* Mia Michaels is a world-renowned choreographer. She was recently awarded her first Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography for Calling You, created in 2006 for Fox's So You Think You Can Dance. Mia has been collaborating creatively and as a regular columnist for movmnt since its inception. Mia Michaels: The Calling - first published in movmnt magazine "Got Fame?" Issue - Fall 2007

The calling in one’s life to be a creator is a huge responsibility to the world. There is no backing down once this realization of artistic destiny takes place. It is the commitment of one’s life, the artistic version of the monk. We are being used by God to affect and change the universe, shift the planet, and hopefully leave it forever altered. Once our calling takes place, it is our duty to respect, nurture, and dig into it so deeply that there is no other way of living. It becomes our life and our every breath. Everything we experience transforms into art.

Then there are those who choose but have not been chosen. They make it a career (a business if you will) and have a different take on it. It’s a different way of life. They do it for the love of recognition, money, and fame. These people operate in a thing called the entertainment business.

So many in this business have been successful without caring about creating their own voice or vocabulary, but just copying the great ones that have come before them. They constantly continue to repeat themselves without ever considering the reinvention of oneself, and without guilt or apologies. There is truth in both these worlds, they just have different heartbeats.We are now in a time of reality TV and instant celebrity.

It’s a time of mediocrity, not too much dignity or integrity on screens all over America. I am one of those so-called instant celebrities in the world’s eyes. It just happened over night. I dropped out of the sky and became a big-name choreographer with a face. The funny thing is I am just Mia doing what I have been doing for the last 25 years, but now I am MIA! Very funny and very strange.

The fame will pass. The show will close. The trends will change. What will remain constant are the true artists, visionaries, and creators, the ones that are called. They will stand as they are until they are gone.

I hope and pray to always stay true to my calling. A creator of beauty, ugliness, and worldly art of movement. I hope to be a constant because I am called.

Mia Michaels*

miamichaels.com

First published in movmnt magazine “Got Fame?” Issue – Fall 2007

You can purchase this back issue here: [quickshop:movmnt issue 5 - Got Fame - Fall 2007:price:5.95:shipping:2:shipping2:0:end]

Movmnt magazine brings via its online mini series iVAN, exclusive backstage never seen before footages from So You Think You Can Dance. In this 8th episode, iVAN takes you to a dance convention in Los Angeles, CA, where he meets Lauren Gottleib, Season 3 contestant. Lauren tells us how to “Get Famous.” Movmnt is proud to be the first and only one to bring you where no cameras have been before with the performers from all four seasons.

iVAN witch means i-Vision i-Analyze i-Network is an online mini series hosted by former So You Think You Can Dance contestant Ivan Koumaev for movmnt magazine. Movmnt, via iVAN, has an exclusive original look at one of the most popular shows on television.

Movmnt magazine, a quarterly publication co-founded by journalist David Benaym and season 3 runner up Danny Tidwell, covers Fashion, Dance, Music and Pop Culture together as a lifestyle.

Find more videos like this on Movmnt Magazine Network

Season 3 top performers from So You Think You Can Dance, Sabra Johnson, Neil Haskell, and Danny Tidwell discuss their reality in an intimate conversation with movmnt magazine.

Neil Haskell, Sabra Johnson and Danny Tidwell

Dancers stand out, even while simply walking. The fluidity of movement, the effortless grace, the confident and physically assertive gait, sets a dancer apart from the crowd. This is why everyone looked at them as they made their way through the restaurant. They make a strong impression.

I can honestly say that I had no idea what to expect, and they certainly surprised me. They made me, themselves and each other laugh a lot. They playfully bickered with one another the way brothers and sisters do. They would turn the interview around on me and ask me questions, and to my surprise, they were genuinely interested in what I had to say. Just visualize for an instant the scene: it is the end of November in Los Angeles, a few days before the end of the So You Think You Can Dance National Tour. Sitting around a candle-lit table with me are Sabra Johnson, Danny Ti dwell, and Neil Haskell, the top three contestants in the third season of FOX’s hit TV show, Kameron Blink – another performer from Season 3 – and Travis Wall, who was the runner-up last season, just like his brother Danny was this season.

