She choreographs, dances in new Chan production

 By Ruth Anne Maddox

  If you’ve seen a show at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres in the past three years, chances are there was a Tamara Kangas’ influence on stage.

Kangas — who grew up in Shakopee and recently moved to Prior Lake — has been choreographer at the theater for that timeframe and also has performed in several of the productions since she was a child.

  The labor-intensive, dance-heavy “42nd Street,” which opens Friday, is one in which Kangas is pulling double duty — she choreographed the show and she’ll be a dancer in the ensemble.

  Kangas started dancing as a youngster at Shari’s Dance Center at Shakopee Town Square. She went on to earn a degree in dance with a theater emphasis at St. Olaf College, lived in New York a couple times to pursue a dance career and toured South America with a Minneapolis dance troupe.

But, she said, “I consistently ended up back at Chanhassen.” It was, after all, her first “professional” stage when she played the part of one of the Von Trapp children in a production of “The Sound of Music” many years ago.

  “Chanhassen has always been my theater home,” she said.

While Kangas considers tap-dancing her specialty, her schooling focused mostly on modern dance — which is a great background to have to work on musicals and create a story, she said.

  A 1989 graduate of Shakopee High School, Kangas said she didn’t participate in sports or organized school activities.

“For me, it was just always dance,” Kangas said. “I didn’t want to do anything else.”

  Although she started dance lessons at age 4, she didn’t really start to “get serious” about performance until she was about 8 years old and auditioned at Chanhassen.

  “I was feeling really confident that’s what I wanted to do,” she remembers.

She thinks moving from performer to choreographer and, on occasion, to director within various shows has been a smooth transition for her.

“My brain works as a director even when I’m choreographing,” she said, noting that the mindset gives her visual pictures of the stage and allows her to make the scenes flow.

  For the upcoming production of “42nd Street,” Kangas said she listened to the music from the show until she knew it “inside and outside … until I could hear it in my head when it wasn’t playing.”

  Then, in January, she sat down with the score and came up with a plan, or structure, of what she wanted to accomplish in each section. Sketching out her ideas on paper, she said, helps to break the music and dance down into manageable pieces.

  When rehearsals began on Feb. 26, Kangas and an assistant were on stage to show the dancers the steps because “I want to show them on my body how I want them to do it,” she said.

  She admits that what seems to work on paper might not actually be what ends up in the show because the dancers are at different levels of ability and various years of experience.

  “It’s hard to sit in a studio with no bodies and try to plan every piece of the show,” Kangas said. “Something might not work … and then you go to Plan B: adapt as you go.”

  Regardless of the dancers’ ability, she said, she choreographs movements that will flow on stage rather than a whole lot of fancy footwork.

  “It’s not about complicated, tricky stuff,” she said. “It’s about a lot of people doing clean moves.”

  She’s not worried about intimidating the other dancers in the show but, as part of the ensemble in “42nd Street,” she will be in the back row “so I can watch everybody,” she grinned. She doesn’t really consider herself an actress because, she points out, she has always been in musicals and never “a straight play.”

Between shows at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, Kangas works with metro-area high schools to create choreography for productions. This includes “Fiddler on the Roof” at Eastview High School and “Beauty and the Beast” at Hopkins High School. She also does freelance work and has done some voice work on radio.

In her “spare” time, Kangas is planning a wedding for this summer and she and her fiancé are painting the rooms in their new home.

  Ruth Anne Maddox can be reached at (952) 345-6678 or rmaddox@swpub.com.