The Lxd - Behind the scenes - The mythology of the lxd - Pt. 1 [ds2dio]

The LXD is an adventure in story-telling and told through dance, movement, with heroes and villains, good and evil, triumph and heart ache. It's about finding your destiny and having the courage to see it through. It's a giant mythology of people who have super human abilities. And dance may have been the cover and we may see it as dance in the real world, but actually they can use this ability to do good or to do evil. There was no plan of what we would actually end up with. That's why we kind of call ourselves the dance adventurers. Ah we're not a dance troupe, we're not a dance crew, ah we're all in this to discover where this path will lead us and we call it evolution because it is evolving, even as we make it. You know one episode we think one thing, the next episode it all changes. And I think that's a fun, I think that's unlike any filmmaking experience I've ever been in, where as when you go in you go in with a product and you say that's what I'm gonna make and you push everything to make that thing. This one is we have a road map of what we'd like to do and as we're going we all discover and create it together, and that's really really cool. The whole point of it was to try something new and different. The whole point of it was to try something brand new. The whole point of it was to try and and take a bunch of artists who are really really talented and mash 'em all together and see what we create. When you're casting a movie you try to, you write a part and you try to put a dancer-actor into that part and it doesn't always fit right. So we wanted to reverse engineer that. We wanted to take the idea of a character that exists and how do we make a story around that character and heighten what they do. I started with sort of that idea of taking Madd Chadd, let's say, Luigi, Legacy, those were kind of some of the beginning ones, and started to write these stories about them and these stories started to connect. And so I sort of built this mythology of who they were and how they came together. I love fairy tales, I love classic stories, you know when Walt Disney would tell the story on the Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night, he would take you to a different land, he would take you to a different world, he would introduce you to a new character. And it was always fun when those characters sort of crossed over as well. So that's what we try to do with all the LXD characters, to give 'em a different voice, give 'em a different genre of dance and then bring them together at some point. The really fun thing about season three is we go back to the beginning. We go to the origins of LXD, which is the Extraordinary 7. And we start off in a depression era circus called the Chamberlain Circus, run by the ring master, Charlie Chamberlain. It's desperate times and the ring master is trying to keep it all together. He's trying to sort of keep his circus family afloat. And he goes to his magician, Winston, and begs him to break the code, to break the magician code and really use his magic in a self serving way. And eventually he gets him to do it. And they pick out seven people from the circus, not just any seven, but the ones that have the most courage, the one that has the most heart, the ones that are sort of at the bottom of the circus food chain. And they gather these seven and empower them with magic. This is the beginning of the the LXD story. When we were building the mythology of the LXD we wanted the Extraordinary 7, we wanted the story to start out with each of the different seven having different types of powers or dance that eventually grew and sort of broaden out as we sort of continue to tell the story and ah and expanded on the mythology. Going back with the circus, we do see the origins of the LXD and we also see the origins of Karey, where sort of organization X started from. Karey has always been, you know he ran this sort of competitive circus called Karey's Karnival and he's always been this sort of greedy, power hungry individual. And when he sort of gets a whiff of the Ra and how to sort of highjack that power, that's when things start beginning and he starts building up his evil empire. When we see in season, ah little bits of it in season one and then really in season two, this is what it's become, you know where he has sort of this squad of goons that do his business. In the beginning of season two we find out that 'Jato who is Specs's wife, has been kidnapped, and then we see it in Mark of the Ox, Karey is responsible for all of this. There is a line in there, there's a hint of the relationship when he says, "She'll come around, it's in her blood." I can't tell you exactly what it is but that's a strong hint of the relationship, that there, that there is a back story and a history to those two. In season two, we see the origins of the Dark Doctor. This little kid, who was helping out his father and sort of got entangled into the military laboratory. He accidentally spills the Ra into this chemical form, releasing this emergency valve where everything has to shut down. His parents come in and it's a really just great emotional scene where his parents sacrifice themselves to save their kid. And what comes out of that is he remembers that it was the military, it was the generals you know that he believes caused the death of his parents. So he's got this vendetta. Karey understands that to sort of destroy the LXD he needs to build his forces and goes after the Dark Doctor in a partnership, in a pact, an alliance of the dark, or the ATD is what we call 'em. And it all culminates to this big ending where um where somebody dies. All dancers have an actual super human ability. Some people call it chi, some people call it their aura, we call it in the LXD, the "Ra," R-A. These dancers know how to tap into that energy. Because they know how to tap into it they can do extraordinary movements, extraordinary things with their bodies. And this power can actually be weaponized and used to take someone down, whether it's a krumper ah krumping and creating this ball of energy that they can shoot out, that physically can hurt somebody else, or a ballerina who whips her leg around and can you know send a ninja slice across someone's face, or a tapper who can ah stomp on the ground and shake the floor and knock someone s balance off, the Dark Doctor can create a shield with an umbrella that reflects the ra. You know that makes really fun choreography but also ah gives context to dance. Sometimes it can be a learned ability, which you know people like the letter makers believe that you can train, someone to tap into it and you can become a warrior or the Ra, and then some people who are just born with it naturally like Trevor Drift, who it just is a part of his blood. So when he's a kid he doesn't know what he's doing, he's just doing these amazing, beautiful things. On the other side evil people have figured out a way to synthesize the power of the Ra in a powder form and are creating armies of creatures that have the power over this Ra. And so there's different philosophies of how to use the Ra. It's been a fun experiment to see where how the good guys use their powers and how the bad guys use their power and how they kind of balance. Everybody has their own weaponized version of their dance style, which is really fun. And that's sort of the key to the war between the good and evil. HIEU: What's incredible is in every country and every culture dance is a part of life fabric. You know dance is a universal language that everyone understands, and that's the draw, that's the popularity of LXD is we can sort of transcend those boundaries. It's this inherent and natural thing that we all have. You know the Ra really exists. It really is a life force. Um and in season three we see a variety of dance, you know from ballet to krumping to flamenco to Indian dancing. We see this range of dance. It's about showing this common language, it's showing this universality that dance can speak to everyone, that dance no matter where it's from or what it looks like, there is sort of a core truth to it. I think the most interesting thing about it all is dance is a unifying force and we understand that and and this is why it plays so well in the world of LXD, whether it's good or evil, the heroes or villain, the dance can connect because it can really tell a story.