Ann Reinking, who died Saturday at the age of seventy-one, was talented at being joyful—you could see her big heart through her big eyes whenever she flashed that sparkling, goofy, wonderful smile—but I liked her best when she didn’t even smirk. When Reinking pouted, or had the restraint to let her sculpted jaw hover austerely while her outrageous body did the work of showing how much she loved moving it for us, she was at her smoldering best.
Reinking’s body exploded with the intensity of an artist whose expression can’t be tamed, but whose beauty lies in the attempts to control it. She was the kind of sexy you read about in the Bible: the snake in the garden, Delilah, any instance when God used the weather to punish human beings for being made out of flesh. She was soul and skill but also the electrifying result of somebody trying to tame the untamable. Her gorgeous, unruly body rose to the precise demands of choreography—most notably Bob Fosse’s—but please watch her, in this clip from “A Chorus Line,” show Michael Bennett’s outrageous requirements for dancer flexibility who is boss.
Obviously, she was outrageously beautiful, to the extent that her shiny sheets of parted dark hair and operatic cheekbones brought her desirability into the terrain of excess—which made sense, because when she moved, everything was a little more. The angle of her back was a little more acute in its arch. Her pelvis was a little more fluid, her legs opened a little wider, her gestures reached all the way down to her fingertips. She flowed when she was meant to, but it was all part of the text. Even when she was writhing, she was writing.
My favorite performance of hers, from “All That Jazz,” is in the hallucination number, “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.”
At one point, Reinking lopes, then freezes toward the camera, in amplified Fosse regalia, the hat and sparkles and dance boots, with the alternating precision of a predator and its paralyzed prey. She’s stunningly sexy as she flicks her hand and twitches her shoulders like she’s recovering from an orgasm. She bends over backwards, extends her legs past the reasonable and toward the infinite, and makes a derby hat look unfathomably cool. At one point, when she faces away from the camera for a variation on a chug, it seems like she’s winding herself up to finish the job of killing us dead. The best part, however, is when Reinking, in closeup, closes her eyes and lowers her head, then nods, like, “Yeah, that’s right,” before she opens her eyes to meet ours. She’s on her knees at the end of the song, but by then you’ve been conquered. She owns you, and she never cracked a smile.
