Ask Charm La’Donna to choreograph a music video, and she might pop up in it as a dancer. For Kendrick Lamar’s internet-breaking “Not Like Us” clip, she created a love letter to Los Angeles street dance — and there she is at the three-minute mark, Crip-walking on a tightrope.
Ask her to host a dance competition, and she might end up grooving along with the contestants. At the Red Bull Dance Your Style finals — a street dance contest at which she was an M.C. this month in Los Angeles — she couldn’t help but get down on the sidelines, screaming encouragement to the competitors over her mic.
La’Donna, 37, is a dancer’s dancer. Specifically, she’s a Los Angeles dancer’s dancer. Raised in Compton, she grew up learning the region’s street styles while also studying ballet, jazz and modern. She still maintains a deep connection to the Los Angeles dance scene: She’s not just of it, but in it.
“Where I’m from culturally, you’re always going to see that in my movement,” she said in a video interview. “And I will never belittle my dancer side. Sometimes people can go, ‘Oh, you’re a choreographer now.’ No! I’m a dancer. I’ll probably still be up there dancing when I’m 60.”
Still, La’Donna has an impressive list of choreography credits. Her polyglot dance vocabulary has allowed her to develop a style that feels both authentic and polished. In the past year, she created epic arena hip-hop routines for both Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show and Beyoncé’s “Beyoncé Bowl” performance, each of which earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding choreography. And she’s just as comfortable in girlie pop mode: Her Barbie-inspired bops for Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” video — in which La’Donna also made a cameo — have helped the clip earn more than 213 million YouTube views.
La’Donna doesn’t shy away from work that makes a statement, political or otherwise, and she enjoys a bit of mischief. “I love doing things that people say you can’t do,” she said. “I love pushing and being pushed.” At Lamar’s halftime show, after he declared, “The revolution ’bout to be televised,” she had the dancers lock-step into the shape of an American flag; later, she staged a gleeful dance party around Lamar as he performed the merciless diss track “Not Like Us.”
Her irrepressible enthusiasm can convert even dance-shy pop stars. She “has a really beautiful energy about her and it is absolutely infectious,” Lipa wrote in an email. Though Lipa was dragged online for her dancing earlier in her career, La’Donna encouraged her to lean into, rather than away from, movement. Lipa’s 2023 “Houdini” video, which La’Donna choreographed to the hilt, can be read as one long clapback at the online commenters who had previously roasted the singer’s dance moves.
La’Donna “champions you with all her might,” Lipa wrote, “so much so that she makes you feel like you can do anything.”
Born Charmaine La’Donna Jordan, she started choreographing early — very early: She made a solo for her kindergarten graduation. She took dance classes at her local recreation center before studying at more formal studios and attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
Her mother, Debbie Vallery, was a stalwart supporter of her passion, “always going above and beyond to allow me to dance, because it was so expensive and we couldn’t necessarily afford it,” La’Donna said. “She did whatever she could to get me to the right places, the right classes.” (The two still live together in Los Angeles; during our interview, Vallery popped her head in to see if La’Donna needed anything from the store.)
La’Donna grew up steeped in clowning and krumping, the street styles that developed in South Central Los Angeles in the 1990s. But with her strong studio training background, she aspired to a concert dance career. “I definitely thought I was going to be in Alvin Ailey,” she said.
When La’Donna was 10, an audition with the renowned hip-hop choreographer Fatima Robinson introduced her to a different side of professional dance. Robinson, who cast the young La’Donna in a music video for the rapper Mase, became an influential mentor and confidante.
“Even as a kid, she was not afraid of responsibility,” Robinson said in an interview. “She was really skilled, but I also liked having her in my presence. I liked her energy. I liked her opinion. I wanted to turn to her at times and be like, ‘What do you think?’”
The two remained close as La’Donna, still in high school, toured as a dancer with Madonna. While earning her degree in world arts and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, La’Donna assisted Robinson with commercial dance projects, and began to develop her own choreographic signature.
It was through Robinson that La’Donna first met Lamar. Robinson remembered the two immediately hitting it off. “They’re the same age, they both grew up in Compton,” Robinson said. “There was a kinship there.”
In 2017, Lamar hired La’Donna as the choreographer and only female dancer for his DAMN tour. La’Donna not only choreographed Lamar’s impassioned 2018 Grammys performance but also danced alongside him, their connection a crackling live wire. She has since created movement for many of his projects, including his current Grand National tour.
“It’s just an understanding we have,” La’Donna said of her relationship with Lamar. “We have this similar way of thinking about art and what art can say.”
La’Donna looks for that kind of unspoken understanding when casting dancers, too. While some entertainment-world choreographers are known for their long, difficult audition routines, La’Donna said she prefers to keep hers simple. She’s more interested in good vibes than virtuosity.
“I don’t necessarily care that you can hit 85 counts of eight and 17 turns,” she said. “But I do really love working with kind people.”
The dancer Kiersten Kae Kruse hadn’t had much luck auditioning until La’Donna happened to visit the smoothie shop where Kruse was working. Kruse introduced herself, and soon after, La’Donna hired her for the pop artist the Weeknd’s tour.
“I guess she saw something in me that nobody else had seen yet — while I was making her smoothie,” Kruse said in an interview, laughing. “Charm kind of just knows who the good ones are.” (“She hasn’t been back to the smoothie shop since,” La’Donna said.)
That unconventional approach to hiring helps La’Donna build trust with her dancers. “Working with her always feels like a team experience,” Kruse said. Many of her choreography’s most memorable moments highlight the performers’ charisma, rather than their technical finesse. In a scene from Lamar’s latest tour that’s gone viral on social media, six women simply strut and pose around him, purses dangling from their shoulders, captivating in their casualness.
As her star rises, La’Donna particularly enjoys pushing and advising the younger dancers she works with. Mentorship, which has played such a large role in her own career, is a gift she wants to pay forward: She hopes to found a nonprofit organization to support emerging artistic talents.
“The Charm La’Donna empire, in a few years, it’ll be an empire of all the arts and how we can help the next generation of artists spread their wings,” she said.
She’d also like to add to her own creative toolbox. She has experimented with making music, and is interested in directing. But she won’t ever get too far away from her dancer identity, which has a magic that continues to thrill her.
“Dancers, what we do, we’re energy shifters,” La’Donna said. “You could be in a happy mood, but then you watch the ballet ‘Giselle,’ and ahh, you’re sobbing! Or someone could be upset, and you do a dance, and they start laughing. You’ve changed their whole energy. That is an incredible power.”
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