It sounds impossibly daunting: Choreograph a music video that dances through hundreds of years of art, movie and theater history. Channel everything from Pre-Raphaelite paintings to Busby Berkeley musicals to doo-wop girl groups. Make it all look polished, yet effortless. Also? It’s for Taylor Swift.
But Mandy Moore was undaunted by the “Fate of Ophelia” video, which came out this month. She is the choreographer who set Swift’s many varied eras in motion on the Eras Tour, after all. Moore’s capable hands were able to weave the diverse dance references of “Ophelia” into a seamless whole.
It’s hard to think of a dance Moore, 49, couldn’t choreograph — in any part of the entertainment business. During her three-decade career she has created charming routines for movies including “La La Land” and “Silver Linings Playbook” and television shows including “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Dancing With the Stars.” She has made dance numbers for the Grammys, the Emmys, the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, among them last year’s “I’m Just Ken” extravaganza.
Recently, she has ventured into musical theater and opera, choreographing the Broadway-bound “Dolly: A True Original Musical” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” at the Metropolitan Opera.
The director Bartlett Sher, who worked with Moore on “Dolly” and “Kavalier & Clay,” said in an interview: “Mandy can translate every predicament or joyful moment that we have as human beings into movement. There’s almost no problem she can’t help solve, and her work will always elevate the thing — any thing.”
Moore’s versatility has roots in her early training. Growing up in Colorado, she studied both ballet and breaking, an unusual combination. “The polarity of those two styles helped define so much of my dance world,” she said. “I was like, Oh, dance can be anything — from ballet’s very clean and shape-driven approach to a more freestyle athleticism, where you can just respond to the music in the way that feels natural.”
Despite Moore’s wide-ranging success, few outside the dance world know who she is, an unfortunately common plight for choreographers. (In Moore’s case, it’s exacerbated by the fact that she is often confused with the actress Mandy Moore; her Instagram handle is @nopenother, as in, “Nope, not her.”)
Moore is a vocal member of the recently formed Choreographers Guild — the labor organization for choreographers working in entertainment — and has campaigned throughout her career for better recognition and compensation for commercial dancemakers. Last year there was a small win on that front: She was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has fewer than 10 choreographers among its more than 10,000 members.
In a video interview between rehearsals and meetings, Moore discussed her approach to choreography across genres. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You’ve earned a reputation as a celebrity whisperer. How do you teach stars to dance?
The nature of this job is that I’m often seeing people — not just celebrities, everyone — in very vulnerable positions. Dance is so vulnerable, and that feeling is only magnified by how famous the person is. Some of these artists have been sort of traumatized by dance. And so I end up as a kind of dance therapist.
A lot of it is really just getting in a room and being like, “Look, here’s this thing that I love, and you can love it too!” Teach them the love first and the steps later.
It seems like Taylor Swift, in particular, has become a more confident dancer since you started working together. How did you help her?
She’d gotten a bad rap for a long time about her dancing, so she was really in her head. We shifted the focus to how movement was already manifesting in her body — the way she naturally wanted to move. And then we fine-tuned that: “OK, that looks a little weird with your shoulders,” or, “Let’s straighten your knee here.”
I really admire Taylor’s tenacity. She works so hard. Whatever I was putting down, she was picking up. And she’s very clear about what she wants, which I love. I find I can’t create unless I have some parameters. The “do whatever you want” thing, for me, it just feels like chaos.
You’ve been doing more live theater recently. Has that always been a dream of yours?
I come from a theater family — my mom was an actress and director, my dad was an actor — so I grew up around all of that. But I never really pursued it. It happened kind of organically over the last couple of years.
The process in theater is so different than in the commercial space. The time is so different! You have what feels to me like 100 years to do everything. I do enjoy working with theater people who look at dance from the perspective of character and story first, instead of just having dancers as shiny happy people in the back somewhere. I like that headier part of it.
It doesn’t get much headier than the Metropolitan Opera House.
The Met is great because they have a very particular way they do things. Again, I love systems! So they’d say, “Mandy, you have four days with four hours each to get these things done.” And I’d be like, yes, OK — I need to do the dancing for this party scene here, I need to do some cool comic-book-style movement here. Most of the time, I felt right in my lane.
One of your breakthrough moments was the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance,” which was also a breakthrough moment for dance on television. What was that like?
I was lucky enough to be in the very first meetings about that show, talking about how we could spotlight the talent of amateur dancers, the nuts and bolts of the format. And then I got to see how it not only put a spotlight on dancers, but also started to put the word “choreographer” into mainstream culture.
Even the idea that we’d be named in the pretaped packages they’d air before the performances, or that the camera would cut to the choreographer in the audience sometimes — that was huge.
It’s pretty rare for dance artists to move between the worlds of commercial art and high art. How are those environments different?
Sometimes, when I walk into a room that is quote-unquote “high art,” I can feel that people are like, “Oh, what’s Mandy doing over here?” But that’s usually dispelled within the first 10 seconds of rehearsal. When you get into the actual work of creating, it doesn’t matter what medium you’re in — you’re always in some dingy studio with a weird mirror and people are sweating and everyone’s a little confused and asking lots of questions.
The mess of making is exactly the same, whether it’s an opera or a commercial for Nike. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.
Now that you’ve worked in all these different media, is there one that feels most like home?
I think I feel at home everywhere. I want to be able to have the whole, like, pizza of my career. If I just have one slice for too long, I start to feel stagnant.
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