Here they are outside Nic’s Martini Lounge in Beverly Hills, sharing stories of the many experiences and people that have led them to this point in their lives. These performers naturally made the evening fly, filled with inside jokes, mischievous anecdotes and priceless stories about their emotions, aspirations, goals and hopes. Sabra Johnson was named “America’s favorite dancer” on the finale of summer’s wildly popular reality program So You Think You Can Dance. Danny Tidwell was first runner-up, and Neil Haskell rounded out the top three as they competed for the coveted $250,000 prize and title of “America’s favorite dancer.” They competed over a nine-week period that challenged them in a variety of dance styles while the country dialed in each week to decide who would continue and who would be voted off.

As if the experience of competing week after week for the American audience’s approval wasn’t exhausting enough, immediately after the show’s finale, the dancers began rehearsals for an extensive US tour covering 49 cities across the country. When I met with them, they were preparing to perform a sold out show at LA’s newest venue, the Nokia Theatre. “It’s bittersweet,” Sabra remarked of the tour coming to an end in Reno a week or so later. “We all auditioned in New York, so since that day, since the callback, since going to Vegas, that’s been my life …we were here the longest; from the very first audition till the very last day of the whole show, the tour and everything. Since this has been our life for that long, it’s so weird to just wake up in December and be like ‘Oh nobody is here to tell me what to do.’”

Sabra Johnson on her Throne

Sabra, who has had the least formal dance training of the top three, suddenly got a mischievous gleam in her eye and added, “I’m ready. I hate these people,” before exploding into infectious laughter. It should be noted that she has the distinction of being the first female winner of SYTYCD. Neil Haskell, with his messy, flaxen hair and boy-next-door charm, appeared a bit shy and withdrawn at first, but then quickly opened up. He affirmed, “I love what we’re doing right now and for the past six months it’s been my life, but I just can’t wait to move on and do the next thing because the next thing will be just as good as this.” Neil, who began dance and gymnastics training at age five, mentioned that he has his next project already lined up. He will be working on the MTV-produced movie The American Mall that will showcase his dancing and acting skills.

Taking the show to 49 cities across the country in less than three months created challenging issues for the dancers. The responsibility of keeping each show fresh combined with the constant demands of relentless traveling pushed them to their physical limits and was emotionally draining. They admitted to having personal tactics that kept them motivated to perform their best during each show. Danny approaches his work with playfulness. “We’re always ready to have fun and go onstage and move our bodies, you know,” he says, grinning. Neil admits that “little jokes” are sometimes what help him keep his performance energized and fresh. “When I’m on stage I want to make the audience have as much fun as possible,” he remarked. “One time I tripped over Danny and I was like ‘Oh! Oh! Let’s dance harder!’” Neil, who has danced on Broadway in Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, made it clear that he is not a fan of the unpredictability that comes with live performance. “I don’t like it when things can go wrong,” he stated candidly.

Danny Tidwell in duel with himself

After ordering a round of drinks and appetizers, the three began to talk about the fan base they´ve accrued over the past six months. For them, it was hard to comprehend how many people the show reached until they were actually out on to the road meeting their fans face to face. “It’s cool that we get to meet [the fans] because obviously they are the people that put us so high up on this pedestal, so it’s definitely nice to meet them and say thank you,” Sabra acknowledged. Neil was humbled by the fans but admitted that he sometimes felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of people waiting by the stage door after each performance. “When you’ve got 400 people standing in line that you have to meet in the next 40 minutes, you can’t take seven pictures with each person, but it’s hard to say no to them. I don’t want to miss other people at the end of the line,” he confessed.

All three seemed hopeful that, with the tour ending and having had the exposure that comes along with dancing on a hit television program, 2008 will welcome many new and exciting opportunities. I asked them if choreography was anything they would be interested in and I was surprised when they said that was not something they saw in their immediate futures. “There is a difference between being a great dancer and a great choreographer,” Neil explained. “Personally, I don’t have anything to give to somebody that somebody else can´t give them, and more. There are other people out there who are going to be able to say ‘this is why you are doing this passé, this is how you are going to put it there, these are the muscles you are going to be using, and here is the choreography to go along with it.’ I’d rather be dancing.”

