Lionesses Dance. The Lion King. Disney. Photo by Deen van Meer

By Valerie Gladstone

Big corporations usually stay with the tried and true. Risk isn’t their game. But in 1997, in an inspired act of hiring, Disney asked the choreographer Garth Fagan to take on The Lion King. Until that point, Fagan had choreographed on two other theatre works, the Duke Ellington opera, Queenie Pie, in 1986 at the Kennedy Center, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1988. His name was hardly synonymous with the glitzy, high-kicking numbers associated with the Broadway musicals. Bob Fosse he was not. In fact, he won his distinguished reputation in a whole other ballgame, the modern dance concert world, by creating subtle, sensuous, highly idiosyncratic works for his popular company, Garth Fagan Dance, a mainstay at the Joyce Theatre for years.

While many experienced Broadway choreographers vied for the job, the Disney producers saw something in Fagan even more valuable than familiarity with musicals.  They saw daring. It had already been decided to break the mold when they selected as director Emmy and Obie award-winning Julie Taymor, famed for her strikingly different theatrical approach. Now they needed an equally imaginative choreographer. Fagan, they sensed, could turn Broadway dance on its head. Although pleased by their trust in him, Fagan let the producers know where he stood. “They’d seen my work,” he says in his musical Jamaican accent, “and they knew what they were getting. I told them that if I’d be able to do innovative stuff then we’d have a match. And they said ‘absolutely’.”

Once he had the assignment, it didn’t take Fagan long to figure out his general concept for the show. Specifically, he wanted to make sure that it would resemble a concert dance.

“I told them that I wanted to include all types of dancing – modern, ballet, African, and hip hop – so that any child coming to the theatre would be able to connect with something. Too often a show’s choreography only used one particular vocabulary. But because I choreographed the show in so many different styles, I had to have intelligent dancers who could switch quickly from one to the other. They were going to have to roll with a lot of punches, from elaborate costumes to split second changes.” —  Garth Fagan, Choreographer

Since The Lion King takes place in Africa, his choice of African-based movement was only natural. It was also something he had been using for years with his own company.  Between growing up in Jamaica and visiting Africa often, he feels strongly tied to every aspect of Caribbean and African cultures. What he didn’t reckon on were the costumes.  “When I saw the drawings for the puppets,” he says, “it was love at first sight. But I didn’t know how I’d integrate them into the dance. All their lives dancers wear clothes as skimpy as possible because they need to be free. Now they’d have gazelles on their arms; grass on their heads, all the while they’re leaping and turning.”

Working with his longtime company members, Norwood J. Pennewell and Natalie Rogers, he devised movements that wouldn’t be hindering by the costumes. “The trick was to get the essence of the animals,” he says, “but also to keep an awareness of the human body. I wanted you to think lioness but also think woman, who is hunting to eat.  While you’re seeing the lionesses hunting, you’re still getting the feeling of femaleness.  They’re strong women and if they don’t hunt, the lazy men don’t eat. All these human things I wanted to get in there. I’m very proud of all my dances but I’m particularly proud of the lioness dance.”

Fagan came away from The Lion King not only with a Tony Award in 1997 for his choreography but with major new insights. “I learned how to create dances in hardly any space, like the hyena dance,” he says, “and how to devise movement that would be vibrant and big enough not to be overpowered by all the beautiful scenery and costumes while also keeping in mind that the dancers have to do eight shows a week and couldn’t be totally exhausted.” He paused, evaluating his life-changing experience. “But the most important thing I learned,” he says, “was how to adapt when something didn’t work. We were going for a masterpiece, and everyone involved knew the collaboration counted for more than any one particular view. That’s why The Lion King is a masterpiece.”

Reprinted by permission of Disney’s The Lion King.

DETAILS
Disney’s The Lion King
Oct 23-Nov 16, 2025 • Buell Theatre
Tickets