Her YouTube channel has more than 1 million subscribers. MTV has hired her to produce and star in her own reality show, "Going Off." More than a hundred and fifty eager dancers will line up just to get into one of her classes.
But why is everyone so obsessed with Tricia Miranda?
The 37-year-old baggy-pants-wearing, giant-hoop-earrings-loving choreographer from Yuma, Arizona, is a master of the viral video.
She uploaded her first class-combination video—to Nicki Minaj's “Anaconda"—in 2014 to promote her upcoming classes at The PULSE On Tour. It "accidentally" got more than 30 million views.
The former Beyoncé and Britney Spears dancer already had serious industry credits to her name, but clips from her classes at Millennium Dance Complex in North Hollywood are what have made her a star. They have even boosted the fame and professional careers of many young dancers in her class, like Jade Chynoweth, Gabe De Guzman, Aidan Prince and Kaycee Rice.
When asked what makes her videos go viral, Miranda lists four things:
- Her students: “The dancers are mind-blowing."
- Her music: She normally teaches to Top 40 songs, which people are searching for online.
- The film quality: The cinematography is professionally done.
- That party vibe: “We're all screaming and telling jokes, laughing, being silly," Miranda says. “I like to create a safe, supportive environment. I want my dancers to feel comfortable enough to ask questions and not feel intimidated. They can mess up, they can be themselves."
A version of this story appears in Dance Magazine's March 2017 issue.
The contemporary queen is taking on the most famous kickline in the world.
When you’ve launched your own company, become a three-time Emmy Award winner from your work on “So You Think You Can Dance” and choreographed a hit Broadway musical, what would you pursue next? Most people would think “A vacation.” But this summer, Mia Michaels will make her directorial debut as the director and choreographer of the New York Spectacular starring the Radio City Rockettes, a revamped version of last year’s New York Spring Spectacular.The show runs June 15–August 7 at Radio City Music Hall.
You choreographed the opening number of the Spring Spectacular. Now you’re running the whole show.
I’m getting my first official director credit—it’s really exciting! I’ve wanted to direct for a long time, and it’s happening. This show is huge. It’s a beast. But that’s perfect for me. I don’t start small, apparently.
What is your vision for this show?
The Rockettes have been around for more than 85 years and now they’re putting themselves into my hands. That’s golden. We’re creating this spectacle and making beautiful eye candy for the viewers. There will absolutely still be kicklines—that will never go away! But I’m excited to breathe fresh energy into it. My goal is to bring a Mia vocabulary into the Rockette world, and really marry the two. When a brand is this iconic, you don’t want to change it—it’s iconic for a reason. I’m protecting this little nugget while playing around with all the gravy that surrounds it.
What is the new story about?
It’s a magical journey through New York City, told through the eyes of a child, so it brings that fantastical quality of what New York can be. There’s a lot of dance, a lot of leg and a lot of original music. I’m bringing on a group of male ensemble dancers, so that’s a big change. The movement is all over the map, from the classic Rockette rep to more contemporary flavors. Not only do the dancers have to do Rockette material, they also have to do the physical and technical Mia work.
What are some of the challenges you’re facing as a director?
It’s so different from just choreographing because you have your eye on every team and every department. You’re looking at everything from the colors to the lights to the videos to the music. As a choreographer, you’re in your own pocket. As a director, you’re in every pocket.
Do you have any other projects in the works?
I wrote a book—an instructional inspirational memoir, if that makes any sense—called A Unicorn in a World of Donkeys. Everyone is always trying to look the same, be the same. This is about challenging yourself to stand out and celebrate it. It has a lot of stories from my life and career, but it’s not just for dancers. I’m also working on “Mia Michaels Live,” which is an online mentorship program for artists, dancers, choreographers and teachers. As I get older, I realize how much I needed a mentor when I was younger. Now it’s my turn to be a mentor—to be Mama Mia.
Any chance we’ll be seeing you on this season of “So You Think You Can Dance”?
