Awesome Dance

Damien Jalet is renowned for his artful choreography of the human form. If you haven’t seen his work in Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Anima, you must. His 2015 collab with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan, Gravity Fatigue, featured a troupe of dancers working in perfect sync so they look like freeze frames from the same movement.

Dancer Maikon Alves can do the robot about as well as anyone we’ve seen. In this clip, he shows off his android-like moves set to a laughter-filled track called HAHAHA, which only serves to make his precise moves and facial expressions creepier. Can’t get enough? Here you go.

Some may dismiss the use of generative AI for creating art, but in the hands of the right person, it can be used to create things none of us imagined possible. Filmmaker James Gerde used AI tech to help create animations that imagine humans if they were made of noodles. Each clip is based on footage of talented dancers, and Gerde made them into pasta.

Shadow Ace wowed the judges and audience on America’s Got Talent Season 18 but failed to make the finals. He made the cut on the show’s 2024 Fantasy League, and we think he deserves top price for his immense shadow puppetry talent, as demonstrated in this spirited performance of A$AP Ferg’s and Nikki Minaj’s Plain Jane.

If you spend any time on TikTok or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the Pimp Named Slickback dance craze. Originated by Jubi2fye, the crazy gliding foot move has blown up with dancers around the world. Now, variants of the fancy footwork have started to emerge, and this brain-bending version posted by he02445300 is on a whole other level.

Lại Trần Ninh Kiềm, aka Killusion, is a Vietnamese performer who combines laser light shows with dance. In this brief video, you’ll get a small taste of his skills with a routine choreographed to Arius’ remix of Blinding Lights. Check out Killusion on Instagram and Tik Tok for more great performances, including Laserman.

We’ve heard some pretty fantastic performances on the marimba over the years, but these guys from Zimbabwe’s Hillcrest College Marimba Band have got way more flair. Here’s a video of the spirited performance that won them the 2017 Marimba Cup Challenge. Here’s footage from another one of their shows.

Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films wows us with another amazing short film. The stop-motion clip was made by capturing live breakdance footage, mapping the frames into outlines, laser cutting each from wood, then layering the 800+ pieces to create a motion effect.

During the 2022 Grammys, J Balvin and a crew of dancers brought down the house with a performance of the Skrillex collab In Da Ghetto. Choreographer Sadeck Waff shared this rehearsal footage which gives us a better look at the precision moves, and the impressive sequence that they staged in just two days.

Fashion design house Burberry celebrates its love of the outdoors, discovering new places, and its FW21 collection with a wild and inventive short film. Using a mix of live-action and VFX trickery, the film places its performers in a surreal world where they can fly through the air like skydivers, but without jumping out of an airplane.

The follow-up to Sila Sveta’s award-winning performance art piece Levitation goes beyond the boundaries of the original, growing this dancer’s environment from the limits of a small, projection-mapped stage into an expansive digital stage. Stick around to the end for the behind-the-scenes footage.

Writer/Director/Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall’s wonderfully creative short film does a great job capturing the feeling you get when you’re stuck in traffic in a New York City taxi cab, and start to think it might be faster to get out and walk… or dance to your destination.

This mindbending dance performance comes from Yoann Bourgeois, who’s famous for deeply integrating scenery into his choreography. This footage, from the 2016 performance Celui qui tombe, features a troupe of six talented dancers as they move and balance to stay upright on a rapidly-spinning platform.

This short dance film by THÉORIZ pulls off some impressive visuals, given the fact that all of its effects were shot in-camera, with no green screen or post-production. They achieved their mixed reality illusion using motion tracking synchronized with real-time projected imagery. Behind the scenes here (turn captions on.)

Director Jack Antoine Charlot’s music video for S+C+A+R+R’s groovin’ dance track features a singular character with some mad dance moves. Because the motion is so incredibly smooth, it’s hard to tell where the CGI animation and live dancer begin and end. Remember, now is a great time to perfect your own choreography at home.

The members of Japan’s electro-pop band and dance crew World Order may have changed over the years, but they’ve still got amazing choreography, as is proven by their latest video, which includes some new moves, along with their crowd favorite robotic walk.