Danny Tidwell, whose ballet training at the Kirov Academy lead him to perform at age 20 with American Ballet Theatre, has a strong opinion on choreography: “It is a full-time job. If you’re a choreographer, you spend all day working on choreography. You devote all your time thinking, creating, working about it. And then, you go to sleep thinking about that. I’ve just been reflecting about dance, you know? How to make myself better as a performer for a choreographer. A really great one I love is Roger C. Jeffrey. I really hope to work with some great choreographers. Hopefully I can help some young choreographers. I’d love to do that, too.” Neil chimed in again to clarify why dancing was so important to him, “My favorite thing to do, dance-wise, is to take someone’s vision or choreography and make it … even better. If somebody allows me to push it and make it better in my mind, that’s my favorite thing, because you get to make it your own.”

At this point, I could tell that Danny, Neil, and Sabra were starting to tire of talking about their professional lives, and everybody was getting hungry. So after we ordered entrees, our conversation shifted to how they filled their down time while on tour. “We slept a lot!” Danny laughed. “That’s a lie!” Sabra teased. Danny continued in all seriousness, “We didn’t go to the movies. We ate, we went to the mall.” Sabra agreed, “We went to the mall way too much. In a lot of the cities there’s not much to do, so we went to the mall.” They also made sure to go out and sample the food specialties of each city. Sabra told me that Georgia has the best peach cobbler in the country. They also raved that Dallas, one of their favorite cities on the tour, had the best barbecue ribs. And while on the subject of food, I have to admit that I was surprised by how much they ate and wholly enjoyed their food. People generally stereotype dancers as weight-obsessed calorie-counting waifs, starving themselves to achieve the perfect dancer’s physique. I hate to dispel any myths, but nothing could be further from the truth when it came to my dinner with these dancers. They all had abundantly healthy appetites for food and for life. They were not afraid to devour whatever was placed in front of them as we went through a variety of appetizers and hearty entrees. Sabra, who had the most voracious appetite at the table, even ordered a gooey flourless chocolate cake at the end of her meal. It was clear to see that with all the dancing and traveling , they had definitely worked up a well-deserved appetite.

With all that travel and the variety of cities they visited, having settled on New York as their favorite city was a suprise to me. Although each had a few cities that they enjoyed (Sabra especially liked Seattle and Portland, and all three agreed that San Diego was great), it was clear to see that the Big Apple provided them with endless amounts of pleasure. They described their favorite spots: Neil for Hell’s Kitchen, Danny for Soho and Tribeca, and Sabra eagerly nodding her head in agreement with every location.

Danny Tidwell, Sabra Johnson and Neil Haskell

I was surprised by the diversity of their musical tastes. Danny admitted to listening to anything from classical to electronic. His dark eyes were thoughtful for a moment before he listed off some more music that inspires him. “I like the song ‘Bittersweet Symphony.’ I listen to the old Cranberries CD.” Sabra looked up from her decadent dessert and squealed, “I love them!” with a mouthful of cake. Danny continued by mentioning one artist he does not listen to; “No Britney Spears!” he quipped. “We listen to music all day. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep” he continued. “That’s the first thing I do when I wake up,” Sabra agreed. She listed her favorite artists as being Coldplay, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Naz. “Neil listens to Dave Matthews and Eminem,” Danny answered for Neil, who nodded in agreement. It was clear that they spend a lot of time together. “We finally got the surround sound in the bus working,” Neil exclaimed with a grin. But apparently not everybody got to play what they wanted to. Neil proudly established the situation; “No, no. Me and Danny are the DJs.” According to Sabra, if you tried to request something, you ended up with Neil’s retaliation of, “excuse me, excuse me, are you allowed in the DJ booth”

So what set these three apart from the sea of hundreds of other gifted dancers that auditioned with for SYTYCD? Danny asserted; “The New York audition was really good. We killed it. We owned the stage. When the curtain came up, we were just there.” Neil continued, “We were on it, and that’s it.”

