that impact is,” she says.
“Even in the sense of a younger generation maybe not having the same understanding about what was happening during the HIV/AIDS epidemic…But you understand how crazy it was during COVID, initially. Everyone was freaked out; no one knew what it was. If you had it, it was like no one wanted to come by you or touch you. So there are some parallels. It’s not the same, but there are definitely some parallels,” Josette explains.
Connect with Monica Josette on Instagram @monijomagic.
Catch TUTS’ production of Rent May 16 – 28 at The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are available at tuts.com/shows/rent-2