When you're an artist as, well, flexible as Shakira, every video presents a challenge: Just how do you top the last one?
Over the years, Shakira has taken the art of over-the-top gyration to new
heights, so much so that, at this point, anything less than a dance sequence resulting in a full hiatal hernia would be considered a letdown. And she knew this when she teamed with director Sophie Muller for her "Did It Again" clip.
The two scoured the globe to find inspiration for the video, taking cues from Moroccan dancers and 19th-century British painters, and recruiting a Florida-born dancer and an Icelandic choreographer for the project. How do we know all this? Well, we asked Shakira about the video, and she gave us the inside scoop — frame by frame.
"It was a collaboration between this friend of mine who's a dancer, and me. She showed me this contemporary dance piece that was produced in Iceland. So we said, 'Hey, maybe we could do something like this for "Did It Again," ' " Shakira said. "So we brought this choreographer from Iceland from this contemporary dance company, and we worked on this piece.
"And I decided to bring a little bit of this painter, [Lawrence] Alma-Tadema, who portrays women in these bathrooms, these Turkish bathrooms, and I wanted to bring a little bit of that poetic imagery to this video," she continued. "And I remember not too long ago having watched a few women turn their heads in a trans in Morocco. So we brought all these pieces — Moroccan women twirling and turning their heads, and the poetry from Alma-Tadema's paintings, plus this Icelandic contemporary dance piece — and we mixed all these pieces together for the video."
It was a lot to cram into one video, and Shakira needed a male counterpart to pull it off. Luckily, she found a (more than) able body: Daniel "Cloud" Campos, a dancer who's worked with Madonna.
"He's sick!" Shakira enthused. "What he does is unbelievable."
But did she have any problem getting close to a guy she barely knew? Not really — as she put it, people often do more with folks they know even less.
"[We worked on the routine] for a few days," Shakira laughed. "Hey, some people just get in bed after one night."
This report is from MTV News.
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