We recently connected with Chayil Brooks and have shared our conversation below.
Chayil, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
The most meaningful project I’ve done would have to be my recent project Giselle. Giselle is a 6 minute short dance film that I choreographed & directed along with a 7 minute behind the scenes film. My long term goal as an artist is to become a movement director for movies and to bring ballet to cinema. The ballet Giselle is one of my favorite ballets so I used Giselle act 2 as my inspiration for my film. My film Giselle is about 10 spiritual beautiful women living in a field known as “the field of the brokenhearted”. Any woman that has had their heart broken by a man lives in this field. The film starts with a girl name Giselle looking up at the sky praying to the heavens for a man, for love. Moments later a man enters the field and Giselle thinks it’s a gift from the heavens. The man tries to escape from Giselle and the others, but once you enter the magical field of the brokenhearted, you can never leave.
This project was meaningful to me because this is the first big project I’ve ever done. This was kind of my introduction to showing people that I am a professional movement director. I want people to take me serious as a choreographer. To show them this is not a phase but my long life dream. I put so much heart and energy into this film and I think you can definitely see I gave it my all.
Chayil, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Chayil Brooks, first name pronounced shy-yell. I am 26 years old living in Los Angeles to pursue a professional career in dance & movement directing. I started dancing when I was 3 years old living in Philadelphia then later moved to Seattle and started focusing more on ballet and jazz. Ballet was my number one at the time. I was training to become a professional ballet dancer.
For college, I attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle Washington receiving my BFA in dance. During my college years I realized professional ballet was not what I wanted to do long term and found a strong connection with commercial dancing & movement directing. My senior year of college I created over 20 mini dance films on different dancers. I also created a dance film for my senior project. 2 years later at 23 years old I moved to Los Angeles to continue and strengthen my career in commercial dance & movement directing.
A year later I got signed with one of the best dance agents in Los Angeles Go2Talent and since then, I have been blessed with so many opportunities as a dancer. I’ve booked a commercial, a movie, trained with some of the best choreographers and more!
This year I’ve been focusing on people seeing me as a choreographer. But not just any regular dance choreographer, I wanted to be seen as a movement director. A story teller that can work with A list actors for movies. Since January, I’ve been working on creating a film that’s different from any other dance film I’ve seen. I wanted more story telling than technical dance movements. I wanted art. I remember working my 9-5 job and this song called Cowboy Gangster Politician by Goldie Boutilier came on, I froze. I turned to my friend and asked her if she knew this song and she told me it was one of her favorite artist. Later that day I was listening to the song for hours creating movement to the song and getting so excited that I finally knew what I wanted to do for my film.
Creating a film is hard. Finding 10 dancers and figuring out scheduling, looking for a production team to film, finding a location who wouldn’t kick us out for filming, costumes, and the worst part figuring out how I’m going to pay for all of this. Thank God for community because without the friends that God has blessed me with, this film wouldn’t have happened. The 10 dancers I casted were friends I’ve meet from dance classes, people I’ve worked with on mini dance projects & a couple of them were fresh faces I’ve never meet but was down to be apart of my project! I also had a few people reach out to me asking if I needed any help with my project and I was blessed with 2 amazing assistants, Cassie & Mia, one of the best photographers in Los Angeles Chloe Jean and a high school friend of mine Anika, who flew from Seattle to film behind the scenes. They all knew as an artist in LA, we are not rich………..yet. I only had enough funds from donations to pay for the costumes, rehearsal space, and transportation. Everyone believed in my film idea that they were ok to be apart of this film for free. They just wanted to be in a project that I was creating. I couldn’t believe it. I was so worried about the financial part in the beginning and I’m so grateful I surround myself with people like them. And to top it off, one of my good friends Kelly who is a baker blessed us with food to bring on set for all the dancers!
Sadly I wasn’t able to hire the filming production team I wanted due to financial reasons but it made me gain a new skill which is film. I always loved taking photos and videos of my friends. During college I filmed all of my dance projects on my phone but this was different from all of those times because this film is my submission for movement directing jobs, the other ones were just practice, this was the real deal to me.
During filming day, the camera stabilizer wasn’t working so I had to hold the camera and hope the shots were stable. One of my assistant was pulling the back of my shirt so when I was filming walking backwards, the shots would stay smooth. On top of that, I was having really bad stomach pain so it was hard to keep focus while I was in pain. After 3-4 hours of filming we finally finished and it was a success!
To basically summarize what I want everyone to get out of this is, community is everything! Being an artist is not for the weak, I deal with so many challenges on a daily basis trying to put my foot in the choreographer & dancer world. A main thing I’ve learned being in LA is, it’s not about how talented you are, it’s about who you know, the connections you make. My film wouldn’t have been a success if it wasn’t for the people I have connected with through my dance journey.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Yes, I want to win an Oscar for best choreography. 1935-1937 the Academy Awards had a category for Best Dance Direction. I want to be a huge voice for the dance community. I want to bring back that award to the Oscar’s because without dance movies would be terrible, and that’s the truth.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
SHARE OUR WORK! It only takes 2 seconds to share a video. If you see a dancer or any kind of artist posting their work online please show it some love. As artist, we get in our head a lot, we don’t get a lot of support from our family because they don’t see our art as an career so most of us are doing this on our own. Making art is not cheap so we are investing a lot of money and time on our projects, even if it only gets 1 like. Sadly, everything is all about numbers. No one is looking for you if you don’t have a huge following, lots of views and likes. So please help your local artist by liking and sharing their work.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Chloe Jean