Alex Magno Part Two – The Drowned World Tour Interview
Today we inaugurate a new series of exclusive interviews here on MadonnaTribe with talented choreographer Alex Magno, who is here for another interesting chat about the making of Madonna’s Drowned World Tour from 2001. With 2006 marking the fifth anniversary of that “one of a kind” tour, we chat with Mr Magno about how he got to work on his second Madonna world tour and the great ideas and choreographies that were put together with for this show, including never before heard details about the deleted number “I Want You“. Here is an interesting excerpt from the interview:
MadonnaTribe: Did you happen to work on songs that were never used in the final set list? It has happened in other tours…
Alex Magno: Yes, actually the was one song that they wanted me to choreograph and that didn’t make the final show.
It was “I Want You“.
Madonna was supposed to wear this beautiful dress and she was supposed to be on a stage that moved over the audience and they took the idea out because it was going to cost too much money and she was going to loose a big part of the audience so they cut that out.
It was going to be a really beautiful, statuesque number, with limited amount of movement but very grand, beautiful movement with a wind machine blowing.
It was really a great concept.
MadonnaTribe: Well in a way it reminds of the “Lo Que Siente La Mujer” number…
Alex Magno: Oh there’s an interesting story about that too.
They gave me the music one night and they said “it must be done for tomorrow”. They gave me the cd with the Calderone remix, which is in English. So the original piece I choreographed was done using the English version, they didn’t have the Spanish version yet. I was told Madonna wanted it to be a hot number with all the girls and herself.
I’ve been explained that they had this huge set opening up like a flower. They gave me a mock up to work with and so I went to the Sony studios in the middle of the night and brought in five of my dancers, not from the tour, and my assistant to play the parts. So we worked till 3 o’clock in morning. Then at 10 o’clock we showed the choreography to Jamie. He liked it and then I started teaching the dancers. Then Madonna came in to watch and she was like: NO WAY!
The number was amazing but she didn’t want anything like that. “I don’t want my girls to look like hookers”.
She just didn’t want that vision she said: “I did that already and I want something else”.
So that’s how the girls ended up being more “boy-like”. We changed it and made everything more statuesque, more posing. So that’s what the number ended up being. Originally it was 300% much more dance and movement than what we did but I actually like the final version better.
Please click here to read the full Drowned World Interview with Alex Magno.