When I asked them what guidance they had for other aspiring dancers, the three seemed to agree on one simple piece of advice; just dance. Neil had some additional counsel. “You have to come out with something that is going to separate you. There are a lot of people who can dance really, really well, but what did the three of us have that was different?” Sabra sang out loud, “A back split leap. I have a great layout.” While they were all speculating on the stereotypical roles they might have filled for the sake of television, Neil joked, “Sure, it had nothing to do with our talent …”

Your reality is your reality. Your perception is your perception. Whatever your truth is, it is. Trying to understand the difference between your truth and the truth of others that has been embedded in your consciousness and being is a great challenge. How do we honestly know the difference? Go inside of yourself…

The answer lies there. There are two types of life warriors. The leaders and the followers. Being a leader requires constant seeking of one’s own truth. Being a follower is simply just believing and owning someone else’s truth. What are you? What is your beauty? What is your ugliness? What is fat? What is happy? What is perfect? What is love? What is art? What is? Your perception of your truth is what is, at this moment, in this time, and most likely ever changing. Everyone being wired and divinely programmed differently has their own truth. Every truth is valid and perhaps it’s the complete opposite of others’. Does it mean it’s wrong? Nothing is right or wrong…

It just is. Right or wrong is merely just your own judgment and perception. Creating my own right and my own reality, and beauty on a stage or screen is my truth at this time. My own vision and instincts are what makes me…me. My timing, phrasing, and choice of vocabulary is my right. What is corny or false to me could be the most brilliant thing for someone else? Seek your own truth. Stand strong in it. Know it. Own it. Follow your gut instincts and never question. Your reality is yours and your reality is perfect! Remember, my writing is my own little perception, of my own little truth inside this big vast world of billions of individual truths. Perfect.

My reality is my perception of my existence…I’m not sure if my reality is exactly where I would like it to be…I wish I could see all the blessings I have in my life at every minute of every day. Why is it always so difficult to perceive reality with positivity? Always inadequacy…

I want to devour the true reality of my life I no longer want to be numb to my wondrous journey, anymore seems like all I concentrate on is what I haven’t achieved yet in my life or what I’ve not become as a woman or artist… What about all I have become and achieved? I believe there is another way of existing and its my fantasy of the perfect life. The funny thing is…

I’ve dreamt of the life im living as a fantasy… Now it is my reality…My goal and treasure is to learn to pat myself on my back, smile and exhale… And most of all to open my eyes to the beautiful blessed life i have been given.

Mia Michaels - miamichaels.com

* Mia Michaels is a world-renowned choreographer. She was recently awarded her first Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography for Calling You, created in 2006 for Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance. Mia has been collaborating creatively and as a regular columnist for Movmnt since its inception.

I never fell for once-upon-a-time’s and happily-everafter’s. I demanded a certain messy humanity even in the fictional characters that drew me into their worlds. When I was growing up, Disney had already evolved their fairy tale style into more contemporary films like Pete’s Dragon and The Rescuers. These socially conscious movies set some sort of foundation for me; their heroes dealt with war and peace, poverty, and other social issues. Fantasia also moved me when it was re-released for its 40th anniversary. It succeeded in conveying classical music to my curious mind, and beautifully interpreted sounds and melodies into magical dreams. Mickey and hundreds of new characters showed me ballet and rhythm in ways I had never experienced before. I will always remember the hippos taking a bath while dancing on La Gioconda’s Dance of the Hours.At eight years old I was introduced to Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince. I am from the south of France, where Saint Exupery is a local hero. The prince’s quest is very similar to Dorothy’s adventure in The Wizard of Oz, but with philosophical elements very much like those found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland.At age fourteen, I realized that real life personalities also had amazing stories to tell. I neglected fiction and turned my attention to hard news. However, I also discovered Messiada, a political novel that dealt with the Middle East. With an extremely well-handled imagination, author Andrea Soussan wove real news-making personalities into the story, and gave it a certain credibility and almost prophetic feeling. The line between fantasy and reality seemed thinner than ever to me.

A warrior of light [...] is someone capable of understanding the miracle of life, of fighting to the last for something he believes in and of hearing the bells that the waves set ringing on the seabed. [...] Everyone is capable of these things. And, though no one thinks of themselves as a warrior of light, we all are.

