by Lucy O'Brien
The 1970s was a prolific, experimental time for contemporary dance, and Madonna was eager to place herself right into its center. In 1977 she won a scholarship to dance with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at their six-week summer workshop in New York. It was the first time Madonna, then nineteen years old, found herself surrounded by dancers as good and ambitious as she was. “Everybody wanted to be a star,” she recalled. Although she was slightly overwhelmed by the experience, it renewed her determination to become a leading dancer.
A year into her course, she got the opportunity to work with Pearl Lang when the choreographer visited Ann Arbor as an artist in residence. Lang created a work for the students with music by Vivaldi, and Madonna distinguished herself as one of the dancers for the piece, performed at the local Power Arts Center. Lang’s recognition of Madonna’s budding talent was the spur she needed to move to the epicenter of dance—New York. Though only halfway through her four-year degree, she decided to leave. Christopher Flynn was her ally, encouraging her to “take [her] little behind” to the city. His colleague Delanghe was disappointed, however, feeling that Madonna “didn’t get good advice.” She would have preferred for Madonna to finish her degree and fulfill her potential.
Madonna, however, had bigger fish to fry. She was concerned she would lose momentum within the careful, slow-moving world of academic dance; she felt she had already squeezed as much as she could from the Michigan course. Her father was deeply opposed, seeing this as a waste of her scholarship—coming from a working-class immigrant background, he had unswerving faith in the power of education, believing that her degree would lead to more solid opportunities. “Stop trying to run my life for me!” she screamed at him one night, throwing a plate of spaghetti at the wall in a fit of rage. Tony was mortified. Although she rushed to apologize, that row would be the beginning of a rift that took years to heal.
For now, she was hell-bent on making a name for herself. “Madonna had to get out of Detroit to make it. There was no Internet then, and there weren’t those sorts of conduits for someone to succeed in Detroit. She needed the machinery of New York or L.A.,” says Brian McCollum of the Detroit Free Press. While she was at college, Madonna worked behind the bar at a gritty rock club on Liberty Street, called Second Chance, which is now called Necto’s. As bands passed through, she was getting a taste for a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle—at odds with the sometimes rarefied world of contemporary dance. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do, but somehow she was going to express all the different parts of herself. She had an internal “fame” clock, and needed to be noticed now. In the late 70s, New York was the only place to be.
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THE ARROGANCE AND THE NERVE!
MADONNA USED TO GO TO SHOWS BY THE SLITS, THE anarchic U.K. all-girl punk band who fused dub reggae and scratchy rhythms to create a new female sound. She would stand in the front row, studying the lead singer, Ari Up, and guitarist Viv Albertine. “I’m pissed off she’s never worn a T-shirt with THE SLITS written in sequins. She owes us. She ripped off all her early fashion ideas from Viv,” Ari said in 2005. Viv would wind rags in her hair and don lingerie as outerwear. “We’d be dressed half in bondage fetish gear, half in Doc Martens, with our hair all out there, scowling at everybody,” Albertine told me in 1997. “People didn’t know if we were a pinup or what. It freaked middle-aged men particularly, that mixture of rubber stockings, DMs, and fuck-off-you-wanker-what-are-you-staring-at. They didn’t know if they were coming or going.”
Whether Madonna customized their look or created one of her own, she was inspired by the sartorial dash of punk—its flirtation with ugliness and the everyday, its way of turning the codes upside down and imbuing them with an assertive femininity. To dress the way she did was a radical act in late 70s America. It wasn’t just the way that women were supposed to look: fluffy hair tamed by hairspray, soft blue eye shadow, and flowery skirts, but the way women were supposed to behave. To gain male approval, women had to tone themselves down. Madonna touched on it years later with her song “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” If a woman was upfront, sexually assertive, and loud, she was marginalized as “weird” and seen as fair game for physical attack.
To be twenty years old in the late 70s was to be at a cultural shifting point, when a binary world of black/white, male/female, good/ bad, virgin/whore was beginning to break down. With her unfailing instinct, Madonna tuned in to this change and embodied it, turning herself into a cultural force. She combined elements of punk style with underground dance and Europop disco to come up with the concept of Madonna. But it took several wrong turns and identity shifts before she reached that point.
IN THE SUMMER of 1978, Madonna arrived in New York, eager to be the center of everything. But it was to be four long years before she got her first record deal, let alone the kind of fame she desired. Like any young suburbanite, she needed to break the big city to make it hers, and that would take time. She stayed with a college friend near Columbia University before moving into an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of New York. She continued with her dance studies and after she got settled in New York that July, attended the annual American Festival of Dance in Durham, North Carolina. During this session, she encountered Lang once again, and introduced herself. “The arrogance and the nerve!” Lang recalls. “Madonna asked me outright, ‘D’you think you need a dancer in your company?’ I’d never have dreamed of doing that when I was young. I told her, ‘We always need an understudy.’ And she said, ‘I’d like to do that.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, you live in Michigan. I’m in New York City.’ ‘I’ll manage.’ Anyway, I forgot about her and went home.”
