Tina Landon: Hollywood’s Down-Home Girl
“Oh crap, I just spilled coffee grounds everywhere!” Tina Landon laughs during our interview, which was more of an informal conversation between two dance enthusiasts. “I totally missed the pot.” I couldn’t help but giggle along with her. I had no idea that Hollywood’s “it” music video choreographer was so real and down-to-earth.
I grew up idolizing Tina Landon, who really hit it big when she began choreographing for Janet Jackson in the early 1990s. I remember recording “If” on the VCR and replaying it in slow motion so I could learn the steps. Little did I know that 15 years later I would be chatting on the telephone with the mastermind herself.
The two first met in 1990 when Landon was a dancer on Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 Tour. “I had been teaching and choreographing simultaneously the whole time I was dancing, but when it really turned over to an opportunity was when I was on tour with Janet,” explains Landon, who grew up studying tap, jazz and ballet in Lancaster, CA. “Halfway through the tour rehearsals things were running behind. When she found out what my background was she asked me to come in and help out.”
After staging some of Jackson’s numbers on the tour, Landon continued as an assistant choreographer for other artists. “I never really wanted to give up dancing,” explains Landon, who got her start as a Los Angeles Laker Girl alongside Paula Abdul in the 1980s. “One thing just kind of took over the other. That’s just life and I was fine with that.” Jobs kept coming her way, and soon she was choreographing for one of her biggest idols, Prince. “I was a nervous wreck at the time because I was his biggest fan,” she says candidly. “I couldn’t believe that I had the chance to work with him. I’d do it again in a second.”
A few years later, Jackson called on Landon’s creativity once more to help with the janet. World Tour. The tour was so well received that Landon became one of the most sought after choreographers, almost over night. She has since worked with almost every recording artist in the industry, from Ricky Martin on “Livin’ La Vida Loca” to Jennifer Lopez on “If You Had My Love” and more recently with Rihanna on “Umbrella.”
Very few choreographers have been able to maintain their relevance the way Landon has. Throughout the past three decades her choreography has become iconic for its unique marriage of sensuality and athleticism. All it takes is a slight thrust of the hips or small gesture of the hands, and you know immediately who was behind the movement.
“It’s an extension of who I am,” states Landon, who grew up wanting to be the first female football player. “I loved sports, so I can’t help but to be athletic. But at the same time I want an audience to understand what I’m trying to say.” Landon says she creates a story by drawing some of her choreography from Polynesian and folkloric dance. But the majority of the choreographic inspiration comes directly from the music itself. “The overall rhythms and the beats and the style of music is going to set a certain tone for me,” she reveals.
Landon, who began teaching and choreographing at the studio where she grew up, says her creative process has grown and evolved over the years. “In the beginning when you’re teaching you’re always prepared,” she explains. “You come in, the whole thing is choreographed, you teach it and you go home. But it doesn’t work that way with videos.”
When it comes to music videos a choreographer has to be ready for anything, from dealing with a difficult director to altering the material due to a last minute set or costume change. Now, Landon goes to work with a general idea and perhaps a chunk of choreography upon which to expand. “It’s kind of like I set an outline and a foundation for what I want the number to look like, and then I kind of build on it within the rehearsal process,” she says.
It’s no wonder Landon is brilliant at what she does. She learned the ropes from the best possible source—the King of Pop himself. “It was one of those surreal jobs,” she says of dancing alongside Michael Jackson on the “Smooth Criminal” video. “I was very green. I was like the little girl with the matching leg warmers and leotard.” Not only did the experience introduce her to the L.A. freeway system and what it means to be “union,” but it also familiarized her with the craft of music video making. “I learned very early on how jobs were done right,” she says.
Jackson’s intense work ethic and fierce love of dance had a profound impact on Landon. “I had just never seen anybody work like that. He’d be in the corner with Vince Paterson and they’d be studying Fred Astaire videos,” she recalls. “And he never marked anything—we could do 100 takes and he would do it full-out 100 times. So he made every dancer pull up and really come to the table. I mean, seriously, how could you mark it standing next to Michael Jackson?”
In 1995, she worked with Jackson again, but this time as a choreographer. Her work on “Scream” earned Landon her first MTV Video Music Award for Best Choreography. Many honors followed, including an Emmy Award nomination in 1999 for her work on the HBO Special “The Velvet Rope” and an American Choreography Award in 2001 for Mya’s “Case of the Ex.” She also has her own CD called “Distortion” and in 2003 she released an instructional DVD.
Teaching has always been one of Landon’s passions. She currently runs an annual workshop in Los Angeles called Twisted, which aims to educate students while exposing them to a variety of different styles and choreographers. “Even with all the information out there, I still feel like dancers are very uninformed as to what it takes to be successful and what it takes to have longevity,” says Landon. “I think a lot of them, especially when they are first starting out, feel it’s about glamour and glitz, but there’s a business behind it.”
Education is an important part of the workshop. Every year she includes a style of dance her students might not be familiar with, like African. Not only do her students find African dance enjoyable, but they also find it liberating. “A lot of dancers don’t know how to free themselves and just let go of all the lines and all the rules and all the technique,” she reveals. “I also feel like it’s a good middle ground for some of the hip hop kids who don’t have technique.”
She likes to end Twisted with a mock audition, something that really benefits the students looking to embark on a professional career. “Sometimes we forget what it’s like to be there for the first time,” laughs Landon, recalling how nerve-racking the experience was. “The only way to get good at auditioning is to audition. When I started to book more jobs as a dancer is when I stopped caring about what they wanted so much. So I try to give that environment to dancers who come to my workshop.”
The best part of Landon’s job as a master teacher is seeing students let go of their fears. “When you’re starting at the beginning of a class, everyone’s nervous. They’re so freaked out,” she says. “But about half way through the class, when they finally know I’m not this horrible monster that’s going to berate them like Simon Cowell, they start to relax.” Only then do the dancers really begin to feel the music and understand what their bodies are supposed to be doing. When Landon witnesses that “glimmer of light” go off in them, she knows she has done her job.
Whether she is instructing a famous recording artist like Rihanna or a group of backup dancers, Landon’s goal is always the same: to make her dancers look and feel great. “I just approach them as a performer because I’m a performer, I’ve always been a performer. And I know what that feels like to be on stage and not feel good about what you’re doing,” she explains. “My job as a choreographer is to find out what looks best on their body.”
Throughout the years, Landon has proven her own longevity in an industry that can be cutthroat and fickle. And it’s more than just her down-home likeability that has made and kept her so successful. “As a choreographer, as an artist and as a performer it’s your job to just keep growing the best that you can,” she says, emphasizing her versatility. “And the goal is—I always tell dancers, the more you have in your pocket the longer you’ll have a career.”