In step with The King

Allison Orr loves Elvis tender, so much that she's reprising her tribute to the late superstar

By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Allison Orr really, truly likes Elvis Presley.

And that's important to remember when considering "The King & I," her dance theater work, the third iteration of which she'll stage at Theatre at Real for three weeks beginning Aug. 2.

Yes, "The King & I" uses a string of Elvis hits as its score. Sure, it takes a humorous, light-hearted approach: In one segment, Orr and her two other dancers make Elvis' favorite snack — peanut butter and banana sandwiches — hands, butter knives and white bread slices fluttering in a charming assembly line. For the finale of the 90-minute piece, Elvis impersonator Donnie Roberts appears in his full sequined jumpsuit glory. And, of course, it's absolutely no mistake that Orr elected to stage "The King & I" again to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Aug. 16 death of the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

Loosely based on Elvis' last concert, "The King & I" includes an "instructional" slide show about Elvis and Priscilla Presley's connection to Austin and each of the nine shows will feature a different local celebrity — Mayor Will Wynn on Aug. 16; American-Statesman columnist John Kelso on an as-yet-to-be-determined day — singing.

But don't mistake Orr's approach as campy or tongue-in-cheek.

See, she really, really likes Elvis.

The grace of the everyday

"I always thought that I would be an anthropologist," Orr says. "I'm interested in exploring other cultures and understanding other people, what they do and why."

And right now, she looks the part as she hoists a messenger bag stuffed with books and her laptop into a booth at El Sol y La Luna on a recent rainy Tuesday.

"And let's face it: I've never been a technical powerhouse as a dancer," she says with an easy laugh, folding her long limbs into the booth, her pixie-ish hair sporting blond streaks. "But I was the best high kicker on the drill team!"

A native Austinite, Orr, 36, enrolled in the obligatory ballet classes as a young child. But flat feet kept her from progressing beyond a beginner's level. Drill team at Austin High School provided the energetic Orr with her first experiences with the pageantry of performance. And in a roundabout way, drill team primed Orr to think about the whole nature of performance — what performance can be and who can do it.

It wasn't until she landed at Wake Forest University in North Carolina that she first encountered modern dance, participating in the college's dance troupe though she majored in anthropology. Back in Austin after graduation, Orr trained with, among others, Darla Johnson and Andrea Ariel, both longtime Austin dancemakers. And importantly Orr got bitten by the urge to create dance herself. Her next stop: Mills College in California and its prestigious graduate dance program.

Her interest? How ordinary, everyday movement could be understood as dance. Her master's thesis project? A trio of site-specific dances that featured the university ground's crew as performers. "I wanted to shift people's perspective, make them aware of who they share space with and how people move through the world around them," she says. One segment featured workers with lawn mowers careening around a campus green to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" Spring Concerto. As the show started, something surprised Orr.

"The maintenance workers, on their own, choreographed their entrance on to the lawn," Orr says. "They took total possession of the performance and made it their own."

Energized, Orr headed to Washington, D.C., after graduate school and went to work for Liz Lerman, a pioneering choreographer who since the 1970s has explored modern dance using non-dancers and ordinary movement. Working as the company manager, Orr had a front seat to watch one of the field's ground-breaking innovators at work.

"I'm completely fascinated by the idea of who gets to be a performer and why," Orr says. "Where is that boundary between what is performance, or dance, and what's not? And what kind of movement around us is already some kind of dance?"

Like, say, taking your dog for a walk.

In 1999, Orr staged "Dances for Dogs and People Who Walk Them" which featured regular people doing short dances with their dogs in Washington's Meriden Hill Park as big band music played. It was so popular Orr staged it again, this time including "Insta-Dog Dance" with Orr choreographing on the spot for whichever dogs and owners decided to participate.

Back in Austin, Orr restaged "Dances for Dogs" in Zilker Park in May 2000. After that, Orr turned her attention to firefighters. But here's the thing about creating performances for non-performers — you have to persuade them to do it.

