Christopher Scott is baffled. “I hear time and again: ‘Musicals are not really my thing.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t even know what that means. You don’t like music? You don’t like dancing?’”
Many people who “don’t like musicals” will like the one Scott has just choreographed. In the Heights was written by Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2005, before his mega-success with Hamilton, and it’s set in the largely Dominican neighbourhood of Washington Heights, just south of where Miranda grew up in Manhattan. Now turned into a film, starring Hamilton alumnus Anthony Ramos and LA Law’s Jimmy Smits, it’s a feelgood story of identity, belonging and a secret lottery win, full of heart, rich with character and bursting with music.
In the Heights was a dream job for Scott, 37, continuing a long working relationship with director Jon Chu who, before directing Crazy Rich Asians, created the web series LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, about a group of dancers with superpowers. Scott loved putting steps to Miranda’s music and words. “What a voice Lin has, his ability to tell stories,” says Scott. “I grew up with hip-hop and when you hear Lin’s rapping, this is not your typical musical theatre rap – this guy is dropping bars!”
He used Miranda’s flow as a base for the choreography: “You use his cadence, his metaphors and translate that into movement. One of the biggest challenges was not stepping on top of that, because the lyrics are so important. You can’t miss a piece of the story to see a cool dance move.”
The score is steeped in Latin rhythms, as well as hip-hop, and there are more dance styles on screen than you’ll see in any other film, from contemporary ballet to B-boying to New York street styles flexing and litefeet. Scott himself started out as a tap dancer, busking on the streets of Santa Monica, California, and danced in the Step Up films before choreographing for TV shows Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance, as well as for Taylor Swift and Gloria Estefan. He was excited by the cultural mix of In the Heights, but knew it needed to be a collaborative project. “You have to make sure styles are represented properly when you’re putting them into the commercial world,” he says. “Doing this film I learned that salsa as a dance doesn’t really exist – it’s called mambo, but it got messed up when the music got commercialised.”
Scott wanted to do things right, so he brought in dancer Eddie Torres Jr to handle the Latin styles. “He’s a genius in the styles of mambo and son and Afro-Cuban, so he was educating me the whole way through and it was amazing to have this beautiful exchange of culture.” The ballet was given to Ebony Williams, “an incredible beast of a dancer”, according to Scott. Williams, who was classically trained, is best known as one of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies. Meanwhile, Emilio Dosal (“like a sponge for all the street styles”) did popping, breaking and house dance. Scott even used the specialisms of the dancers in the cast, finding one dancer was an expert in tutting – an elaborate finger dance.
They all come together in a major set piece, the song 96,000, where all the characters speculate about what they’d do with a $96,000 lottery jackpot. The number was filmed in an outdoor public swimming pool, the kind of place to which all life decamps on the hottest days of the year. It was a massive triumph of logistics, with 90 dancers in and out of the pool – from of a total of 200 dancers in the movie. “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” says Scott.
Scott is respectful of different dance cultures while also loving the way they can feed into one another and evolve – at increasing speeds since the advent of the internet. Once, on a trip to Trinidad, he met a dancer whose style he recognised and realised he was copying a routine of Scott’s friend, the US dancer Madd Chadd. “This kid has probably watched his YouTube video 500 times. It crosses the ocean, they take it and create something and then we’re looking at it back in the US and the dance just evolves. What these kids are doing now is insane.”
Video sharing platform TikTok has played a big part in that exchange. “It’s making dance accessible to anyone who wants to do it all over the world, who thinks, ‘I can copy that.’”
Everybody should be dancing, thinks Scott. “We’re all dancers,” he says. “Dance is not something you do or don’t do. It’s like an emotion, a feeling that we have: you’re happy, you’re sad, you’re dancing. When wars end, people go out and dance in the street. It’s powerful.” Is that what’s going to happen when this pandemic ends? “I hope the whole world does one big TikTok together,” he laughs. “I want everybody doing the mambo.”
• In the Heights is released on 11 June in the US, 18 June in the UK and 24 June in Australia.
