Even a look at Kyle Hanagami’s resumé is sufficient to depart you in need of breath. The 37-year-old choreographer has labored with everybody from Jennifer Lopez to Alicia Keys to Ariana Grande to BLACKPINK. He created the dances for this 12 months’s box-office smash Imply Ladies. And he’s amassed almost 8 million followers and greater than a billion video views on his social media accounts.
“On no account did it occur in a single day,” he says. “It took years and years of laborious work.”
That arduous work is clear all through Hanagami’s on-line presence, however particularly on his phenomenally common YouTube channel. Hanagami has harnessed the platform’s energy in a singularly savvy means—and in doing so, has gained not simply hundreds of thousands of followers but in addition a faithful inside circle of colleagues and collaborators.
An Surprising Starting
Kyle Hanagami. Photograph courtesy Hanagami.
A profession in dance wasn’t on Hanagami’s radar rising up. “I didn’t even know what a choreographer was,” he remembers. Throughout his freshman 12 months as a psychology and economics main on the College of California, Berkeley, Hanagami auditioned for the college’s hip-hop group for enjoyable. Due to his innate musicality and sense of rhythm, he ended up making the lower.
What began as an off-the-cuff dedication quickly changed into one thing extra severe: “I fell in love with it,” he says. Hanagami returned to his native Los Angeles in 2010, constructed up his YouTube channel, and leaned into all alternatives that got here his means, together with dancing for the Black Eyed Peas and choreographing for “The X Issue.” “There was no roadmap again then,” he says. “I needed to learn to navigate a quickly altering dance panorama.”
Leveling Up
Hanagami rapidly established himself as a choreographic drive. His distinct motion vocabulary, ample with musical thrives and syncopation, drew dancers in droves to his lessons at Millennium Dance Complicated and Motion Way of life in Los Angeles. His sleekly edited YouTube content material—which, early on, included not simply choreography movies but in addition a glance into the lifetime of an expert dance artist—even caught the attention of a variety of administrators and actors, lots of whom reached out to pursue collaborations. “YouTube has been instrumental to my profession and cross-pollinating totally different elements of my skilled life,” Hanagami says.
Finally he was choreographing for stars like Jennifer Lopez and productions together with “Dancing with the Stars.” Whereas the tasks stored coming, Hanagami was looking forward to a distinct kind of problem. “I typically got here in midway by a musician’s profession, so I didn’t have an effect on who they have been as an artist,” he says. “I actually wished to be concerned from the start.”
Enter BLACKPINK, broadly thought of essentially the most profitable woman group in Ok-pop. BLACKPINK tapped Hanagami as their choreographer in 2016—a time when “they hadn’t even launched a track,” he says. He’s labored with the group ever since, choreographingmusicmovies which were considered by billions of individuals across the globe. “It’s been really- gratifying to see how far they’ve come, and in addition see the affect my choreography has had on shaping their total imaginative and prescient,” he says.
Kyle Hanagami and Jaquel Spivey on the set of Imply Ladies. Photograph by JoJo Whilden, courtesy Paramount Photos (Imply Ladies is now on digital and Blu-ray).
In 2023, Hanagami signed onto Imply Ladies, the film musical adaptation of the Broadway manufacturing, each primarily based on Tina Fey’s hit comedy from 2004. Placing a contemporary spin on a beloved traditional “actually pressured me to suppose exterior of the field,” Hanagami says. “It was such a inventive problem and took my profession in a course I didn’t suppose was attainable.” That course? A credit score line as a second unit director (he led a secondary digital camera and crew throughout filming)—and, because of this, admission to the Administrators Guild of America.
Folks First, Dancers Second
The throughline in Hanagami’s in depth resumé is his capacity to know folks. “Even in fast-paced, high-pressure circumstances, I really like working with Kyle,” says actress Ashley Park, who originated the function of Gretchen in Imply Ladies on Broadway and has labored with Hanagami on a Skechers marketing campaign, in addition to certainly one of his viral movies. “He’s a pure director and visionary in relation to prioritizing storytelling, whereas elevating the spirits of everybody concerned.”
Earlier than exploring the choreography, Hanagami likes to discover the artist’s character. “I wish to know their strengths and their weaknesses,” he says. “All of this helps me make a connection earlier than we work collectively in an expert setting.”
A Potential Pivot
As his profession continues to growth, Hanagami has his sights set on a future within the director’s chair. “Directing seems like the subsequent frontier for me,” he says. As an skilled video editor (because of all these years on YouTube), a newly minted member of the DGA, and a mentee of the choreographer-directors Adam Shankman and Kenny Ortega, Hanagami is nicely positioned to make a splash within the movie business.
Kyle Hanagami within the zone on the Imply Ladies set. Photograph by JoJo Whilden, courtesy Paramount Photos (Imply Ladies is now on digital and Blu-ray).
However choreography received’t essentially take a backseat. “I’ll nonetheless work on tasks that contact dance ultimately,” he says. That features choreographing for the present season of “So You Suppose You Can Dance.”
“All the pieces I’ve completed up till this level—from my video-editing expertise to my love for psychology—has ready me for this,” Hanagami says. “I really feel greater than prepared.”
The Firm He Retains
“If I have been to provide one piece of recommendation to somebody within the leisure business, it’d be to encompass your self with good folks,” Hanagami says. Charlize Glass, an expert dancer who labored with Hanagami on Imply Ladies and has taken his lessons for 13 years, says he lives by that recommendation himself. “Kyle creates an setting that’s in contrast to the rest, largely due to the assistants round him,” Glass says. “It makes the work a lot extra pleasant.”
A kind of folks is Hanagami’s shut good friend and collaborator, Haley Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald first crossed paths with Hanagami greater than a decade in the past and has been a fixture in his social media content material {and professional} tasks. “Collaborating with Kyle is like piecing a puzzle collectively—the mix of his technical eye and my dancing works actually properly,” she says.
Kyle Hanagami, digital camera operator Ari Robbins, and Haley Fitzgerald engaged on Imply Ladies. Photograph courtesy Hanagami.
Hanagami refers to Fitzgerald as his “proper hand.” “I similar to her as a human, and I wish to be round her,” he says. “While you gel with somebody like that, it makes the work higher.”
All the time Advocating
A prolific creator, Hanagami is a vocal proponent of choreographic copyright. He has secured copyrights for almost all of his choreographic work, and lately pursued his personal lawsuit in opposition to Epic Video games and the online game Fortnite, during which he claimed that the corporate stole his copyrighted strikes.
“I’m so enthusiastic about this as a result of choreographers are sometimes ladies, or come from marginalized communities, or are folks of coloration—systemically, it’s nearly a on condition that they’ll be taken benefit of,” he says. “I’m fortunate sufficient to be ready the place I can maintain different events accountable.”
Hanagami brings that very same ardour for advocacy to his work as a vp of the Choreographers Guild, the labor union for choreographers within the leisure business. On the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he remembers Zoom conferences the place it turned clear that he and his Guild colleagues have been all dealing with comparable issues throughout the business. “As choreographers, we hardly ever work on tasks collectively. We’re normally on our personal island,” he says. “However by our conversations, we’ve been in a position to set up what choreographers need and deserve, and the right way to get there.”
