When Colette Brandenburg was growing up in Michigan, she remembers spending winters with her grandmother. It was during this season that her mother and father—an elementary school teacher and contractor, respectively—would go hunting, so off to grandmother’s house and The Nutcracker rehearsals the young ballet dancer would go.
Brandenburg’s “very conservative” and “very English” grandmother “was uptight about everything but the movies,” she says. When they weren’t at the theater, they would stay in and watch classics like Gone with the Wind.
“My first love of movies came from that,” says Brandenburg, now 37. “I always loved musicals, but I couldn’t sing. So I didn’t think it was an option for me.”
Little did she know back then, watching movie musicals with her grandmother, that she’d eventually start a dance troupe of her own called LA Follies.
A dancer her whole life, Brandenburg moved to New York after college. She was disappointed by how little money she and other dancers were making for months of hard work in off-Broadway shows.
“New York’s market is really saturated for dancers,” she says. On the other hand, “I’ve always been more interested in composition and creation than being in other people’s work.”
A choreography job landed her in Los Angeles, where she got an artist residency at a city college. While working a shift at the Otheroom bar in Venice, she met a member of the National Theatre of Scotland who was performing in Black Watch.
“It was moving, provocative, frightening,” Brandenburg says of the performance. “And it was the first time that I had seen dance used in a theater setting, where it actually moved the story forward and wasn’t ornamental.”
To fully immerse herself in physical theater, the choreographer recommended Brandenburg go to London. There, she got an MFA in choreography and started her own company called The Federation.
“It was a loose company,” she says, “but it gave me a taste of what it was like to run a company.”
After graduation, Brandenburg returned to Los Angeles. Unable to find a thriving theater scene parallel to what she had encountered across the pond, she became a lecturer at Cal State University, Los Angeles and was part of the WaterWorld crew at Universal Studios doing pyrotechnics and working on roughly 30 Terminator shows a day. Even then, she was taking mental notes for a great, looming project.
“One thing that is interesting is that they train for mistakes,” says Brandenburg. “There are, I think, something like 17 variations of the show. Often, something is wrong—maybe a performer missed one trick, or something didn’t fire right, or there’s some sort of mechanical issue—so the performers know all these different variations of the show and have to implement them when things don’t work. It’s like failure is built into the show.”
But dance was her first love, and it frustrated her to see so many good dancers unable to find well-paid jobs in L.A. So in 2012, Brandenburg co-founded a dance company called LA Follies with producer Bonnie McMahan, who she met while working on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
“I didn’t really think I was going to start a business,” says Brandenburg. “I thought I was just going to create something to support my choreography.”
Shortly after the company was founded, Shannon Zimmerman stepped in as co-founder. While Brandenburg takes control of ballet choreography, Zimmer leads all the tap dancing. For hip hop, contemporary jazz, fire, and synchronized swimming, they bring on additional experts.
A cymbal player in her high school marching band, it’s no surprise that Brandenburg loves seeing large groups of people move in formation.
“I feel like now musicals are focused on vocals, but the old ones, the dancers were just—it was crazy what they would do,” says the WeWork Santa Monica member. “MGM and these big, huge film companies had an in-house dance company.”
Inspired by everything from Annie to Funny Girl to Busby Berkeley’s hypnotizing choreography on the silver screen, LA Follies will make any event pop by reintroducing and reinventing an old Hollywood charm and wonder.
The Follies perform at holiday and birthday parties alike, their past clients including Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn, and Kris Jenner, to name a few. At an event for Bud Light, the Follies brought hip hop dancers, contortionists, and belly dancers to the mix.
“We have immersive elements,” says Brandenburg. “We try to make it so the guests have something really well-executed, but it’s not just: here’s a dance, eat your dinner, and clap.”
Photos: Kat Wickstrom, Julie Klima