©Jordan Hall
“I get schooled everyday with these dancers. They try to teach me, but it’s more embarrassing. I can say that I picked up a little bit, but I’m not very proud of it. I used to take random classes here in LA — like at the Edge or Millennium, and go take hip hop classes, or a tap class. Now, I feel like I know everyone or they’ve auditioned for me, so I get really self conscious if I know that they know they’ve auditioned for me.”
So says the guy whose artistic eye is responsible for directing dance flicks Step Up 2: The Streets and the recently released Step Up 3D, as well as the popular LXD (League of Extraordinary Dancers) web series. Jon Chu may be a lover, but he ain’t no dancer…and that’s okay with us, because the man knows a dancer’s soul.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Step Up series or LXD, imagine America’s Best Dance Crew or So You Think You Can Dance, subtract judges and multiply by awesome. Chu’s skill lies in translating the advanced choreography into wordless conversation, intertwining movement and rhythm with sumptuous cinematography and…let’s just put it this way: if the Food Network can be described as “food porn”, then Jon Chu is the Food Network of dance.
Okay, so Chu might have put it better during a recent interview with Heed’s Antoinette Banks, “My language is film. Audio and visual storytelling. It’s how I get things off my chest; it’s how I express myself. It’s a bit like composing in a way, except there are visual and audio aspects to it. When we’re writing the piece, we’re composing it. And when we are shooting, we are performing it…editing it is putting all the pieces together. There’s a form of grammar to audio and visual storytelling. The more films I do, the more I get to explore that grammar.”
Given, the Step Up series has been critically panned for derivative plotting, but if you’re watching for storylines, you’re missing the point. Showing an artist’s touch, Chu delivers a visual feast of hip-hop dance – eschewing the stereotypical quick cuts for long shots and pans – that critics can’t hate. Even the picky folks at Rotten Tomatoes commented about the latest in the series, “It may not contain believable acting or a memorable plot, but Step Up 3-D delivers solid choreography and stunning visuals.” Chu himself brings up the disconnect: “…When we created these characters, and we’re trying to feel those characters with dancers, it wasn’t as compelling because writers don’t necessarily know dancers. They don’t necessarily know the newest dance and what’s being created. If you try to shove a great dancer in a limited role, you don’t get a great result. You might get a good result, but that extra spark doesn’t happen.”
And that’s where LXD came in; so full of spark the damn thing’s nearly on fire. “When…we started working on the…LXD stuff online, I came across these fascinating characters and so we reverse-engineered it. I went backwards and said, ‘What would be interesting if I made up a mythology about these specific dancers?’”, Chu says. Set in a world where dancers are equivalent to superheroes, the series delves deeper into dance – incorporating and interspersing ballet and contemporary dance moves into the gravity-defying hip-hop and break dance routines. Chu explains, “LXD has been a really fun experimentation in dance. We’re really trying to take dance and storytelling in a real organic way and LXD allows us to do that. We’re finding some really cool things that we’ll be able to focus on in Season 2.”
The first season launched on Hulu in July with new webisodes being released each week. So far, the only criticism has been a lack of females in the cast, a point that Chu hit on. “The reality is–we shot these [Season 1] a year ago. We didn’t have that much money to shoot them. We shot one episode in one day. The first season of ours [took] ten days and the girls that we used are The Beat Freaks. At that time, they were on America’s Best Dance Crew, and then they started touring. So essentially, the women weren’t available. That wasn’t a conscious thing. We don’t have dancers on contract, so, pretty much what we can get at that time is what we roll with.”
Pulling double duty as writer and director with LXD, Chu manages to tell a story with only the bare amount of verbalization necessary (usually using a sort of narrator to provide exposition), relying on his dancers to convey the tale through their acrobatic maneuvers and using those lingering long shots as the stage for their frenetic action. On his identification with the characters, Chu says, “I feel like all the fables. All the little fairytales that we tell are a part of my life as well. I write all the episodes, so they all are a part of me somewhere. These dancers…hit me hard [with] their art, their poetry — their dance comes from them. When I meet a dancer and feel something emotionally when they dance, then [I] try to figure out how that ability got discovered.”
So how did Chu discover his own ability? When asked about mentors, Chu tells us, “I had a lot of mentors through different stages of my life, but they have always changed my life in different directions, for sure. I would say the first real mentor I had…was my [3rd grade] art teacher, Mr. Blake, from Pinewood Middle School. He was one of those teachers who didn’t just put us in the corner and give us paint. He gave us access to clay and canvases, all different shapes and sizes. He really was someone who would do everything in his power to get it down. If there wasn’t any money he would just go buy it himself…I was never into the arts before that and it was the first time I was really given that freedom of expression and without him I wouldn’t have found who I really was. When I talk to dancers and other artists they all have that one person that allowed them to explore things through their soul that they never had access [to].”
While Chu was influenced by that first introduction into art, he continues to find the dancers to be his mentors and muses, and for that and for his success, he says he feels blessed. “I became a Christian when I was 17. My family wasn’t religious in any way, and I didn’t know anything about it, until I overheard a friend talking about a bible study on Friday morning. And I thought, ‘that’s kind of cool’…I honestly feel completely blessed. There’s honestly no way I’ve could come up with these things. I honestly believe that there’s a place we don’t know, where these dancers come up with their moves, that doesn’t make sense to us, but it makes sense to me. I don’t know all the answers and I don’t claim to know anything, really. I know that I don’t know. I love the journey of discovering…discovering what I don’t know…I’ve gone up and down in my faith so many times in my life. Especially coming from [being a part of] the media. We decide what you like and what you don’t like. We feel a little bit like the wizard beyond the curtain and that’s scary. I try not to view everything in the world like that because it’s dangerous. Every time I’ve thought I’ve known, I look back and realize how stupid I was. It’s a journey, and I think that’s ok. The day that I don’t question what I know is the day I’m in trouble.”
©Jordan Hall
