Dance, music, and spoken word all play a major role in Stars’ “Blindspotting.”
The series was created by Rafael Casale and David Diggs, who wrote, produced, and starred in the original film, and it was picked up six months after the film’s schedule. Ashley, played by Jasmine Cephas Jones, and Miles (Casall) — her 12-year partner and father of their son — struggle in prison, and are forced to move in with Miles’ mother and half-sister.
Choreographer John Boggs, who has worked with partner Lil Buck on the show’s dance miniseries, says the show proves there are no limits to what street dance can do. Boogz says, “Our life goal is to change people’s perception of what dance art will look like and the stories it can tell.”
Boogz is particularly proud of the sequence that Buck and Buck worked on during episode four, “The Four Hustlateers,” a dance depicting the friendship between Colin Miles and Diggs, set inside a house. The episode is steeped in nostalgia as Ashley, Janelle (Candice Nicholas Lippmann), Renee (Helen Hunt), and Earl (Benjamin Earl Turner) are remembered, primarily through the lens of their teenage years. It’s finally a tribute to the movie.
“It wasn’t a scripted scene at first, we pulled Rafa into the room,” Boggs says.
With that, Buck and Boggs began working on the routine with the idea that each room would represent a different stage of Miles and Colin’s maturity: “We wanted the dance to reflect the dynamic of friendships, love, bickering, and all the things that close friends go through.”
They didn’t have much time to get ready, but that’s where their friendship came into play, Buck says.
“We were able to talk to everyone in the room about this idea,” he says. “We come from a free dance background. So when we dance and do things like this, we have to come up with different things to do right away.”
Buck adds, “We’ve been around each other for so many years that we can get so much done in a short amount of time. It took us 10 minutes to come up with this.”
Although the piano piece has no lyrics, while putting it together, Boogz and Buck used the music that inspired them. “We set a track, pitched ideas just to see what would happen. We tried it a few times and it turned out beautifully.”
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