TOY BOY | The choreographer of the series tells us how it was working with the five boys
"In Toy Boy the choreography is made for the camera, for the viewer. Each step is adapted to your shot."
Madrid, April, 14, 2020
Fidel Buika is the creator of the choreographies of Toy Boy. Dancer and choreographer, he has been in charge of preparing the dance numbers for the series for more than a year for Jesús Mosquera, Jose de la Torre, Carlo Costanzia, Raudel Raúl Martiato and Carlos Scholz, the five boys who are the protagonists of this fiction produced by Plano a Plano.
“The first step in any choreography is to find its objective. It is always different in a choreography for the theatre, a video clip, an advert or a series”, assures Buika, who explains that, in the case of Toy Boy, as it is a choreography for strippers, its purpose was that “it should be sensual and, in some points, sexual, in a very elegant way”.
For its creative development, Buika was mainly inspired by the film ‘Magic Mike XXL’, with Channing Tatum as the main character, but also by the lines of action of other shows and musicals that can currently be seen in London, Las Vegas or Germany.
Once the goal of the choreography had been identified, the most difficult thing for Buika was to put all the actors on the same dance level. “Most of them had never danced before. I had to see what I could get out of each one of them and all of them together. It was a matter of seeing what their strongest point was and playing so that they looked good on camera,” she says.
In this sense, he explains that “it’s not the same to do a live choreography as to do a recorded one”. “You don’t know what’s going to happen to you live or who’s going to film you,” says Buika, who doesn’t, however, take away from the difficulty of filmed choreography, which has its own particularities.
ONE STEP, ONE SHOT
“In Toy Boy the choreography is made for the camera, for the viewer, for the different shots. Short, long, body, on the floor … Each step is adapted to your plane,” details Buika, as a sample of the preparation and prior study of each of the numbers.
So much so, that before the start of the shoot, Buika and the five actors worked for eight months on the choreographies, rehearsing three hours a day from Monday to Friday.
Dance rehearsals were also combined with training sessions in the gym. All this to be able to offer the best version of the five boys on stage: firemen’s dresses, gladiators, boxers with fluorescent lights, on a round bed, on a ring with animal masks or as ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. Let’s remember some of the choreographies!
ADDED CHALLENGE
In addition to the choreography of Toy Boy, there is a difficulty, which is that, apart from dancing, the boys had to take off their clothes. Something that, given the good results on screen, may seem simple, but it is not so in the case of actors who are not used to it. “Jesús, Jose, Carlo, Raudel and Carlos have gone from never dancing to doing it in front of the camera and even taking their clothes off… That is a very, very difficult challenge“, stresses Buika, who talked about it a few days ago with some of the actors in a live show from Instagram’s profile from Plano to Plano.
For the choreographer, the predisposition and good attitude of the actors was in this sense fundamental during the whole learning process, which lasted several more months, once the recordings started and until the end of them.
“I really liked the way they took on this job. They have been totally involved. They were going all out, with everything. When someone wasn’t in the choreography, they learned it anyway to keep improving”, Buika points out.
According to him, “the rapport has been incredible. “The most rewarding thing has been to be able to enjoy and do it all together. I was part of them. The six of us have had a great time,” adds Buika, for whom Toy Boy has been, both professionally and personally, one of the “most motivating and exciting” projects he has had throughout his career and which he will carry with him “all his life.
