The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

    Dancer performs in professional music video

    Six days after responding to a friend’s Facebook post, Alexis McCarthy ’14 finds herself in a backyard filled with dancers, extras and cameras.

    Her hair and makeup are done, and she has her choreography down pat.

    The story of how she got to the backyard began when McCarthy saw Ali Bloomgarden’s ’13 post on Facebook, which asked if anybody was interested in dancing in her friend Bel Kertesz’s music video.

    Kertesz, a young pop artist, was looking for jazz funk dancers to star in her music video, which is a genre that McCarthy has danced for nine years.

    The next day, McCarthy auditioned with Kertesz’s manager and within an hour she had learned the choreography and was hired.

    “I wasn’t really that nervous for the audition because I have gone on auditions before for dance so I knew what to expect,” McCarthy said.

    After auditioning, McCarthy practiced for the first of the two music video shoots.

    She went over the dance continually and recieved advice from others in order to improve.

    “I had to practice a lot since it is different on camera, because you don’t really know what you are going to look like on camera,” McCarthy said.

    McCarthy had people help her prepare for the camera by having them film her before the shoot.

    “I had to see what looked good or bad, and change a couple of things,” McCarthy said. “The people were really nice about everything and they helped me because we had a bunch of rehearsals before the actual shoot, so I was pretty comfortable with the choreography by the end.”

    At the shoot, McCarthy was one of the five dancers, along with many extras for a pool party scene.

    McCarthy danced alongside Kertesz behind the pool while the extras were in the pool.

    “We were all doing the same thing and had a couple of different formations,” McCarthy said. “The choreography was pretty simple.”

    McCarthy has been dancing since she was a toddler, and so she felt very comfortable learning the choreography and dancing in front of the camera.

    “I definitely want to do more things like this,” McCarthy said.  “I used to go to auditions a lot more than I do now, so I am thinking that this year I am probably going to get more into this kind of stuff.”

    With one more shoot to go, McCarthy said she hopes to find more opportunities like this one, and she might just have one in the near future.

    “[Kertesz] was really excited about me dancing, and she was talking about if she gets to perform, that I could maybe dance with her, so that is really exciting for me,” McCarthy said.

    The music video is set to premiere on Kertesz’s Youtube channel.

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    Dancer performs in professional music video