Oh, I don’t know! I have no idea! But never say never. That brand is a big part of my life, so if Nigel [Lythgoe] wanted me to come back, I would definitely do it if the time was right.
What street styles can do for concert dancers
Marquisa Gardner spent the first 17 years of her life training in ballet, jazz and tap. In college, she began performing with a contemporary ballet company and teaching jazz classes in Los Angeles. Then one of her students brought her to a club where kids were dancing a style called clowning. “It was a major culture shock for me,” Gardner says. “I tried to mimic what the dancers were doing, but I was rooted with ballet technique.”
She was hooked, though. Exploring the new style helped Gardner improve her performance quality, and gave her a new outlet for expressing herself. Today Gardner is “Miss Prissy,” known as the Queen of Krump and one of the stars of the 2005 film Rize.
Though it can be tempting to stay in your comfort zone, trying different street dance styles could be the key to your versatility: You’ll begin to hear music differently, find new ways to move and expand your improvisation skills. Unsure about which to dive into first? Read on for a breakdown.
B-Boying: Improve Floor Work, Get Faster Feet and Learn Flashy Tricks
The first step to channeling your inner b-girl: Get comfortable getting fast and low. B-boying, sometimes referred to as breaking or break dancing, utilizes floor work (think head and knee spins), freezes, acrobatic elements and quick footwork. “It’s a physical style—you’re going to be on your hands a lot,” says Alex Welch, aka “B-Girl Shorty,” a Los Angeles–based instructor and member of the Beat Freaks.
As with many street styles, b-boying relies heavily on freestyling, so learning to let go is key. Nothing b-girls do is small—the movements are precise but explosive. Most of all? “A b-girl is strong, independent and kills it every time,” says Welch. “She never lets anyone tell her she can’t do something.”
Popping and Locking: Master Intricacies and Details
While the East Coast was break-dancing during the 1970s, funk styles—like popping and locking—were cropping up on the West Coast. Val “Ms. Vee” Ho, an instructor at Broadway Dance Center, Peridance and Pace University’s commercial dance program, explains locking as “quick, sharp, dynamic movements,” while popping is “a quick contraction of the muscle followed by an immediate relaxation.” Popping is a smaller, repetitive motion, while locking is a bigger, more external way of dancing. “Locking is swinging with the beat,” Ho says. “Popping is attacking the beat.”
Both styles require classically trained dancers to relax their spines. “Instead of thinking up, up, up, fighting gravity and balancing, think about dancing down,” Ho says. “The funk styles work with gravity instead of against it. The biggest struggle many concert dancers face is relaxing their neck and upper back.” Learning to maintain a balance between technique and release makes for a more interesting dancer.
Krumping: Develop an Explosive, Full-Bodied Performance
Although krumping has gained popularity thanks to “So You Think You Can Dance,” the televised version is slightly watered down. Krumping is almost entirely freestyle and rarely choreographed. It is a battle-centric style more than a stage style, and it’s one of the most aggressive forms of street dance. Instead of focusing on floor work and tricks, krumpers dance upright, with explosive arms, bent knees and pulsing chests. “Krumping is a fusion of African cultural dance and street dance,” says Gardner.
It’s crucial to fully abandon your concert dance roots in order to best explore the style. When Gardner first tried krump, her ballet training hindered her. “I couldn’t create the lines and embrace the dynamic,” she says. “With krump, you’re not trying to achieve a perfect arabesque. It’s about being raw and telling a story. You can be passionate and vibrant, and it should feel amazing. There’s no wrong way to krump.”
Having a hard time? “Give yourself scenarios,” Gardner says. “How would you feel if your boyfriend broke up with you? How do you channel your aggression? What about your passion? Express that energy in your freestyle.”
Voguing: Gain Cleaner Lines and a More Dramatic Presence
Imagine someone is taking a photo of every move you hit throughout a piece of choreography. That’s voguing. The form is about looking linear and angular to create shapes with your body. It’s precision-based, but requires dancers to maintain a fluid, graceful posture, while creating a dramatic picture with every movement.
