Robinson’s inspirations for Shug included Darcel Leonard, a lead dancer on the 1980s variety series “Solid Gold” — “I would imitate her all the time” — and daggering, a crotch-forward Jamaican dancehall style.
For Shug’s showstopping entrance number, “Push Da Button,” at a swampy juke joint, Robinson turned off the lights in rehearsal, and found her snappy, Bob Fosse-meets-Lola Falana rhythm. The darkness pulsing with coiled bodies wound up onscreen too; because Robinson had recorded the practice sessions, Henson said, she already knew how to work the camera angles. And when Robinson was at the monitor during shoots, “she would see things that Blitz wouldn’t see, because he was watching something else, and she would just come in and whisper” a way to amp it up.
“I’m not a dancer, I’m a mover-weller,” added Henson, who studied musical theater in college. “And she just knows how to choreograph stuff to make you look good, to make you shine.”
Robinson had no formal dance training when she started popping up in Los Angeles clubs in the late ’80s and early ’90s. She was working as a shampoo girl at her mother’s hair salon and going to cosmetology school, then letting loose at night: “I always say, clubs are my classroom.”
Toni Basil, the singer, dancer and choreographer, spotted her and offered her an audition for the rapper Young MC. That didn’t work out but the gigs that followed opened Robinson up to the hip-hop stratosphere. “When I danced for Big Daddy Kane, Jay-Z was our hype man,” she said. “I’ve known all these people for years.”
After touring as a performer, creating dance naturally followed, even if she wasn’t looking at it as a career yet. “I remember Rosie Perez” — then a dancer friend — “calling me and saying, ‘You have to charge money, and you have to call yourself a choreographer,’” Robinson recalled. “And I was like, OK. And after I got off the phone, I looked up how to spell the word ‘choreographer.’”
