Dave Scott, who steered off a college basketball track to become, without formal training, a prominent hip-hop choreographer, mapping the moves for adrenaline-charged street dancing films like “You Got Served” and reality shows like “So You Think You Can Dance,” died on June 16 in Las Vegas. He was 52.
His son Neko said he died in a hospital of organ failure after a long illness.
Mr. Scott, who was raised in Compton, Calif., was attending Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, on a basketball scholarship when he went dancing one night. Little did he know that a manager of the rapper Rob Base was there, and was impressed enough by Mr. Scott’s gyrations that he invited him to replace a dancer who had dropped out of the rapper’s tour.
Mr. Scott was anything but a professional. He learned much of what he knew by decoding the moves from Michael Jackson videos and early hip-hop films like “Breakin’” (1984). It didn’t matter.
“I learned the choreography in two days,” he was quoted as saying in a 2013 article in The New York Post. “I left school and finished the tour.”
So much for hoops; Mr. Scott’s direction was set.
He went on to work as a choreographer for more than 20 films and television shows. His breakout effort was “You Got Served” (2004), which follows the dance-battle odyssey of a crew of Black teenagers from Los Angeles.
The climactic showdown at an MTV dance contest pits them against a posse of white dancers from nearby Orange County with regionally appropriate spiky surf-punk hairstyles. Playing herself as a judge, the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim advises the Los Angeles crew, “Get grimy and dirty — straight street.”
That they do. Their performances recalled “the muscular ballet style pioneered by Gene Kelly and Jerome Robbins,” Dave Kehr wrote in a review in The New York Times, “except that the pirouettes in this film are more likely to be performed by dancers spinning on their heads than on their toes.”
The film, which featured the R&B singer Omarion and the future “Family Feud” host Steve Harvey, grossed more than $40 million and broke new ground artistically, Mr. Scott told The Post: “It was the first time on film you were seeing a mix of B-boys and choreographed dancing in a battle mode.”
He also brought his talents to “Stomp the Yard” (2007), which featured the music heavyweights Chris Brown and Ne-Yo and followed the story of a street dancer from Los Angeles (Columbus Short) as he hoofs his way through the fraternity scene at a historically Black college in Atlanta called, yes, Truth University.
Among his other notable projects were “Step Up 2: The Streets” (2008), about a teenage dancer (Briana Evigan) trying to balance her troubled youth with life at an elite arts school, and the 3-D dance film “Battle of the Year” (2013), which also featured him as a dancer, about an American B-boy team going for victory at the international competition of the same name.
David Lee Scott Jr. was born on Aug. 15, 1972, in Los Angeles, the eldest of four children of David Lee Scott Sr., a plumber, and Evelyn (Rader) Scott. He graduated from Compton High School in 1990.
Growing up in Compton — the city in South Central Los Angeles made famous by N.W.A.’s landmark 1989 gangster rap album “Straight Outta Compton” — came with clear challenges.
“There are gangs and violence there,” he said in a 2008 interview with the site SixShot.com. “I come from a family with a few gang members.” But, he said, “I think being from the hood strengthens your mind and you have to determine the direction that you want to go in life.”
Growing up, he never thought of dancing as a career option. “Back in the day when we started breaking,” he said, “it was fun and nobody was like, ‘I want to do this for a living.’”
His thoughts had turned toward choreography even when dancing for Rob Base. “I just started adding pieces of choreography to the tour,” he said in a 2008 interview with Dance.com. “But, really, I have always been, from the time I started to dance, more of a creator, a choreographer.”
Along the way, he worked on tours with the rapper Bow Wow (then known as Lil’ Bow Wow), the R&B star Brian McKnight and others, served as a guest choreographer on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” and as a choreographer on 17 episodes of the Fox reality show “So You Think You Can Dance.” He also formed the boy band B2K, featuring Omarion, and worked with another, Mindless Behavior.
In addition to his son Neko, Mr. Scott’s survivors include his fiancée, Natalie Casanova; his parents; another son, Cy; two sisters, Antoinette Scott-Mays and Tamesha Scott; a daughter, Jasmine Scott; and a granddaughter.
Although he said he had never taken so much as a dance lesson, Mr. Scott took his craft seriously.
“A lot of people feel like they can get up off their couch and just do hip-hop,” he told Dance.com. “But in actuality, if you don’t know the basics, where it came from, then you’re stuck. You gotta know the core before you can groove it out.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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