With his American Utopia show, David Byrne changed what the rock(ish) concert could be. No singer at the front and drummer stuck at the back. No guitarists and keyboards dutifully flanking the frontman, the backing vocalists corralled on a platform. No rigidity. The use of the latest in wireless technology meant he and his snappily attired musicians were untethered by any cabling and uncluttered by any gear, liberating them to roam around the stage in synchronised, song-specific dance moves dreamt up by Brooklyn-based choreographer Annie-B Parson.
The tour was in support of his eighth solo album of the same name and ran, on and off, between 2018 and 2022. After the globetrotting, it was recast as something like a stage musical for a Broadway residency. That was filmed for an HBO special directed by Spike Lee. With the free-range, free-expression, shape-shifting American Utopia, the same musician who helped reinvent the concert movie with 1984’s Stop Making Sense had now done the same for the gig.
Now, for his new Who Is the Sky? tour, Byrne has had to do that all over again.
Enter Steven Hoggett. The London-based movement director has deep experience across a range of stages. He’s worked with the National Theatre of Scotland on Black Watch and Let the Right One In, winning an Olivier for the former. With the National Theatre on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. With Sting on his musical The Last Ship, with Green Day on the theatre version of punk polemic American Idiot, with Thom Yorke on last year’s Factory International/Royal Shakespeare Company production Hamlet/Hail to the Thief.
Then came the phone call from Byrne one day before Christmas Eve “a couple of years ago” – and the offer to collaborate on his next tour was “one of the best Christmas presents”. But then, the anxiety set in. How to top American Utopia, a show Hoggett had seen three times?
“Annie broke the ice, I will say that,” the 54-year-old Yorkshireman says of the American’s boundary-busting, paradigm-shifting production. “I didn't have to do the breaking of wills that she would have had to do to get this to work. So I'm thankful for that, if nothing else.”
He also had to encapsulate and animate the simple but powerful lyrical mantra at the heart of ‘Everybody Laughs’, Byrne’s 2025 album’s joyful opening song: “Everybody looks and everybody sees, everybody’s asking everybody ‘please’, everybody’s going everywhere at once…”.
No biggie, then, Steven?
Well, I still think American Utopia is one of the greatest pieces of choreography and staging I've ever seen, hands down – theatre, dance, whatever. So it was quite tricky. And I went back to look at it when David said he wanted to use mobile musicians [again] but this time he was looking at five dancers, not two. Plus David. So there's 13 bodies moving on stage. There are certain things you can do with formations. I made a list of them all, all the things typically you might do choreographically. And as I went through American Utopia, I started ticking them – and Annie had used every tool in the box beautifully. So I got quite depressed for about a month.
Obviously you got over that. Late last year there was a glowing live review in a music magazine, from a New York show early in this tour. It quoted Byrne as saying at the top of the show: 'Love and kindness are the most punk things you can do.' Was that an animating idea for you in terms of your work on the show?
Yeah. Look: day by day, it only gets worse [in the world]. Certainly, we made the show in America, but the UK is not funny right now either! David sent me the album when he asked me to do this. It took me a second to realise that he was committing to an album that was about looking for the joy in the connection of human beings. It's absolutely what you should write an album about… Instead of plunging into the despair of it all, he said: 'Well, what about joy and what about connectedness?' And he's written an album that reflects that.
And that fed directly into your choreography?
I thought: this is a great opportunity to show 13 people who all move all at once. Everybody gets their responsibility. Everybody is somebody you will know by the end of the show. Also: let’s not to forget that we're going to be doing this with a load of people that are willfully [committed]. [As an audience] we're all looking the same way because we want to join something.
There is unity in unity…
I've always felt that when people start moving in unison on a dancefloor or wherever, I drop my shopping. It's one of the most amazing things that people can do. Whether involuntarily or not. I wasn't old enough for this, but I remember in the ’70s, there was lots of dance routines that people always used to do with the same movements on a dancefloor. That had gone by the ’80s when I got into a nightclub. I am kind of sad about that. But, yeah, bodies moving in unison always makes me feel good. It's my sweet spot.
How did you go about choreographing a bunch of people with a range of dance skills and abilities?
We had six weeks rehearsal in New York last summer. I didn't put a number together for three weeks. In the mornings, I worked with the dancers. I didn't use David Byrne tracks. I used different music by different artists, and I tried some ideas out. I didn't want them to know that it was going to be, say, ‘Slippery People’, because they'd give me an obvious result.
So I would give him a task, and it might be something like: “You are a futuristic disco dancer…" Or we watched some nature programmes. There's a beautiful flamingo sequence in Blue Planet that we watched. We watched Dumbo. We watched Madonna's ‘Frozen’ video by Chris Cunningham.
What about the musicians?
In the afternoons, I watched them all learn to play the songs. I'm looking as they're looking down at the fretboard, seeing where their hips and shoulders and fingers and elbows are. So which way can they go? Which way can't they go? And I held my nerve for three weeks, because then we had two weeks to choreograph all 23 songs. So it's six days a week. I don't know how we did it, but in the last week we ran the whole thing. It was manic and mad. But I felt that by sitting back and not panicking and doing my homework, it fed me lots of ideas.
What does David see that's important about the choreography in terms of amplifying the messages of his songs?
I'll put it really simply: David loves dancing. And like anything, his dancing has changed. It's easy to prep for this show because there lots of footage of David. It's amazing to watch him go from his hips and his knees, and now it's his shoulders and his hands where his choreography sits. I love the fact that he's grown up through his body. And now as a physical, kinetic being, he lives and sits somewhere entirely different. He doesn't move at all like he did in Stop Making Sense. That's because we develop – our intrinsic sense of movement changes over time. And his has. But he just loves dancing.
And to explore [those ideas] in the way they did with American Utopia was breathtaking. Any choreographer [would agree]. The place was packed with choreographers when I saw it. You couldn't move for us. Everybody had their notebooks out. Like: “What the fuck?”
Having worked with Thom Yorke, as a choreographer how would you characterise the Radiohead frontman’s dancing style?
Wooargh... Synaptic... seizure. Frenetic. We were actually all together yesterday, because we're bringing that back this year in London, and we were talking about choreography. He's another person who really knows his dance.
How was it co-creating the Hamlet/Hail to the Thief piece?
Actually, we had a challenging workshop developing Hamlet. It was the last day, and Thom came over. He just looked a little bit cowed and quiet. He went: “I don't really know how to say this to you... but I didn't like any of the choreography these last two weeks.” And I was like: he's right. It wasn't very good. I mean, I was absolutely mortified and terrified! But I love the fact that he wouldn't purport to know much but he does have taste. And it matters to him what choreography does.
That was a big lesson to me, which was: [these musicians] are looking and they're watching, and they do know what they want. So I don't waste anybody's time anymore! When it comes to choreography, you've got to be able to put it up, and you've got to stand by it. But it was one of the worst moments of my life!
To end on a sidenote: you mentioned the room at one of the American Utopia shows as being full of choreographers. What’s the collective noun for a group of choreographers?
A... I was about to use a swear word! Well, either in New York or London, if you put a big group of choreographers in a room together, they'd have a great night. Directors, they wouldn't even speak to each other – they'd pretend they didn't know each other. That is true. So: a drunk of choreographers. Because they get hammered if they can slip the leash.
The UK leg of David Byrne’s Who Is the Sky? tour starts this week