Paulo Coelho, The Manual of the Warrior of Light

 

It was only a few years ago when literature hit my reality in the gut. I discovered The Manual of the Warrior of Light by Paulo Coelho. I couldn’t believe it; it was literally as if someone had analyzed me for years and wrote about my personality, mentality, sensibilities, goals and demons.Then last summer I encountered a brand new phenomenon: when some of the real life people around me became part of a television storyline. It is never easy to write about people you know very well and interact with on a daily basis. So when we decided to dedicate this issue’s cover to Sabra Johnson, Neil Haskell, and Danny Tidwell (with whom I cofounded movmnt), we reached into fantasy to tease out a certain reality that many have not seen from them yet. The result is a magical photo shoot, as well as an in-depth conversation with all three filled with elements that TV viewers, journalists, bloggers, forums, and the rumor mill may have missed. Or shall I say, misinterpreted.Just as all of these stories and characters taught me about the wonder and beauty of life, movmnt hopes to bring the worlds of pop culture and the performing arts alive for our readers. This is why movmnt is launching Keep It Real, a nonprofit initiative designed to give back to the community in various ways. Look for much more about this in future issues and at movmnt.com.

David Benaym

Warrior of Light and Editor in Chief of movmnt magazine

The disease of instant celebrity in the post-pop era.

Text by D. Michael Taylor – Illustration by Laz Marquez.

Got Fame? The scene: A starlet, recently freed from a grueling 72-hour ordeal, careens out of a correctional facility parking lot and dials the first coke dealer she can find in her iPhone. Nothing can slow her down now. She is pissed but giddy over the press she has received. Stupid paparazzi. And the studio keeps calling leaving threatening messages with her manager. Can’ they see she’s having a crisis? No one understands how hard it is to be in the spotlight constantly, she thinks. Of course she parties a little, everyone does. She chuck s a fast food shake out the window, hitting an oncoming car. Fucking idiots. No one understands what she is going through.The unmistakable stench of rot and decay lingers over popular culture right now. Celebrity, once the domain of an elite (and elitist) class of hand-picked talent and well crafted studio production, is now mass-produced. How did we get here? When did fame become an end unto itself? The promise of unlimited access to the means of media distribution was supposed to even the playing field, allowing the cream to rise to the top. Everyone can play; everyone can hit the jackpot; everyone can be famous. Yet the very nature of fame is corrupted by its ubiquity. It is meaningless unless there are those less famous looking up to you. You can have 6,234 friends on MySpace and never meet more than ten of them. Fame is now the crack cocaine of success cheaper, readily available, self-destructive, and quicker to fade.

Illustration by Laz Marquez

In the 1950’s, as modern culture began its hurtle into the second half of the Twentieth Century, the idea of universal recognition took on a life its own. Advertising reached its artistic peak as grizzled Madison Avenue giants staked their reputations on buzz words and iconic images, creating the cave paintings of modern civilization. Everyday items like soap and cigarettes became more than mere daily necessities picked up at the corner store. They became brands. Loyalty to a particular product was demanded and won by catchy jingles, flashy images, and big ideas. Branding is now the de facto language of consumer culture we take it for granted but it had a mystique all its own when the Marlboro Man was born, or the Avon lady came calling.

Technology served as the driver of seismic shifts in the pop cultural landscape, first through radio transmissions, then through the cathode tubes of a television set. Television quickly became the dominant medium for popular culture, only recently challenged by the Internet, which is rapidly becoming our primary source for information and entertainment. The evolutionary leaps made by these communication tools altered the way that we interact with one another and the world at large. Radio connected us with sound, television brought visual life to those sounds, and the Internet broke through the barriers that prevented us from participating in the conversation. Communication is now a truly multi-media experience, and it is both empowering and chaotic. Information, as the cyberpunks of the 80s always said, wants to be free. But a beast like this one, caged for so long in the boardrooms of corporate conglomerates, is unpredictable and seemingly impossible to tame.

As ideas and brands became more and more universal, no one embodied the coalescing celebrity complex more vividly than Andy Warhol and his merry band of New York misfits. Love him or hate him, it’s impossible to chart the trajectory of celebrity culture without acknowledging his role as its poster boy. Even before the Internet gave everyone their own show on YouTube, this eclectic visionary saw that the future would be built on recognition and fame. Was he lazy and attention-starved? Was he a modern prophet, subverting the idea of fame even as he glorified it? That is for history to parse, but it is undeniable that he tapped into the coming zeitgeist in a way that will haunt us for a long time to come.

