"I said, 'You know what? I have to go back to my roots, I have to start on my grind again.'. I saw the glitz and glamour that to other people might look like it's fun, and it's cool, and it's all that, but it's really hellish."Īnd so it was back to L.A. I was just eager to work." But his time dodging flashbulbs offstage with Spears taught him tough lessons: "Just trust me, getting chased around by cameras and paparazzi is not fun at all. At the time, he says, "I was so young and so green and just so eager. That's also when he danced his way into the tabloids, during a period he calls "the Britney fiasco": His brief dalliance with the pop star broke up his marriage and eventually cost him his job. Any kind of classes going on, I was there." That work paid off - by early 2004, Short was on the road as creative director for Spears's "Onyx Hotel" tour. I mean three classes a day, seven days a week. Dancing is the visual personification of music, but stepping is the rhythmic personification of music and dance." In more ways than one, Short says, " 'Stomp' was my college." Though he'd seen stepping before - at Juneteenth celebrations while visiting his grandmother in Arizona - it was during his time on tour that he began to "understand the rhythmic language of stepping. I just wasn't a trained dancer." The show's found-object percussion came naturally to Short, who had played keyboard and drums "since I was 3 or 4 years old," so "because I was a musician, I understood the language." But his dance training came later, out of necessity.
But the actor says that growing up, "I didn't know how to dance." With "Stomp," he says, "I kind of adapted to the movement because I had to. )ĭJ's dance moves win him the respect of his school chums, just as Short's skills earned him a spot as a backup dancer for Britney Spears in 2002 the next year he became her choreographer. Nevertheless, in the new film "Stomp the Yard," Short, 24, was confident he could play DJ, a young man transformed by his experiences in higher education after he travels to Atlanta to attend the fictional Truth University and joins a fraternity and its underdog step team. (A road company of the show is at the Warner Theatre through Sunday.) Columbus Short says he always intended to go to college.īut the actor, who grew up in Southern California, says he "took a detour," when, at 17, he joined the cast of the dance-percussion show "Stomp" in San Francisco and toured with the group for two years.