Charm School With Charm La’Donna

Kendrick Lamar’s Big Steppers Tour was a visual spectacle, a groundbreaking hip-hop opera hailed for its intricacies and ambitiousness. For two hours each night, Lamar and a swarm of dancers interacted in finely tuned movements; one critic said it was like “watching the engine of a fine-tuned Mercedes.”

Few rappers have achieved, or even attempted, a choreographed production of such scale. And the mastermind behind those moves? Lamar’s longtime collaborator and head of choreography Charm La’Donna.

Charm La’Donna was born to dance

Growing up in Compton, California, La’Donna (born Charmaine Jordan) more or less always knew she wanted to dance.

“I hope it doesn’t sound cliche, but it was just a God-given gift,” she says. “To be so young and be very adamant and passionate and having the discipline to know what I want and really, really going for it—I did other things, but dance and the arts have always been at the forefront in my life.”

La’Donna says she was lucky to have a mom who pushed her to pursue those dreams, and she got her earliest break during her senior year at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts when she was hired as a backup dancer on Madonna’s Confessions Tour. At just 17, she was one of the youngest dancers on the tour.

In the years since, her list of collaborators has grown to include Dua Lipa, Meghan Trainor, Selena Gomez and Rosalía, whose song “Con Altura” landed La’Donna an MTV VMA for Best Choreography. She choreographed The Weeknd’s Super Bowl LV halftime show, and she’s worked on productions for the Academy Awards and the Grammys. But she is perhaps best known, as the music and culture magazine Complex put it, as “a fulcrum of Kendrick Lamar’s live show,” having choreographed a number of tours and televised performances for her fellow Compton native. She’s a big deal.

Balancing being your own boss

I felt somewhat sheepish connecting with Charm La’Donna for this story, the main feature in a magazine issue with a focus on freelancing. I mean, I’m a freelancer—I spend my days in front of a laptop, answering emails, transcribing interviews and attending to necessary edits. La’Donna is an artist; I didn’t want it to seem like I was comparing her work and mine or cheapening her craft by likening it to the labor of a laptop jockey. Only one of us is working with Rosalía, right?

But La’Donna has a laid-back ease. She says that the more she thought about it, the more she realized how much she has in common with any self-employed person.

“Honestly, I think I am more of a freelancer, right? Because yeah, I’m doing art, yeah, I’m doing dance, but if I don’t work, it stops,” she explains. “I don’t have anyone to call at HR to be like, ‘This didn’t work out!’”

Dealing with burnout

In fact, early on in her career, she says her art almost became a burden. She was handling the behind-the-scenes work of running the business along with the choreography, a never-ending cycle of work that had her feeling burnt out.

“You’re creating art, but you’re also worried about when your bills [are] gonna get paid,” she reflects. “I don’t get a check every two weeks, and I don’t get paid leave. I am my business.”

For a long time, trying to manage the art and the business took a toll on her—a catch-22 that will be familiar to any entrepreneur. It’s a delicate balancing act, figuring out if and when you can add new people to support you while knowing that you’ll need to be able to support them. 

Getting to a point where she can focus exclusively on her craft has been a journey, and it hasn’t always been easy.

But entrepreneurs also know how good it feels when the sacrifices, the hard work and the tears pay off. These days, La’Donna has a team around her taking care of the details so she can focus on dance.

“I don’t want to be writing anybody an email talking about money and logistics,” she laughs. “I want to create; I want to be with the artist.” She even has the time and freedom to venture beyond choreography and has her sights set on more directorial work, writing stories and doing short films that involve dance.

The art of trust and collaboration

There are other ways in which Charm La’Donna’s choreography isn’t so far removed from any good working relationship. Sure, her coworker might be Dua Lipa, but many of the factors that make a choreographic collaboration successful are the same as those that are important in the office: a willingness to workshop ideas, openness to compromise and change, and the ability to be honest about your thoughts and feelings in a respectful way.

“And [you have] to trust each other, right? My clients, they’re able to trust me and my expertise and what I feel, and I trust them and how they feel and what they see,” she says. “Of course, sometimes, we might not agree on things, but we always figure it out, you know what I mean? There’s always a compromise, or ‘I see why you did that,’ and we can make it work.”

In other ways, of course, dance is nothing like your typical day at the office. It requires a radical vulnerability and openness, and for all parties to let go of their hang-ups and experiment. There’s also the fact that it’s physical—something that can be trickier for some artists to embrace than it is for others.

“Sometimes you might have artists who aren’t as fluid in the body as they are with their words and their music,” La’Donna says. “And so to be in a room with me and release everything and be vulnerable and let their body move and learn is such a beautiful experience.”

Fostering artistic expression

Part of Charm La’Donna’s skill set is her ability to get artists to open up and express themselves physically, and her methods for doing so vary depending on the person she’s working with at the time.

“Everybody’s different, and it’s just a matter of adjusting to that person, and what they need, and what they want, and how they want to feel,” she explains.

It’s important for her to get inside and understand each artist individually, though, because she finds the best work happens when it’s a true collaboration. “It’s when the artist expresses how they feel, what they want to feel, what they want the audience to feel, what their music means to them and then me interpreting it my way and blending it together.”

Believe that you can do it

Charm La’Donna’s success is the result of a lot of hard work, but she emphasizes that she’s been blessed to live her passion. At a young age, she became a protégé of the choreographer Fatima Robinson, whose storied career includes work with Michael Jackson, Aaliyah, Beyoncé and Mary J. Blige. Today, part of her joy is that she can hire other young choreographers to assist her, mentoring them in much the same way she was mentored as a young person.

When it comes to young creatives who are working on their art while trying to build a business, La’Donna’s advice is to take time for yourself and really figure out what it is you want. Part of that is being real with yourself about whether a job is right for you and assessing whether you can realistically take something on. She encourages artists to never accept a “no” at face value: “A ‘no’ doesn’t mean it’s over; a ‘no’ means ‘go find another way.’”

And, she adds, you have to really believe that the future you want is already yours. You have to know that you can do it and understand that your success is almost an inevitability.

“You’ve gotta believe. I know that sounds so corny; I just hate to sound so corny,” La’Donna laughs. “But you really gotta believe. You’ve gotta see it, you’ve gotta believe it, you’ve gotta feel it—whatever it is that you want—that it’s already yours. I don’t care if it’s the craziest dream in the world. If you want to go do a ballet company on the moon. Believe it.”

This article originally appeared in the September issue of SUCCESS+ magazine. Photo by Alissa Roseborough