The irreverence and wit of his perversely repetitive silk-screens still has the power to haunt artists who work much harder than he did to perfect their techniques, while his estate continues to garner millions of dollars per piece. His commercial art background helped him understand the power of iconic simplicity and reproduction. His insistence on dwelling within a pervasively superficial world still confounds the very idea of art itself. With a dry, wicked sense of humor he foretold the age of tabloid journalism, teenage celebutards, and the nature of the Web itself. Everyone is now doomed to be famous for 15 minutes, even if it is only to 15 people, as the bloggy adage updates it. To be famous was not even a goal worth considering for the average citizen not so long ago. To be renowned within one’s specific area of expertise was rewarded handsomely for a select few, but the transformation of fame into a career in and of itself, commanding the attention of millions of people at a time for no particular reason, changed our world forever.

It is useful at this point to emphasize that these trends, by and large, are by-products of a much larger shift. The power granted to individuals by technology is changing how we interact with one another and may be a force for great good as well as great distraction and confusion. There is no period in history when individual citizens have had so much control over their environment. It is only human to initially fritter away most of that power mimicking one another. We are creatures of habit by necessity; societies would crumble and fail if everyone went in a different direction all at once.

Art and high culture tend to aggregate among an elite few, precisely because of the disruptive nature of self-examination. The creative life is often a lonely one, and the benefits to the rest of mankind sometimes go unappreciated until after the artist has died. So the revolution will be televised, printed, and posted online but not everyone is fit for battle. Now more than ever, those who have the talent to see and express what lies over the horizon also have the means to broadcast themselves to a global audience if they can find a way to be heard above the clatter and noise of everyone else. It is that pervasive noise, the incessant hum of fame-seeking, that presents us with one of our greatest challenges right now. The excesses of celebrity culture have reached an absurd plateau; vanity and self-worship threaten to undermine the ability of anyone to rise above the fray and share the beauty of true creative talent with the world. With radical freedom comes a new kind of radical responsibility, and we are clearly not out of the woods yet. Glimpses of originality and greatness, while not impossible to find, are too often drowned in a maelstrom of flashbulbs. We have an idiotic obsession with the daily minutiae of people propped up precisely so that we can watch them fall. Anyone can find a spotlight, but no one is allowed to enjoy it for very long. There is a bloodlust to tabloid culture, and we are both witness and actor in a sprawling melodrama of meaningless people doing meaningless things. We covet their lives while rooting for their downfall; no one is allowed to have the pedestal for longer than their allotted fifteen minutes. The true media revolution and its artistic potential is still possible. But we are in the primal phase of a new pop culture paradigm, and it’s spitting directly into our cameras. -

DMT

Got Fame?
From movmnt’s Editor – Fall 07

Whenever I pondered that question as a youngster, I always had a clear vision of what I wanted to do: to make a contribution to the media world. At a very early age I knew my passion for communication would remain a constant in my life. Journalism knocked at my door when I was eleven and never really left.

During my recent travels around the country, I asked quite a few teens what they want to be when they grow up. The frequency of the word famous was startling. What happened to wanting to be an actor, or an astronaut, or a fireman? Yesterday’s kids dreamed of becoming heroes. Today they just want to be famous.

I always wanted to be on TV but only in pursuit of my work. Fame, however, has become accessible to anyone, from anywhere, and, unfortunately, for anything. Even worse: sometimes for nothing. Our culture’s obsession with famous people has mutated into an obsession with fame itself.

Today’s overexposed mediocrities have finessed an odd combination of exhibitionism and vulnerability into a career. We yearn for a movement where talent and dedication take precedence over a thirst for stardom.

To be as respected as Rolling Stone, or as recognized as Time, are the results of great achievement. But like fame, they are not goals in and of themselves.

Pop culture is part of our heritage. The challenge is to raise the stakes and add to its legacy instead of recycling it. movmnt aspires to bridge the gap between pop culture and today’s real talent, and recognize artists over fame junkies. We aim to bring fashion, dance, and pop culture together as a lifestyle.

David Benaym

Published in movmnt magazine “Got Fame” – Fall 2007 issue