LUIGI
The Man, The Myth, The Technique
Founder of the world’s first jazz school and friend and mentor to countless students, teachers and celebrities, Luigi has a passion for showing others how to find the passion in themselves. This year we honor him with the Dance Teacher Lifetime Achievement Award.
Even his name is smooth: Luigi. It flows off the tongue as eloquently as his feet chassé across the floor or his shoulders roll into an épaulement during a pas de bourrée. Even at age 78, his dancing is classic, flawless and refined, his body lithe and trim. Born March 20, 1925, he came into the world as Eugene Louis Faccuito but was dubbed “Luigi” by the late great Gene Kelly, his employer, mentor and, later, peer and friend. Today Luigi is a household name in the dance world, standing at once for the codified jazz technique and the legendary man who created it half a century ago.
Inventing a technique and teaching around the world would have been enough to earn him a chapter in dance history books. But what is most remarkable about Luigi is the warmth and humanity that infuse his teaching and encourage each of his students, from the absolute beginner to the most seasoned professional. “A good teacher teaches from the heart,” says Luigi. “Don’t look for the weaknesses in people. Instead, find what is best in each student. Even if it is a pretty shade of lipstick, tell her you like it.”
Dancers, singers and actors from every corner of the entertainment industry study with Luigi at Studio Maestro, home to his school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His students have included John Travolta, Christopher Walken, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Ann Reinking, Ben Vereen, Patricia McBride, Maria Calegari, Twyla Tharp, Susan Stroman, Valerie Harper, Alvin Ailey, Robert Morse, Tony Roberts and Jacques d’Amboise. Many of these celebrities return, when schedules permit, to remind themselves how to realign their bodies. Performers from Hollywood, Broadway and major ballet companies say that the Luigi technique is like an elixir for the body and soul because it is a movement style based on the most demanding and rigid of all techniques—classical ballet—but never asks more than the body can do naturally and comfortably.
“Dance should not hurt if you put the parts in the right place,” says Luigi. For him, this requires engaging the buttocks and stomach, lifting the chest and dropping the shoulders. “Use the strength of your center to give your arms and legs more beauty,” he says, adding that the appendages are meant to derive their impetus from the strength of the body’s core.
To dance the “Luigi” way, a dancer must have the utmost respect for the classical positions and not embellish them with extraneous movements. “Each position is used to make the next position more beautiful,” Luigi explains. This simple movement theory has guided him throughout his career in helping numerous students develop proper technique, become better artists and recover after injury.
Born to Dance
Eugene Louis Faccuito was the eighth of 11 children, born to Italian immigrant parents in Steubenville, Ohio. Luigi recalls that his father, who died before his fifth birthday, nicknamed him his “Valentino,” believing that he was born to entertain. The day Luigi was born, Tony, one of his four older brothers, was downstairs dancing and entertaining visitors; his father came downstairs and said, “If you think this kid can dance, wait till you see my Valentino upstairs.”
Luigi had an idyllic childhood, full of support and love from his parents and siblings. Of his older brothers, who he says acted more like four fathers, he was particularly close to Tony, seven years his senior. “Tony taught me everything he knew; he was a great dancer with natural talent,” says Luigi. “The two of us were always dancing, tapping and flip-flopping. We even wore out the cement in my mother’s cellar.” Luigi also trained with the McKean sisters in Steubenville, who taught a bit of everything—ballet, tap and acrobatics. There was no such thing as jazz dancing then, he explains. It was just called dancing.
By age 10, he was working professionally in nightclubs, burlesque shows at fairs and festivals and in local theaters. By 12 or 13 he was winning amateur contests and even replaced Dean Martin as the singer in Steubenville’s Bernie Davis Orchestra. After signing on with a local agent called 10% Charlie, he got bookings in cities such as Pittsburgh, Detroit and Buffalo. Tony was there every step of the way, encouraging and nurturing his career. “He even separated me from the girl who was my first love,” reminisces Luigi. “He thought my girlfriends were distractions who interfered with my career.” Tony still checks in on him from his home in Steubenville, asking after his younger brother’s health and wondering if he can still dance.
Tragedy—and Recovery
When Luigi moved to Hollywood after serving in the army in World War II, he thought he’d get his big break. “I didn’t want to be like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, I wanted to be another one of them,” he says. “I was good-looking and could do it all. I thought I would become a big star.” But fate had other plans for him.
In December of 1946, Luigi was riding in a car when a crash threw him from the passenger seat and crushed his head against the curb. The right side of his body and the left side of his face were paralyzed, and he suffered a fractured skull and broken jaw. After awakening from a coma that lasted several months, doctors told him they hadn’t expected him to live, and that he probably wouldn’t walk again, let alone dance. Luigi preferred to listen to an inner voice that said, “keep moving, never stop moving.” And indeed, the motto “Never Stop Moving,” emblazoned on T-shirts sold at his school, has become the mantra which guides him. He knew he would have to work extremely hard just to walk again. Shunning conventional physical therapy, which he found ineffectual, Luigi started to do his own exercises, which he soon discovered kept him supple and enabled him to have greater control of his body.