The staff at Engine 11 of the Austin Fire Department didn't quite know what to make of Orr's proposal. "There was the fear that we were going to wind up being some kind of Keystone Cops thing or some kind of joke," recalls Lt. Mike Sullivan of the Austin Fire Department. "But Allison was very respectful and just very curious about what we did. I could tell that it wasn't that she wanted us to fit her vision, but that her goal was to grasp our job and go from there."

Orr knows that not everyone understands the seriousness of her approach. "I have spend a lot of time with people in their own environments, ask questions, observe, research," Orr says. "I learn their vocabulary, both verbal and in terms of movement. I guess I work very much like an anthropologist."

Staged just a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, "In Case of Fire" featured the firefighters pulling hoses, climbing ladders and rapelling down the Austin Fire Department's training tower. More than 500 turned out to watch the spectacle which, because of its timing, took on a reflective pall that Orr never originally intended. But unexpected synchronicities are part of creating nontraditional performance. "There's always uncontrollable elements," Orr says. "But I like the idea of giving people an open opportunity for creative expression and then seeing what happens."

Since "Fire," Orr has created dances for gondoliers on the canals of Venice, Italy; a dance for two women older than 65; and a dance for two-seeing impaired men and their guide dogs. All were critically praised.

Darla Johnson, one of Orr's early mentors, is now an administrator in the dean's office of Austin Community College's Arts and Humanities Division where Orr teaches dance. Johnson says it's the sense of openness that gives Orr's work such appeal. "The accessibility of her starting points — the point of entry — is the beauty in her work," Johnson says. "Allison's use of the everyday reminds us that dance still is — and always was — a community event. It reinforces the notion that we all dance — that humans beings are dancing every day."

And certainly one human being who had his own every-day dance was Elvis Presley.

Tour de force

"I never spent a huge amount of time thinking about Elvis," Orr says, digging into her plate of enchiladas. "He's obviously an enormous part of our cultural landscape, but it's not like I was a die-hard Elvis fan."

Until she went to Graceland.

While touring with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1999, Orr took the opportunity of a stop in Memphis to visit Presley's famed mansion. "I went by myself, first thing in the morning and it was raining," she says. "And by the time the tour was over, I was crying."

Elvis as a quintessential American original, his ultimately tragic but always larger-than-life life, his humble origins and tastes, his Southerness, his inarguable musical talent and his enduring status as an icon — Orr found a fascination with all of it. Elvis-mania had her in its grasp.

True to her own style, Orr hit the books, researching Elvis' life and career. And true to her own interest in redefining the definition of performance, Orr took a special fascination with Elvis impersonators. "Performers imitating another performer — how intriguing is that?"

Plenty, it would seem from the success of "The King & I."

Orr first staged it as a short piece in 2003 that included Donnie Roberts, an Austin-based Elvis impersonator. By 2005, she had expanded the show and added more performers, including a few other Elvis impersonators and a trio of Elvis aficionados (including one woman) dressed in sequined jumpsuits. Orr staged the show in the appropriately retro Elks Club. The production sold out every show and netted Orr three Austin Critics' Table Award nominations.

"People who had never ever gone to see modern dance before — people who were just big Elvis fans — came to see the show," she says. "And modern dance types probably saw their first Elvis impersonator. How great is that?"

But she wasn't ready to let go of the King quite yet.

"For as satisfying as the Elks Club show was, I really wanted to keep tweaking the piece," she says. And besides, her ongoing research kept turning up more material. Particularly, Orr became fascinated with Elvis' early career when he and his band members drove themselves around the Lone Star State, playing gigs in towns such as Big Spring, Sweetwater, Texarkana and yes, Austin. Really, what Orr became interested in was understanding the connection between herself and Elvis, which meant triangulating it all through Texas. Eventually, Orr hopes to tour "The King & I" to those historic small town venues that Elvis played and that still exist. "That's really how people make sense of the world, by connecting it to themselves and the place they literally occupy," she says.

Hence all the Texas references in "The King & I" and the opportunity for local celebrities to be Elvis for a night in front of a local audience. And non-dancers such as impersonators Roberts and C.B. Lawrence taking the stage as, well, dancers.

"There's Elvis in all of us," Orr says smiling.

But what she really means is this: In all of us, every day, there's a dancer.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699