danielphine: Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' Creative Director Explains: Why NYC?

Monday, March 7, 2011

Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' Creative Director Explains: Why NYC?

'This was the place that birthed her,' Laurieann Gibson tells MTV News of choosing location.
By Jocelyn Vena

Lady Gaga
Photo: Kevin Winter/ Getty Images

Lady Gaga knew exactly where she wanted to shoot her trippy music video for Born This Way. If she was going to properly tell the story about the birth of a new race that doesn't judge or hate, the New York native knew she had to take it home to the Big Apple.

"We took two days and when Gags was making the album, she wanted to be in New York," Gaga's creative director, Laurieann Gibson, told MTV News on Monday. "This was the place that we started. This was the place that birthed her. This was the place that birthed my dance. New York just has something so real about birthing something specific."

Before cameras even started rolling, Gibson and Gags, as she calls her, decided there was only one place to work on the avant-garde, modern dance routine for the video.

"So I took her to Alvin Ailey [where I studied dance], and we rehearsed there because the choreography is really modern-based. It's, like, more technical than anything she's ever done," she recalled. "That was a great moment to engulf her in a real dance world and push her ability choreographically.

"And we shot the video in Brooklyn over two days and it was freezing cold. And we had to hide the location and we were quite successful except at the last day there was one paparazzi sneaking around," she added. "We had to build these boards and move because she was so passionate about it [not] getting out to her fans before it was ready."

But planning for the video started long before the Haus of Gaga landed in New York City to shoot the Nick Knight-directed clip. Gibson recalled how she and Gaga birthed the idea. "I've created, directed and choreographed for Lady Gaga since the beginning, so 'Born This Way,' this was musically such an amazing evolution and such a brilliant record, so when she played it for me, it took me a while to find out the visual interpretation that I could give back to her.

"I woke up one night and I got it and I said, 'I got it: We have to birth a new race,' " she recalled. "As genius as she is, she then begins to create all of these elements that make her Lady Gaga. When I saw the final edit I, of course, was loving some stuff and then I was like, 'But oh, here we go.' It was brilliant. Nick is amazing."

What do you think of the "Born This Way" choreography? Let us know in the comments!

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