“There was this moment on set where Tim, myself, and Jenna were on this sort of stage area filming the dance taking place,” Baker says when we catch up with the professional hoofer between Wednesday episode drops. “We were watching all the crowd, and the choreography take place, and I just turned to Jenna and I said, ‘You know, this is your fault.’ And she turned back and smiled.”
It’s true that both dance sequences poised to light up IG reels and YouTube re-edits for months to come are born out of a desire to subvert “Bloody Mary” expectations. Yet both sequences are meant to be something wholly unique.
“The brief from the get-go was to ignore the season one dance,” Baker explains. “Don’t even pay homage to it. Let it go. Let’s build something completely new that feels really relevant for these characters that services the plot in this new way. So that was really exciting as a choreographer.”
Audiences had seen Wednesday moves across a dance floor like a cadaver possessed, but both moments in season two, one performed by Ortega and the other by Myers, were a chance for the actresses and their choreographer to get inside Enid’s technicolor head.
“Wednesday is really [grounded] in the gut,” the choreographer says. “Her every muscle is almost engaged, yet then completely relaxed. It’s a weird sort of dichotomy of Wednesday, one that you can’t explain, which is exactly why it’s just so compelling to watch. Whereas Enid feels to me like the embodiment of a sort of ADHD. Everything moves and everything’s shiny. Yet there is this real sort of intellect and sort of darkness in her as well.”
For Baker it would mark a chance to work a second time with Ortega and Burton, both of whom the 35-year-old choreographer collaborated with on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice during the sequence where the Wednesday star joined Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder in an epic lip-synching of Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park.” In Wednesday, Baker was less hands-on in Ortega’s big moment of K-popping around Nevermore, although he did devise some basic moves while recording on his own camera for Gough, Millar, and Burton’s approval. But after Ortega self-choreographed Goth curious kids’ favorite party trick of Halloween 2022, she still had a hand in that particular big moment, including the bit where Jenna-as-Wednesday-as-Enid pulls on her own pigtails.