Back in New York, Lang was busy at the American Dance Center, which she’d formed with Alvin Ailey. They each ran their own company there. “In November, the door opened to the class and there was Madonna,” continues Lang. “I used her for about two years.” Lang was an astute choice, a key figure in modern dance and formerly one of Martha Graham’s principal dancers. When I interviewed her in New York in 2006, she was eighty-five, and had retired only two years earlier. She lived and breathed dance from a young age. “When I was three or four, I came from Chicago with my mother to see the Isadora Duncan student company at Symphony Hall. My mother was a fan of Isadora’s, she was a heroine of the women’s movement at the time. I saw these girls dancing—one came skipping from back to front of stage, opened her arms wide, and the audience gasped. ‘I’m going to do that,’ I vowed.” Lang ended up dancing with Martha Graham’s company during the 1940s, when the choreographer was at her peak. “Martha had a remarkable mix of music and poetry. It wasn’t just kicking your legs up and doing top-drawer nonsense like Balanchine. She was one of the great artists of our day. She stops your heart. She’s been compared to Picasso.”
Lang set up her own company in 1953, evolving a powerful woman-centered style. Her approach was flexible, working on complex moves with dancers until they got it, or getting them to perform another way. Madonna, luckily, was able to cope with what was thrown at her. “She did what she was asked. The work itself was technically very difficult, but she made it.”
Soon after joining the company, Madonna was rewarded with a dancing part in I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a piece about the Holocaust. Young and thin, she made a graceful Jewish ghetto child. She also brought out Lang’s motherly instincts. “I got her a job at the Russian Tea Room, checking hats and coats, because I thought she was losing weight and needed one decent meal a day,” Lang remembered. “I’m sorry to say but I’m pretty sure that was the one decent meal she was getting.”
Madonna could also be “kinda funky” with the way she dressed. “It was that period when they wanted to be as unusual and messy as they could,” said Lang. But despite the torn leotard and safety pins, she was impressed with the dedicated way Madonna threw herself into dance. “She was very aggressive in her approach. But in a good way, that’s necessary. If dancers hide they don’t come across so well.”
Though prestigious, dancing was work with very little financial reward. Struggling to make ends meet, Madonna took various short-lived jobs at Dunkin’ Donuts and Burger King, before returning to the slightly more lucrative work of nude modeling for artists. Although she was posing naked, she saw this as art photography and therefore “legit.” According to writer Michael Mackenzie, “The other way a dancer could make money was topless dancing, which a lot of the dancers, even some of the bigger dancers, did. They’d go to New Jersey and do it on the side. It was sorta out of sight, out of mind. Madonna never did that, she saw it as too compromising.”
Madonna’s youth made her a fearless risk-taker. But, like any young woman on her own, she was vulnerable. One day, not long after she joined Lang’s company, she was in a run-down part of town. She was grabbed on the street by, as she described to a friend, a heavyset black man, who led her at knifepoint up the steps of a tenement block to the roof. There he forced her to perform oral sex. When he was finished, he left her crying and shaking on the roof. For a long time she stayed there, too afraid to leave in case he was on the stairs. Eventually she made her way down and went home, profoundly shocked by the experience. It seems that rather than reporting the assault to the police, Madonna internalized it, burying deep her sense of shame and isolation. Years later she talked about it with a therapist, and then said in an interview: “I have been raped, and it’s not an experience I would ever glamorize.” Memories of the attack surfaced again in 1992, during the filming of the movie Dangerous Game. In character, Madonna related the story of her rape exactly as it had happened. “It was a very heavy sequence,” said the director, Abel Ferrara. “I didn’t know she was going to tell that story.”
Although Madonna didn’t talk about it much at the time, the trauma went deep. It can be argued that her anger at the attack came out afterward in a need for complete sexual control. Many friends have suggested that she used sex to get attention, get dinner, get a bed for the night, and one of her preferred methods was fellatio. For a young woman who felt powerless, it was one way to show men that she was the dominant one and she didn’t care. Sex became a mask, a way of psychologically turning the tables on her attacker.
Even though Madonna played street-smart, shrugging off the assault when she confided to a few friends, it led to the dissolution of her dream. Before long, she was losing concentration in classes, complaining to Lang that dancing gave her back pain and that some of the moves were too difficult. It was as if the attack made her self-esteem crumble, and she abandoned her pursuit of contemporary dance. Besides, it would have meant years of backbreaking work before she could become a principal dancer or establish herself as a successful choreographer. “Dancing is physically hard. There are no tears and whining. You work hard and there’s plenty of people better than you,” says British choreographer Jane Turner. “The choreographer is the auteur in modern dance. You devote yourself to your company and you earn very little. You’re a dedicated disciple. There’s no income. It’s impossibly uncommercial. No fame.”
Maybe Madonna felt unsupported and isolated. Maybe she doubted her expertise as an avant-garde dancer. Maybe she needed to do something fun after her dark experience, to use dance in a different way. Whatever it was, she needed a quick hit. She fell out with Lang. Although she had been content to submit to Christopher Flynn’s dance regime, she bristled under the older woman’s discipline. “You’re supposed to take a class every day, most dancers do, but Madonna was becoming listless,” recalls Lang. “She said one day, ‘I’m going to an audition, I’m going tomorrow, so I won’t be in class.’ She lasted one more week, and then I never saw her again.”
