Yahoo Finance ‘The Color Purple’ Dances Its Way to a ‘Masterpiece’
When director Blitz Bazawule set out to reimagine “The Color Purple,” with music and dance as integral to the storytelling as dialogue, he knew he would need a choreographer with improbable range. Someone who, as he puts it, “understood movement on two levels: scale and intimacy.”
Fatima Robinson — fresh off Beyoncé’s “Renaissance World Tour,” who has choreographed for film (“Dreamgirls,” “Save the Last Dance” and more) and some of the industry’s most iconic music videos (Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time,” Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” and “Boom Boom Pow” and nearly the entire catalogue of the late singer Aaliyah) — was the only person on his list.
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“I found out that Blitz wrote me into his pitch [to studio Warner Bros. Pictures],” laughs Robinson.
“Usually a director picks his DP [director of photography] first. I picked my choreographer first,” Bazawule adds. “Fatima is a masterful choreographer when it comes to big scale — many bodies, many dancers — but she’s also really good at small, intimate choreography.”
The film, which opens Christmas Day, is the latest iteration of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the gradual liberation and awakening of Celie, a Black woman living in the early 1900s rural South, who is abused by her father and husband and separated from her beloved sister Nettie but derives strength from a community of women.
For his reinterpretation of the Broadway musical version of “The Color Purple” — which was first staged in 2005, with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray — Bazawule uses the musical numbers to more thoroughly mine Celie’s emotional life.
“You can go anywhere when you’re in someone’s imagination, it just allows for so much room to play,” Robinson says. “As soon as I got on the phone with Blitz, I knew we were making the same movie.”
It was a way for Bazawule to offer a fresh take on a work that has already been adapted into multiple successful forms, from Steven Spielberg’s 1985 Oscar-winning film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey (and produced by Quincy Jones) to the 2015 Tony-winning Broadway revival headlined by Cynthia Erivo. (Bazawule’s film is produced by Spielberg and Jones along with Scott Sanders and Winfrey, both of whom were producers on the musical.)
The film stars Fantasia Barrino as Celie, Taraji P. Henson as Shug Avery, Danielle Brooks as Sofia, Domingo Coleman as Mister, Corey Hawkins as Harpo and Halle Bailey and Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as the young Nettie and Celie, respectively. It features several new songs, including two cowritten by Bazawule and Nick Baxter. Dan Laustsen and Paul D. Austerberry — both of whom worked on Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water” — serve as cinematographer and production designer, respectively. And Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, who also worked on the original film version, returns as costume designer. (Barrino and Brooks reprise their roles from the Broadway production.)
Robinson’s work fuses hip-hop moves with world influences, including African dance and classical Indian hand gestures. In their early conversations, Robinson and Bazawule — who hails from Ghana and made his film directorial debut with 2018’s “The Burial of Kojo” — talked about how to use African dance as a storytelling device, so that the song-and-dance numbers lived within the fabric of the film.
“African diasporic music and African American music is built out of cadence, our stories are embedded in movement,” Bazawule says. “We were not going to make a musical where music just drops out of the sky, like we’ve seen with a lot of musicals.”
“We worked a lot to figure out how to go in and out of [dance] scenes,” Robinson adds. “It’s important that the choreographer steps out of the way and does not selfishly make it about just the dance steps, but how dance pushes the story forward. And that was one of the things that I think we did so well. Music, dance, movement — it all flows and works together; dance continues to tell the story.”
They used diegetic sound to move seamlessly between narrative scenes and musical numbers. “Huckleberry Pie” begins with the clap-clap-clap-clap of Celie and Nettie’s pattycake game; the first notes of “Nettie/Mister” are the clop-clop of horse hooves, and Harpo’s “Workin’” — among the new songs cowritten by Bazawule — opens with the rhythmic sounds of hammers and saws.
“We always knew that movement was going to be where our music was going to start from, physical movement was going to trigger sound, and that sound would trigger music,” Bazawule says. “And I think Fatima really over delivered there.”
Robinson, 52, has no formal dance training, but she has been dancing nearly her entire life. The oldest of three girls, she created dance routines for herself and her younger sisters, performing them at family gatherings and for house guests. Her churchgoing mother — a former college majorette at Tennessee State — would have liked her daughter to attend church, but Robinson worshiped on the dance floor. “It’s where I felt close to God,” she says.
(Music and rhythm run in the family: Her father played guitar in a soul band and Robinson’s son, Xuly Williams, now 23, studied ballet at Los Angeles High School for the Arts and is studying music and acting at New York University.)
Growing up in Los Angeles, Robinson danced in competitions on the club circuit and soon began landing gigs as a backup dancer in music videos. When she was 19, John Singleton cast her as an extra in his 1991 film “Boyz n the Hood.” And when Michael Jackson asked Singleton to direct the video for his single “Remember the Time,” Singleton asked Robinson to be the choreographer. She was 21 years old. The epic nine-minute video — more of a short film — is set in ancient Egypt and features Eddie Murphy and Iman as Pharaoh Ramses and his Queen, with a cameo from Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
At that point, she had toured with Big Daddy Kane and Bobby Brown and choreographed videos for Heavy D. But working with Jackson was her “big break,” she says. “That’s when I really decided, ‘OK, I can actually make a career out of this.'”