Javier Madrid, known as “Javier Ninja,” says the key to immersing yourself in vogue choreography is to worry less about your lines and more about rhythm and confidence. “You can’t be timid. No one wants to watch a shy dancer,” he says. Envision yourself as a model in a magazine. “They look extended, like there’s a line down their backs. They’re dainty, but dramatic.” Madrid says everything vogue dancers do can be directly applied back to concert styles: “Your lines will become cleaner, you’ll look taller, more elegant—and you won’t do anything halfway ever again.”
From Miami City Ballet to Broadway—and the steam room
For most dancers, performing six nightly shows and two matinees a week would be the ultimate test of stamina. But for former Miami City Ballet soloist Sara Esty, she’s actually dancing less now that she’s an ensemble dancer in An American in Paris on Broadway. “I used to spend six to seven hours a day just rehearsing,” Esty says. “I never had to pay much attention to keeping myself in shape because I was dancing so much.” But while the hours may be fewer, the intensity remains. “The show is so physically demanding,” she says. “And it’s not just the dancing—the dancers do all the set moves ourselves, and the sets are heavy!”
Esty, 29, handles one of the show’s most demanding dance tracks and understudies the lead role. Though unlike preparing for a ballet performance, where “you’re jumping, jetéing and bouncing all over the stage,” Esty says she now just has to focus on having a strong core and progressively warming up throughout the day, leading up to the climax of the show: a 17-minute ballet.
On days without a matinee, Esty usually has a four-hour rehearsal before her evening performance, so she doesn’t always make it to a ballet class. Instead, she uses her two-hour break after rehearsal to rest and eat, then arrives at the theater 90 minutes before curtain to give herself a pre-show warm-up, which includes light yoga, stretching and a ballet barre (“it’s like breakfast—I can’t function without it,” she says).
In particular, Esty makes sure her ankles and calves are warm and loose in order to handle the show’s many shoe changes. “My physical therapist suggested a regimen to keep my Achilles tendons elongated so they don’t get tight going from pointe shoes to heels to tap shoes and back again,” she says. It includes pliés and tendus, and stretching her calves on a set of stairs, standing in parallel and letting her heels hang off the edge of a step.
Esty also tries to hit the gym about once a week. She warms up on the elliptical for 20 to 30 minutes, followed by planks, calf stretching and foam rolling. She started focusing on planks the summer before the show opened in Paris to build core strength, and has stuck with them. Her go-to move: holding a plank on her forearms or hands for one minute, then resting for one minute, and repeating three to four times. But Esty’s real motivation for hitting the gym? The steam room. “I’ll even go in between matinee and evening shows just to sit and loosen everything up,” she says. “Because by the end of the show, my body is in total shock.”
Breakfast: Hard-boiled eggs, fruit and toast with peanut butter. “And coffee, of course.”
Pre-Matinee Snack: A green juice from Jamba Juice
Lunch: A healthy sandwich, trail mix and dried fruit or peanut butter on a granola bar. “I love the trail mixes from Trader Joe’s—there’s one with almonds, cashews, cranberries and mini peanut-butter cups.”
Dinner: A salad with romaine, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, chicken or steak, and feta or cheddar cheese, with crispy onions on top. “I make sure there’s an equal balance of dark-green vegetables and good-tasting stuff.” She’ll also have a cup of soup, usually chicken noodle, kale quinoa lentil or beef stew.
Post-Show: “I give my body something it will love, like a Clif Bar, almonds, flavored ice-cold coconut water, or even leafy green vegetables and some steak, pork or chicken.”
Sweets: “I’m a sucker for a cookie or cake.”
How husband-and-wife team Keone and Mari Madrid found choreographic fame via YouTube
Photo by Little Shao, Courtesy Go 2 Talent Agency
Boy meets girl. Boy and girl start dancing together. They fall in love, create epic dance collaborations, go viral on YouTube, get married and perform together on Times Square billboards.