Through sheer will and hard work, he recovered and was soon back in class. “I was always in some class or other and took whatever was available to me.” He studied ballet with Bronislava Nijinska, Adolph Bolm and Eugene Loring, tap with Louis Da Pron and character, adagio, acrobatics, fencing and tap at Edith Jane’s Falcon Studios.
He finally got his big break when an MGM talent scout saw him dancing at Falcon Studios and asked him to audition for Gene Kelly in On The Town. He got a part in the chorus, thus beginning lifelong friendships with mentors Kelly and choreographer/dancer Robert Alton. This also marked the beginning of an eight-year career performing in such films as Annie Get Your Gun, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, White Christmas and others.
Birth of the Luigi Jazz Technique
“When I was on a set, I wanted to be good, I didn’t want to lose my job, so when a choreographer would say ‘Take five,’ I would get up and work out the movements and put my body in the right positions,” Luigi recalls. Gradually, people began to notice that what he was doing was helping him to learn and stay fit.
Kelly and Alton would say, “That’s great, Luigi, create a technique for that. That’s not just good for you; let other people learn how to do that.” Buoyed by encouragement from dancers, choreographers and directors, Luigi started teaching his technique informally on stage sets and formally in dance studios in the late ’40s and early ’50s.
In 1956, Alex Romero, Kelly’s assistant and a choreographer, invited Luigi to assist him and appear in the Broadway production of Happy Hunting, starring Ethel Merman and Fernando Lamas. He ended up staying in New York City to assist another choreographer and to perform in three more Broadway productions. After teaching at June Taylor’s studio, he founded his own school, the First World Jazz Centre. Since then, Luigi has directed the school with the indispensable support of Francis J. Roach, his greatest disciple and a well-known teacher of the Luigi technique, who has traveled the world working with him.
And He Hasn’t Stopped Moving
Watching Luigi dance belies the fact that he was the victim of such a tragic accident. The residual damage from the accident, however, can be seen in his eyes, which he hides behind thick glasses and under his signature cap. After three eye operations he still has double vision and cannot focus his eyes together. Luigi’s upright posture, straight back and the lift of his chest and head compensate for his poor vision. “Gene Kelly loved the way I lifted my face,” he says, smiling. “And I love how he lifts his head in the movie Singin’ in the Rain.”
Luigi’s confidence, courage and optimism are contagious. His teaching is his lifeblood (every class is a piece of his whole life, he says) and his students feed his soul. You sense Luigi’s energy the moment he walks into the studio. His classroom is suffused with his spirit and peppered with many Luigi-isms: “I’m in a plié, but look! I’m still going up!”
“Don’t worry what you look like, feel it and be one of a kind;” “Feel things, don’t just do them;” “Let your body become the sound. The stronger the sound, the more beautiful the music.” And one of his favorites: “The body parts are instruments put together by the heart and conducted by the soul.”
Luigi still teaches between two and four classes a day, beginning each warm-up with a simple standing position to focus the body. Next come the 24 arm positions he adapted from Michio Ito, a teacher he studied with in Hollywood. Ito derived his 20 arm positions from the Dalcroze Eurythmics method in Europe. Luigi subsequently adjusted these positions for jazz and added four more. Arm exercises were very important to Luigi during his recovery because, as he says, they taught him to pull the shoulders down and press the blood into the fingertips to rehabilitate his back and neck.
Following the arm work, the 45-minute set warm-up continues with stretches, pliés, frappés, passés, kicks and floor work. Students do the entire class in the center. Class culminates with a quintessential Luigi combination, inspired by the many years he spent performing in Hollywood, vaudeville, theaters, fairs, nightclubs, on television and on Broadway during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
He signals the beginning of each combination with “Ah 5, 6, 7, 8,” the preparation that teachers use all over the world today, and which he says he introduced. “When I was young and working in Hollywood, choreographers and teachers would give us a ‘da da da da da da’ or a four-bar introduction,” Luigi says. He explains that he began using “5, 6, 7, 8” as a coach and teacher because it enabled him to ease students into the rhythm of the phrase, giving them more time to prepare.
To study with him is to experience the aesthetic of the great musical era of George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and the aura of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Bing Crosby, Michael Kidd, Hermes Tan, Vera Allen, Cyd Charisse, Robert Alton and others. This is a world that survives only on the silver screen and in the minds and moves of the people who lived it.
At the end of a class during a recent workshop, students applauded, shouted and flocked to him as if he were a rock star. He rewarded their work with hugs, kisses and compliments. Participants of the two-week workshop included teachers from the U.S. and abroad, college dance students refining their Luigi skills and professionals such as Donna McKechnie, Sheila Bond and Liza Minnelli.
Minnelli, who met Luigi on a movie set with her parents when she was four, began studying with him at age 13. “Luigi stood up so beautifully, he revolutionized the way people danced in film,” she says. “His technique feels so great, it makes you hold your head high. After a Luigi class, you feel very important, like you could conquer the world.”
As for Luigi himself, he says without a hint of lament or regret, “I knew that I would never become a star with these eyes and this face. My passion had become teaching. It gave me a chance to become a star.” DT
Susan Eisner Eley is a freelance writer based in New York City and a former editor of Dance Teacher.
