Watching Ian Eastwood & the Young Lions perform and grow as both a choreographer and competitors on NBC World of Dance was nothing short of amazing. They recently released a new video and it. is. amazing. Check it out below along with what Ian had to say on his YouTube page about the piece.
Here’s what Ian posted about the creation of the video, read more here:
“where do i even begin with this piece that i hold so close to my heart…
first thing you should know is that i found this heart-stoppingly talented singer songwriter Eryn Allen Kane’s music going back to early 2015 amidst listening to many rising stars out of chicago but there was something very different about this song bird and her message. i had this record “Have Mercy” on my playlist to choreograph to for the entire year of 2015, but didn’t think i would do it justice. it took me the rest of the year to find my inspiration and i finally choreographed it in decmeber of 2015. after only teaching it two times and shelving it until the time was right, in the fall of 2016 we got the call from NBC asking us to do the show. we needed to turn in a video submission of two pieces. so i thought to myself, who am i? what defines me? and i thought… out of everything i had choreographed over the last full year, this piece represented me as somebody with something to say with their art.
we shot this submission in all red, inspired by Kane’s album cover. (listen to her full project and view the album cover [photo by : bryan allen lamb] here: https://open.spotify.com/album/7sVyk1…) in november. waited to hear back about the show…and before we knew it we had gone through two rounds on national television. the cuts were happening fast. amazing talent was going home round 2 and we needed to say something that mattered or we probably wouldn’t have much more to say on this platform. we pushed, and we pushed hard to go with something different this week. we grew closer as friends and family, pushed our boundries, and completely tore apart and restructured a piece from the ground up as a team, from something that had started almost two full years prior. this is the hardest i’ve ever worked on a piece as well as my team. its unfortunate that TV didn’t portray a lot of the beautiful staging and detail we put into the final piece, and its unfortunate that even this video doesn’t reflect the final product since it was shot 5 months prior, but hopefully at some point we get a full HD copy of the full piece with the right angles.”
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