Step By Step

Choreography. The word conjures up images of intricate steps and flying leaps in elaborate TV and film musical productions, energetic TV commercials and pulsating music videos.

Choreographers will celebrate the best in commercials, music videos, short films, TV specials, TV variety series, TV episodic series, fight sequences and feature films Sunday during the 10th annual American Choreography Awards at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

As they prepare to honor their own, a trend has emerged: In difficult political and economic times, there is a return to feel-good fare and era-driven choreography.

"We've come through the whole Christina Aguilera bump- and-grind period, and I think we're moving toward more traditional American values in terms of straightforward Broadway musicals that will work for film," suggests Brian Gendece, a manager of top choreographic talent and an executive producer of the ACAs, pointing to the cinematic versions of Broadway shows "Rent" and the remake of "Hairspray" that are being developed for the big screen.

It could be argued that the most recent trend toward period choreography began with "Moulin Rouge" in 2001 and continued with the best picture Oscar-winning "Chicago" in 2002.

This fall, there are several films, most of them period pieces, in which music, dance and choreographers play a significant role. Among them are DreamWorks' animated "Shark Tale," which opened earlier this month; Miramax's "Shall We Dance?" starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, opening today; Universal's "Ray," starring Jamie Foxx as the late Ray Charles, set to open Oct. 29; Lions Gate's planned November release "Beyond the Sea," a biopic about '60s crooner Bobby Darin; and Warner Bros. Pictures' much-anticipated Joel Schumacher offering "The Phantom of the Opera," opening in December.

While projects such as these keep choreographers kicking up their heels, in reality, they are only part of what's listed on their job dossiers. It's just as common for choreographers to devise scenes of people walking down a street or a couple kissing in a kitchen as it is a spectacular musical number straight out of "Chicago."

"I read the script to find out the point of view and who the character is. Any movement — even a walk — you want to know what is going to be revealed of the character. The audience gets a hint, and later, it comes out full-blown. Movement has the power to do that," says choreographer JoAnn Jansen ("Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights"), who is working with director Cameron Crowe on Paramount's upcoming drama "Elizabethtown" to strategize the movements of some of the main characters, including Hollie Baylor, played by Susan Sarandon.

"When you're not doing a full-out dance, it helps to know what the director wants the audience to see. Cameron said to me, 'In your language, I want awkward poetry,' and I knew exactly what he meant," Jansen says, recalling a pivotal scene in which Sarandon's character reacts to her husband's memorial service.

The lords of the dance face a wide variety of challenges, some of which go beyond the scope of human movement — as evidenced in Warners' July release "Catwoman." Choreographer Anne Fletcher created all the feline paces of lead Halle Berry, studying videos of cats, their locomotive idiosyncrasies and body positions when they hunt. "I translated it onto the (human) body," Fletcher recalls. "Even her walk in the movie revealing her as Catwoman was something you wouldn't realize was choreographed. We worked months on that."

Often, a carefully crafted scene will only end up with a minimal amount of screen time, as was the case with a kissing scene between Berry and co-star Benjamin Bratt, where he pulls her to him and they move onto the kitchen counter, then roll together onto the couch. "(It) was a total of maybe five seconds in the movie," Fletcher says. Even so, her contribution to the scene helped turn what could have been a mere clumsy tumble into a sensuous cinematic moment.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the elaborate, cast-of-thousands dance numbers like the masquerade sequence in "Phantom." Choreographed by Peter Darling, the scene involves more than 100 resplendently dressed actors celebrating New Year's Eve, during which the Phantom disappears from the Paris Opera House.

"I wanted the number to have at some point a wild, almost hallucinatory quality, as I'd read about masqued balls being places of real abandon," Darling says. "We decided to do an upstairs- downstairs approach to contrast all the workers at the Paris Opera having their wild party with privileged society at the ball."

The dancers use fans reminiscent of the Phantom's mask to hide and reveal their faces as they walk down a grand staircase showered in gold-and-silver confetti. The scene's intense drama was matched only by Darling's experience.

"Due to constraints of time and money, I worked it all out with paper clips before getting the real people," he says. "We didn't get all 100 dancers until two days before shooting. If there is one big difference with film compared to theater or television, it is the degree of preparation needed in the musical numbers."

Preparation was also key for animators determined to make their characters move swimmingly in "Shark." They brought in Nadine "Hi-Hat" Colquhoun, best known as Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott's choreographer, to teach them all the right moves for their animated fish, especially putting a certain spring in the step of Oscar (Will Smith), the film's leading character. Colquhoun also lent her talents to the dance steps featured in the penthouse party scene and most notably choreographed the big production number at the end of film, done to the 1977 Rose Royce hit "Car Wash."

Using real dancers, "We went to a dance studio and chose a move for each character," Colquhoun says. "Then the animators came in and put it on camera."

"Shark" co-director Bibo Bergeron is pleased with the results. "Animation is all about rhythm," he says. "Even when (the characters) don't actually move, they have a rhythm."

Whatever the tale, for the choreographer, it's all about using dance or movement to drive the story.

"Sometimes, a turn of the hand or an arc of the head can say more than words," Jansen says. "Choreography is really storytelling at its basic level. In film school, students are often asked to make a film without sound; it's about posture, physical attitude. There's a reason that's the first assignment."