She went on to choreograph for a who’s who of chart-topping artists including Lenny Kravitz, Prince, Mary J. Blige, the Black Eyed Peas, André 3000, Meghan Trainor, Busta Rhymes and she became Aaliyah’s regular choreographer, including on “Rock the Boat,” the video Aaliyah was working on when she died in a plane crash in August 2001. She has also choreographed video campaigns for luxury brands including Gucci, Chanel and Burberry.
Rosie Perez recalls seeing Robinson dancing in New York City clubs when Perez was scouting for dancers for the Fly Girls, the dance troupe on Keenen Ivory Wayans’ groundbreaking Fox variety program “In Living Color.”
“In the New York scene, club dancing was a combat sport,” Perez says. “People used to break out in fights if they thought you stole their move or you were trying to get too much attention or you thought you were all that and you weren’t. It was tough. And the competition was hot. But Fatima had such an energy, it was undeniable. She was doing all the latest stuff, but she had something that was specifically hers, that you couldn’t really pinpoint. And that’s what caught my eye. And she had a confidence when she was dancing that she didn’t have when she wasn’t dancing.
“You can make up steps but if you don’t have a vision, it doesn’t really mean anything. You see that in a lot of music videos, that’s why so many of them are kind of boring,” Perez continues. “But the ones that have vision, those are true choreographers. And she has that. She’s always had that.”
Robinson’s process is highly instinctual. “I like to call it the magic. I like to come in with a vision, and then let the magic in the room flow,” she says during a recent Zoom interview from her hotel room in Denver. She’s on the road with Mariah Carey for the singer’s 13-date Merry Christmas tour.
Sometimes those visions come to her in her sleep.
“I dream choreography, I dream formations. I will see how the movement should go, the flow of the song,” she says. “The other night, I had a dream that I was with André 3000. We were in my car, he wanted to play me some music. But I turned down the wrong street and then as we were making a U-turn a polar bear starts chasing us. And then my left hand was in the polar bear’s mouth. I got the polar bear to take my hand out of his mouth and he ran off. Me and André finally got to my place. He’s playing the music, then there was a really loud sound. I went to the window to see what the loud sound was and it was an airplane taking off; the airport was in my backyard. I have not talked to André in probably a year.”
But the next day, he texted her.
“He said, ‘I’ve got a song I want you to hear, I’m ready to get into the studio and start dancing,’” laughs Robinson. “It was wild.”
She won’t say if her upcoming collaboration with André 3000 will include a dancing polar bear, but she adds, “When those things happen to me, it’s like, yes, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
The opportunity to bring movement to the images inside Celie’s head — her dream world — was what drew Robinson to Bazawule’s interpretation of “The Color Purple.” She had never seen the Broadway musical. But as a young girl, the groundbreaking nature of Spielberg’s film adaptation — and the female bonds at the center of the story — left an impression.
“It was the first movie my mom came home and told me and my sisters about. She said, ‘I have to take you to see this. It’s amazing.’
“I’ve understood this dream world so well,” she adds. “I was a very quiet girl growing up. And I lived in my head a lot. So I felt like I really could understand a character like Celie, a quiet person but someone who is seeing and processing everything. And those dream sequences allow for so much room to play.”
That doesn’t mean anything is ad-libbed. Robinson shot and edited the dance numbers so that Bazawule could see exactly how they would play out in real time. “I went in to the rehearsal room with the dancers and a skeleton crew and we filmed it, edited it and then sent it to Blitz, so he would actually get an understanding of how the choreography moves in the room,” Robinson explains.
One of the most imaginative and surreal numbers — when Barrino performs “Dear God” — also highlights Robinson’s facility for subtlety when the material demands it. Celie sings about her blossoming feelings for Shug Avery while walking on a giant gramophone as Shug soaks in a clawfoot tub set atop the middle of the record. For the number, Austerberry built a real working gramophone and a 22-foot vinyl record. (The only CGI element was the giant gramophone horn.) As the record spins counterclockwise, Barrino walks forward.
“It gave Fatima an actual platform to work off of, but the platform is moving in a counter-rotational way. So there was all of this very subtle movement. This giant gramophone is taking Fantasia counterclockwise,” Bazawule explains. “All she had to do was work her way clockwise to create these beautiful subtle movements. And then she slips off the gramophone and wakes up on the other side.”
This number and the ribald showstopper “Push the Button,” performed by Henson in a jeweled red gown and feathered headdress, encapsulate the range — Robinson’s facility for memorable visual and aural storytelling through both quiet and loud moments — that first dew Bazawule to her.
“I am a perfectionist,” Robinson says. “I watch everything that I do and I critique it. I say, ‘Man, I wish I would have put those dancers over there,’ or, ‘I wish we would have hit that beat,’ or, ‘Oh, wow, if only I had put the dancers on the stairs instead.’ I’ve learned to let a lot of that go. I don’t let it cripple me. But this is the first time that I watched something that I’ve done and I didn’t critique it. For the first time, I think I am part of a masterpiece.”
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