Dance: Hey, Fela!

FELA! Through Sept. 21. 37 Arts, 450 W. 37 St. (at 10th Ave.), 212-560-8912; $51.25 to Aug. 31; then $76.25.

One of the more memorable recent Tony Award moments was Bill T. Jones joyfully dancing his way up to the stage to accept his 2007 award for choreographing Spring Awakening. A determinedly individual and often leading controversial figure in the contemporary dance world for nearly 30 years, Jones has crossed over into theater on several occasions—notably his work on Will Powers’ The Seven at New York Theater Workshop. But with FELA!, the expansive and exuberant new show about the influential Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti currently in previews at 37 Arts, he has moved into the theatrical realm in a big way. Jones is not only director and chorographer, but he’s also co-author of the book.

Featuring the vibrantly multi-talented Sahr Ngaujah as Kuti, the show brings the audience into the Shrine, Kuti’s Lagos nightclub where he presented lavish performances of his extended compositions featuring dozens of musicians and dancers. “His Shrine was a place where you could expect equal parts rock concert, political harangue and Yoruba divination ceremonies,” Jones explained during the first week of previews.

“Fela is an object lesson in the way in which the spiritual and the political actually meet. He examined the notion of what it means to be an authentic African man who is suffering the depravity of a post-colonial meltdown. There was such hopefulness and euphoria after Nigeria won its freedom from the British. But what followed was a series of bloody coups and dictators taking over, and an entrenched elite that is extremely corrupt.”

Jones recalled improvising to Kuti’s music in the late 1970s, during his early career before coming to New York with his partner Arnie Zane. But after a colleague brought him together with Steve Hendel, who envisioned a musical built around Kuti’s luscious, infectious Afrobeat sound, Jones discovered there was a great deal more to the music.

“I had to learn how to listen to it as something other than dance music. It was only when I could sit down and read the texts [pidgin English or the Yoruba] and had them translated, that I understood what made him so volatile in that environment. I also came to appreciate his compositional skills, such as the innovation with the horns. Often, the horns are behaving as traditional African percussion might behave. Another innovation was to bring in the chorus of women singing in counterpoint to him.”

FELA! features a vibrant ensemble of eight such women—in reality, Kuti married 27 women and lived with them in a radical commune/recording studio he called the Kalakuta Republic—who are nearly always involved in the drama, singing, dancing and framing the action. Kuti himself, as embodied by Ngaujah, is a larger-than-life, intensely charismatic figure in brightly colored tight suits, who sings, dances, proselytizes, preaches and plays saxophone. Jones first spotted Ngaujah during auditions for The Seven several years ago, and when the Kuti project was already in its early stages of development, Jones realized the actor would be ideal for the role.

Kuti studied music and formed his first band in London before returning home, where his music took on an increasingly political tone. He incurred the enduring hostility of the country’s military regime, which arrested him repeatedly and staged several brutal raids on his commune. Spending some time in the United States in the politically volatile year of 1969, he came into contact with the Black Power movement and influential thinkers and writers who helped spur his political development.

“For a man who had a lot of progressive ideas, who was fighting against an authoritarian regime, he was a study in contradictions,” Jones noted. By our politically correct standards, he was not a misogynist, but a male chauvinist.” In shaping FELA! and bringing this fascinating figure to life on stage, “I was trying to take him off the posters, since he had become like Che Guevara, a two-dimensional figure of a revolutionary. But he was also very much a human being, and that’s what I’ve been on a journey of discovering.” In the second act, the show also alludes to how Kuti delved further into the Yoruba religion.

Jones’ production throbs with the pulsating rhythms of Kuti’s music and weaves the performers through the audience at times. Working with longtime collaborators such as co-author Jim Lewis, Marina Draghici (sets and costumes) and lighting designer Robert Wierzel, he has created a world that explodes with color, motion and texture. Peter Nigrini’s projections help evoke the time and place and propel the drama of Kuti’s eventful, multi-faceted life.