Lang admired Madonna’s strength but not her manners. She is also skeptical about Madonna’s technique. “I put her on the stage, that’s for sure. It’s how you attack a movement. Someone will sail into it, others will attack it. Madonna had that kind of energy, she was able to keep up with them. She was all right. But she wasn’t as good as my good dancers, because she had this other thing on her mind, the pop stuff.” She scoffs at the suggestion that Madonna was influenced by Graham. “No way, no where. There’s nothing of mine or Martha’s in what she’s doing. She’s now pop culture.”
Traumatized by her attack, tired of scraping together a living as a dancer, Madonna moved on to far more glamorous territory. Although deep down the sexual assault was a devastating experience, it acted like a trigger, propelling her forward. For now, the club scene was the most exciting place to be—and the best place to forget her fears.
Madonna found the next few months a challenge. She remained in dancer mentality, going to classes in Manhattan and practicing at home, but felt a little lost without the security of Lang’s company. She met graffiti artist Norris Burroughs at a party, and they had a brief relationship. Her time with him was a short hiatus, a sort of calm before the storm. They would spend long, sunny afternoons making love or wandering through peaceful uptown parks. Burroughs loved her elemental spirit. He described her as “sensual and sexual,” but said there was something elusive about her, as if she were “made of light.”
In 1979 she transferred her affections to an aspiring musician, Dan Gilroy, who, with his brother Ed, had formed The Breakfast Club, a band specializing in ska-influenced punk pop. Gilroy’s account of their first date is symbolic of many of her future relationships. They met in a bar on the Upper West Side on a weeknight, when the place was virtually empty. “I’m a beats-oriented dancer. She was whirling around with a leg around her neck and spinning and all that. It was frightening being in the middle of a dance floor with no one else there, and she’s working the floor very nicely and I’m…in my place.”
Madonna’s affair with Gilroy was put on hold when, soon after they met, she got a job performing with the Patrick Hernandez disco revue in Paris. According to Burroughs, Dan and Ed had an act that was part of an alternative vaudeville show called Voidville. This came to the attention of Hernandez’s Belgian producers Jean van Lieu and Jean-Claude Pellerin. They met Madonna through Dan and encouraged her to audition for the disco star.
When she got to France, she was looked after by van Lieu and Pellerin, two smooth operators who wanted to mold her into a funky Piaf-style showgirl. There was a lot of talk and expensive dinners, but nothing much materialized. Accustomed to a fierce workload, Madonna chafed at the lack of activity. Though she has been very dismissive of this period in her life, she went there at a formative time, when she was changing from being “just a dancer” to becoming a dancer who sang. In Paris in 1979, she couldn’t help absorbing the showgirl style of venues like the Moulin Rouge and the influence of Eurodisco. With his hit “Born to Be Alive,” Patrick Hernandez was a master of the latter. It’s no coincidence that her first records had a Europop feel.
Paris then may have been a backwater in terms of music industry, but its café culture was very much alive. Madonna made sure she went to the right parties, establishing contacts and a love for the city that was to feed into later collaborations with artists like Mirwais, Mondino, and Jean-Paul Gaultier. “In the 70s, Paris was a good place for café society,” recalls Californian socialite Melinda Patton, who lived there at the same time as Madonna. “Anybody could meet anybody. You’d sit in a café and meet the whole social gamut from top to bottom. Everybody goes out all the time. You met one person, you’d meet a thousand.�
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Although Madonna enjoyed the social life, she saw her career stagnating. Feeling cosseted but at the same time misunderstood, a disappointed Madonna decided to head home. There, desperate for any avenue of success, she answered an ad for a movie role in Back Stage magazine, asking for “a dark, fiery young woman, dominant…who can dance and is willing to work for no pay.” She sent a two-page résumé to the director Stephen Jon Lewicki, and got the job. Her first foray into film was the rather unprepossessing A Certain Sacrifice, a low-budget movie in which she plays the part of Bruna, a New Wave dominatrix who hangs around listlessly with her S&M tribe until she meets a nice boy from the suburbs, who’s just waiting to be corrupted. They become a couple and she moans rather unconvincingly to him about how she is caught up with her “slaves” in a trap of domination and submission.
Bruna ends up being raped in a restroom. For Madonna, filming this scene not long after her real-life attack must have been difficult, and for a moment onscreen she seems genuinely distressed. In the film, Bruna’s abuser is ambushed by the gang and there follows an orgy of blood sacrifice set to a dirge-like Goth rock soundtrack. Madonna exudes a callow sensuality and strenuously emotes, but cannot save the movie. Although its grainy footage of early 80s New York has curio value, the script is clumsy and the acting unconvincing. Lewicki went for a low-budget Mean Streets feel, but ended up with an amateurish art film. He ran out of money toward the end of shooting, and didn’t finish it until after Madonna was famous. He released it in 1985, much against her wishes. What’s interesting about the Bruna role, though, is how it foreshadows the virgin/whore dichotomy that she later explores. In A Certain Sacrifice, she plays a woman punished for her active sexuality—a theme that would come up time and again in her work.