Though it’s not the most common love and success story, it’s the story of Keone and Mariel (Mari) Madrid. Often compared to commercial choreographers (and fellow husband-and-wife team) Tabitha and Napoleon D’umo for their sweet lyrical, hip-hop style, Keone, 26, and Mari, 29, have grown a worldwide fan base and become darlings of the urban choreography industry. Their YouTube videos have garnered several million views, capturing the attention of people like Ellen DeGeneres, who invited them to perform on her show.
It all began when Keone’s students at San Diego’s Culture Shock Dance Center filmed his combinations and posted them on YouTube. “I thought YouTube was just for comedy videos and cute kittens,” Keone says. “Neither Mari nor I uploaded our first video.” It was essentially because of those early videos that Keone and Mari finally met. After seeing their work online, the dance workshop Urban Legends invited both of them to teach in Temecula, California. Afterwards, Keone asked Mari to teach for Future Shock San Diego, a competitive crew he had danced in, and the pair eventually began dating. But it wasn’t until six months into their relationship that they began collaborating. “Our styles meshed surprisingly well,” Keone says.
Keone and Mari’s popularity surged when videos of them teaching together were posted on Movement Lifestyle’s YouTube channel (which serves to bring additional exposure to working choreographers). In May 2010, they conceptualized, choreographed and professionally shot their first video, “Smooth Operator,” which utilizes large-frame shooting in lieu of quick cuts and fancy angles. The zoomed-out camera lets viewers see the whole picture as they would during a stage production—Keone and Mari passing a single rose back and forth as they alternate between intricate footwork and seductive slow dancing.
Soon, Keone and Mari started posting more videos on their shared channel, and their popularity steadily progressed over the next few years. In 2013, their video to Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” quickly went viral after it was posted on Urban Dance Camp’s channel. “Getting a million views at the time was unreal,” Keone says. It prompted an e-mail from—and eventual live performance on—“The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “That was when we realized our viral reach,” Keone says. “From there, the jobs kept coming.”
At first, they were mostly booking teaching gigs. The duo teaches each summer at Urban Dance Camp and also gets calls from conventions and studio owners who want the pair to choreograph their family-friendly material on their students. “People call us and reference our videos,” Keone says. “Our work online is like our resumé.” They’ve also booked Korean pop videos and a Hyundai commercial and choreographed for “So You Think You Can Dance.”
“Their style was very smooth, very lyrical, with hard-hitting movements and creative storytelling,” says “SYTYCD” executive producer Jeff Thacker, who hired them after seeing the pair online. “But Keone and Mari had no egos, no drama. They created something that was still uniquely them and was right for the show.”
It’s easy to see why the world is drawn to their videos: Watching their choreography is often like watching two people fall in love over and over again. In their “Is This Love” routine, they portray an old couple, linking arms as they transition from basic step-touches to perky, interlocked or mirrored partner work. “We’re not just dancing together—we have a life outside, too,” Mari says. “A general person will be like, ‘Oh yeah, the married couple that dances!’ “ says Keone. “It’s an easy thing for people to connect with.”
Keone and Mari’s choreography became a hit in an industry where partnering is often basic and predictable—and rare. “Many partner pieces in the urban dance realm were very traditional,” Keone says. “The dancers would just do opposite choreography facing each other. We wanted to try and do something different with the technicalities and intricacies in our choreography.”
Yet that partnering remains wholesome and all-age-appropriate, in part because of their shared faith. “We’re both Christian, and there are certain things we don’t want to do,” Mari says. “This is genuinely who we are.”
Keone and Mari’s next venture takes their videos to a more personal level: They just opened a private studio called Building Block in San Diego. The goal is to offer private intensives to individuals or small groups. “Like personal training for dancers,” Keone says.
In the future, Keone and Mari say they would love to get into theater and film projects, or work with a musical artist. And they don’t plan to stop dancing anytime soon. “We’re going to be dancers as long as we can—as long as our bodies allow,” says Keone. “Even if that just means dancing together in our living room,” Mari says. n
Alison Feller is a freelance writer in New York.
