“We were trying to find people who could do the martial arts and the acting and the singing, but we failed, in a way,” Mr. That meant less time to practice other aspects of their performances. He decided to narrow his focus to the dance world - largely hip-hop, modern, and classical - figuring he would get an actor’s stage presence and a martial artist’s core strength and agility in the bargain.īut mastering the fight choreography, even for a cast with extraordinary physical discipline, took longer than expected. But the musical theater actors he saw didn’t make believable fighters, and the martial artists couldn’t pull off the requisite acting and dancing. He spent more than a year on casting, searching for performers who could match the show’s multidisciplinary ambitions. But lately I’ve been feeling so much hostility, and that kind of subconsciously went into the plot.” “When I came to this country in the late ’80s, it was cool to be different. “I wanted to create a modern myth about immigrants in America and how they survive,” Mr. Though wrapped in pop packaging, the core themes of “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise” - geographical and spiritual dislocation, hybridized identity and the weight of heritage - are deeply personal. The last such high-profile, high-flying attempt was the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” a notoriously unwieldy enterprise that left a cautionary legacy of comic one-liners, broken hearts and sunk capital when it closed in 2014. It was developed as a kind of proof of concept for the new building, engineered to dazzle audiences with name-brand artists, staggering physical scale and blockbuster pyrotechnics not found anywhere else in a city well steeped in audacious spectacle.īut achieving liftoff won’t be easy. “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise” is his most ambitious undertaking yet. In those roles, he commissioned an opera that paired the artist Marina Abramovic with Willem Dafoe, and a ballet, adapted from a Jonathan Safran Foer book, that featured a score by the electronic music producer Jamie xx and choreography by Wayne McGregor.
Poots, one of the contemporary art world’s most exuberant and prolific matchmakers, served as the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory and the founder of the Manchester International Festival in England.