Tommy in tune

At first glance, the average-size redhead doesn’t much look like a ballet dancer. But in rehearsal, Tommy Rapley tells his actors what he wants, then suddenly leaps onto the stage to show them. And you think, That guy can move. Similarly, Rapley, the House Theatre’s director of movement, defies assumptions when he discusses dance and theater with a sophistication and an intent, unassuming confidence that belie his 26 years.

His new work, Dorian, “will be less like a dance-ical, where the emotional drive leads people to burst into dance just as people burst into song in a musical,” Rapley says. Instead, it will “move seamlessly between dance and dialogue, so that it feels not like scene-dance-scene-dance, but like one long arc of movement. And the moments that stand out are moments of stillness instead of moments of lift and throw. What we’re building to, then, is stillness.”

Well, then.

These are early days yet for Rapley’s career. But in his second directorial outing this spring, Ellen Under Glass (he helmed The Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz last year), Rapley impressed by imaginatively experimenting with something that’s all but nonexistent in the city’s mainstream theater: an integrated fusion of dance and narrative. “Creating a visual narrative that is also an emotional narrative is something I’m trying to figure out,” Rapley says.

Now he’s figuring that out through his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the titular character’s cruelties mar his increasingly grotesque portrait while leaving his own pretty face untouched. Rapley explains he’s after a dance-story vocabulary that’s “more emotional and visceral than words…I don’t feel like that vocabulary is really being explored in Chicago—or anywhere that I know of.” In his balletlike dance opera, as Rapley calls it, Dorian’s portrait will be embodied by an actor with masks; when he steps out of the frame, the pair’s physical wrestling manifests Dorian’s spiritual wrestling.

Lest that sound more head than body, Rapley explains (on the day before his boyfriend moved to Chicago) that as he shifts the tale from the Victorian era to the excess-basking 1980s, Wilde’s gay subtext will be in full bloom. “I feel like at the House we do something really beautiful with violence, but sometimes we’re scared of treating sexuality in the same way,” Rapley says.

If his work-talk indicates a fairly serious Rapley, chatting about his life reveals a lighter, fresh-faced side: “I love” punctuates his speech regularly. He loved ballroom dancing with his mom when he was a teen. He loved attending Southern Methodist University in Dallas on a full dance scholarship. And he loved the SMU theater students who’d become his fellow company members at the House.

But there’s one thing Rapley apparently has little love for, and that’s the Joffrey Ballet. After a senior-year stint with the Rockettes, who had him dancing in a big bear suit, Rapley graduated from SMU in 2001 and then spent the next two years with Ballet Memphis. Choreographing the House’s Peter Pan in 2002 convinced him to join the company, but he wasn’t yet ready to give up dancing. With characteristically low ambition, he figured he’d audition for just two Chicago companies: Joffrey Ballet and Hubbard Street.

Joffrey accepted him, but Rapley found the company frustratingly traditional. “It made me want to stop dancing,” he says. He’d known about apprentices’ grunt work, but he’d told himself, “I’ll do a year, and they’ll see that I need to be a company member.” They didn’t. After his evaluation (involving “other forms of personal degradation”), Rapley decided to replace his measly Joffrey apprentice salary ($250 take-home a week) with the much better one from waiting tables at McCormick and Schmick’s (“I love it,” Rapley says, without irony).

Since then, Rapley’s choreography has earned him plaudits (and a Jeff), but it’s the praise of a not-so-graceful actor that Rapley holds up as a personal high. Of the House’s Chris Mathews, Rapley says something that, for anyone who’s seen Mathews dance under Rapley’s guidance, is startling: “He was one of the most physically awkward human beings I ever met,” Rapley says. “I think the best review I’ve ever gotten was the review of Rocket Man where they called Chris Mathews graceful. I was like, My job is done.”

Dorian bounds into Bailiwick Thursday 3.