By Christine Champagne

The athleticism and skill required to excel at dance–a sport practitioners would tell you is just as demanding as football, tennis, soccer or any other–is clearly demonstrated in “Keep Up,” a :60 promoting Nike Women’s line of dance apparel.

    Created by Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Amsterdam, and directed by Johan Renck of RAF, Stockholm, for the European market, “Keep Up” finds a lone female dancer challenging three mega-speakers to a duel of sorts. While the speakers blast a bass-heavy beat (composed specifically for the spot by hip-hop artist and producer Pharrell Williams), the dancer shows off her moves–everything from popping and locking to break dancing.

Keeping up with the pulsating beat is a challenge for even this energetic dancer. At one point, she is knocked off her feet by the force of the bass pumping from the speakers. But she picks herself right back up and continues to dance. When the music stops, she issues a challenge to the speakers: “Same time tomorrow?”
Part of a larger campaign of dance-oriented spots all directed by Renck, “Keep Up” stands out because the spot has an edge to it not commonly seen in sports-themed ads aimed at women. Renck agreed with that assessment. “It is exhausting and sweaty and grimy and not about a sweet girl doing her little sweet thing,” the director said. “There is something else to it.”

 

EVERYBODY DANCE

Of course, casting the right dancer was critical, and dancers were sought in Los Angeles, London, New York and Paris. Ultimately, a dancer from Paris was chosen in part for her ability to perform a multitude of styles. Perhaps just as importantly, though, the girl had real attitude, according to Renck. “She was a cocky street chick,” he reflected. “She was cocky from the first minute I met her.”

W+K brought in famed choreographer Jamie King, who has worked with everyone from Madonna to Britney Spears, to choreograph the dancer’s moves. “We went to quite a few of the rehearsals,” W+K creative director/copywriter Sue Anderson reported. “Initially, we would allow Jamie and his team time with the girls. Then we would go and visit them every couple of hours, and they would say, ‘This is where we are. What do you think? Do you think it’s still being true to the storytelling? Do you think it’s working with the music?’ And then they would adapt and change things [based on our input]. It was actually a really collaborative process.”

In the end, however, the moves you see the dancer make in the spot weren’t one hundred percent planned out. “The ambition from the beginning was to choreograph the whole thing. That’s how we rehearsed it, but when we came to the shoot we changed the strategy,” Renck shared. “It was about having the choreography as a foundation but then also trying out different stuff and pushing her to do other things.”

“A lot of the time we would say to her, ‘Forget your choreography. Just do stuff for us,’ ” Anderson confirmed, “and she was making up moves on the spot.”

The reason for the freestyling? The off-the-cuff moves helped to lend a reality to the spot, making it feel less staged. “I wanted it to feel like she was trying to be perfect but she was affected by the fact that she was getting tired,” Renck related.

 

BLACK BOX

Renck shot “Keep Up”–along with the rest of the spots in the campaign–over the course of three days at on a stage at Shepperton Studios, Middlesex. London. The setting for the spot is sleek and simple. The dancer does battle with the speakers in a black space that has the look and feel of an empty airplane hanger.

“We were looking for something that was not a dance studio. We didn’t want the classic wooden floor and bar,” W+K creative director/art director Irene Kugelman explained.

“We never wanted the spot to be a re-make of Flashdance,” Anderson chimed in.

“We grew up with that in the ’80s, and it’s badly, badly etched into our brains,” Kugelman added with a laugh.

In designing the space, it was decided to base the setting on the look of the big, black speakers featured in the spot. “We had fallen in love with the initial design of the speakers, and we tried to figure out what would be the appropriate surrounding for the speakers,” Kugelman said. “It was almost like finding the button before the coat.”

Once the shoot wrapped, The Mill, London, was called in mainly to enhance some of the speaker vibrations. “Keep Up” was edited by Joe Guest of Final Cut, London.

Reflecting on “Keep Up,” Anderson pointed out that it continues in the tradition that Nike has established in showcasing top athletes–whether it is a basketball player with a mean dunk or a tennis player with a killer backhand. “It was really important that we did exactly the same thing–showing somebody who is as good at dance as you possibly can be,” Anderson said.

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