Prince: Always in Motion

Prince’s magical style went beyond the music. He created his own sexy, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-of-him moves.

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by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

December 5, 2016

Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns

Prince and Cat Glover on stage in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 1988.

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Imagine Prince motionless. In death we’re forced to, but in life it was impossible.

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That is because he danced, always. Included in his multitude of personas, Prince was a patron of dance, a choreographer, and, as a young man, trained in classical ballet.

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Prince’s formal training began at Minnesota Dance Theatre when he was in high school and part of the Urban Arts Program. It was there that he connected with MDT founder Loyce Houlton. “My mother was very, very good at seeing talent and promoting it,” recalls Houlton’s daughter, Lise. Loyce Houlton, who studied with modern dance icon Martha Graham and the father of American ballet, George Balanchine, died in 1995, but she was a friend and mentor from the day they met. Prince even flew Houlton and her husband to Los Angeles for the world premiere of Purple Rain in 1984.

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[B]y the time Sign ’O’ the Times was released in 1987, Prince had morphed, as many dancers do, from dancer to choreographer.

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This was when he craved originality above all. Dancer and now choreographer Cat Glover recalls meeting Prince in 1986 when she was an award-winning freestyle dancer appearing at Chicago clubs and a recent Star Search winner. They later went to a private club and Prince asked her to dance. “I knew that we were compatible from the first time we danced together. It was maybe three songs and I mimicked everything he did, and he was like, Whoa. He whispered something to his manager [and] Prince winked at me. He had big, beautiful eyes, like a deer. He said, ‘You’re going to be in our band.’ That was pretty much it.”

Glover, who lives in Los Angeles, was key to Prince’s dance throughout the Sign ’O’ the Times years. Glover says Prince fed on her street style and was attracted to her originality. “Prince liked dancers who danced different,” she says. “He didn’t like dancers who did the same thing.” Catch a concert from the Housequake era and you’ll see Prince executing half a dozen breakdancing moves, like the one where he’s stomach-up on all fours, kicking and zipping across the stage. In his originality-prizing years he was also carefully following the work of Moses Pendleton, a Connecticut avant-garde dance choreographer who incorporates acrobatics and surrealism. “There’s a scene in [the video for] ‘Lovesexy’ where Prince does this solo, it’s kind of a weird dance—that’s him giving thanks to Moses Pendleton,” says Glover. “There. Nobody knows that but you.”

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Dance wasn’t just eye candy for the audience; it was critical to his evaluation and estimation of his own work. Prince would take his music to clubs to see if it would get people on the dance floors, Glover says. “He wasn’t just a musician. For one of his songs to get recorded it had to come with everything. If your feet aren’t tapping, if your feet aren’t bopping, it’s not good enough. If you can’t dance with music then it’s no good.”

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Prince’s support of dancers was by then national. Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet was on the verge of shutting down in the ’90s until Prince donated the rights to his music for a blockbuster called Billboards; it helped save the company.

Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Misty Copeland and Prince at Madison Square Garden in 2011.

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More recently, in 2009, he plucked Misty Copeland out of relative obscurity from the American Ballet Theatre. The two then performed together, including 2011 shows where Copeland is pirouetting around him in full Swan Lake finery on toe shoes. Just last year, Copeland became the first African American principal dancer in ABT’s history.

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“I wouldn’t be in this place in my career had I not met him,” Copeland told People magazine.

Though dance was the minor key in Prince’s art, it was likely the major culprit in his death. “He ruined his hips on those damn high heels he used to wear,” Command says in frustration. “He would do splits, [and] those shoes, I look at them and shudder.” Adds Glover, “He would push himself to the limit all the time. He made it look easy, but everything that looked easy was three months’ rehearsal. It was never easy.”

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Of course, to imagine a motionless Prince is absurd, impossible. He was ever in motion, propelled by rapacious intellectual curiosity and feet-on-the-ground experimentation. And he danced all but ceaselessly for 57 motion-filled years. Read more...