CHOREOGRAPHY / EXPRESSION / INSPIRATION
Parris Goebel
The freedom
inside the formation.
By Rob Urban
A person has to
move inside it.
A top can fall beautifully on a still body and behave quite differently when that body starts to dance. For Parris Goebel, that difference belongs inside the creative decision.
In her 2022 Fashionista interview, she described paying attention to clothing’s fit, color and movement alongside music, choreography, hair and makeup. Each changes what the audience sees and feels. A costume participates in the performance because a person must move inside it.
I like the seriousness of that attention. The person doing the work remains at the center of the image. What can she express? How will the garment respond? What becomes possible when the people making different parts of a production understand that they are shaping the same experience?
Goebel’s choreography offers a compelling answer. Movement can organize the visual world around it. It can carry personality, desire, force and joy before anyone explains what the performance means. Her accounts of making that work also reveal something quieter: confidence can grow between people, in the room where the performance is still taking shape.
An idea made visible.
Goebel grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, teaching herself through music videos. In a 2018 i-D interview, she described posting her work on YouTube, where it caught Jennifer Lopez’s attention. An audience on the other side of the world could encounter something she had already begun making.
There is courage in that sequence. She gave her ideas a form other people could see. It is easy to keep a creative ambition in the future tense, waiting for better circumstances or a more convincing introduction. Making the work creates another route into the conversation.
The first large opportunity still asked her to learn. She told Fashionista about directing dancers older than herself and meeting the speed of a major production. Her confidence had practical foundations: time spent dancing, choreographing and leading, including running a studio by seventeen.
That is the kind of confidence I admire. It can coexist with unfamiliar demands. You can know what you have to offer while still discovering how much a new room will ask of you.
Before the
formation
is finished.
Goebel’s description of choreography in the i-D interview is wonderfully alive. She spoke of creating in the room with dancers, responding to music and mood, and learning the material together as it developed. The studio gave her room to experiment.
That account makes a finished formation more interesting. Before bodies move together with apparent certainty, somebody has to try something whose effect is still unknown. Another dancer’s timing, energy or interpretation can make a possibility visible.
A group is more than a multiplied solo. Its members can draw attention toward one another, create a center or change where that center is. The relationships become expressive. A choreographer works with the space between people as surely as with the movement of an arm.
The generosity is in giving those people a meaningful part in the discovery. An unmistakable point of view and an open rehearsal room can belong to the same artist. In fact, knowing what you care about can make it easier to recognize the useful surprise someone else brings.
Confidence has
more than one appearance.
The i-D conversation also contains a revealing account of rehearsing for Savage x Fenty. Goebel said she had cast fifty women of different shapes, sizes and ethnicities. She was struck by how many trained dancers initially felt uncomfortable rehearsing in the underwear they would perform in. Over the following days, she saw their confidence grow.
That detail gives the word empowerment something human to hold onto. Being good at dance does not automatically make a person comfortable with being seen. Skill and self-consciousness can occupy the same body. A performance has to make room for the person carrying both.
By her 2020 British Vogue interview, Goebel was describing an even broader emotional range for the show, including vulnerability and curiosity alongside strength and sensuality. Asked about cast members without dance training, she explained that helping them feel comfortable and confident was part of her job.
I find that approach moving. Confidence has more than one appearance. It can be expansive, playful, hesitant or intimate. Giving different people different ways to inhabit a performance makes the world onstage more interesting, and gives the audience more ways to recognize themselves.
The craft that
moves the image.
Goebel’s work on Savage x Fenty Show Vol. 3 earned the 2022 Emmy for Outstanding Choreography for Variety or Reality Programming. The recognition names the craft that makes the experience move.
The distinction matters. We can remember a striking image and still overlook the decisions that let the image happen. Choreography gives those decisions a sequence: where somebody begins, how a group changes, when a gesture arrives, what follows it.
A memorable performance can feel immediate even when many different choices are working together. The audience receives the result at once. The people making it have to resolve the relationships between its parts. Goebel’s interest in the entire visual experience makes sense in that light. The details have consequences for each other.
A world
to inhabit.
In July 2023, she directed, choreographed and led Nike’s Goddess Awakened in Paris, a forty-minute performance involving more than thirty Nike athletes and partners. The event brought movement, clothing and self-expression into a shared presentation of womanhood.
In Nike’s account, Goebel described dance as a way to express love, grief, power and femininity. That is an ambitious emotional brief for a brand event. It gives the people in the performance more to do than demonstrate a product. They become the reason the clothes have a world to inhabit.
For anyone thinking about how a brand communicates, there is something valuable here. An idea becomes more convincing when the experience gives people an active way to express it. The meaning can be carried by what they are allowed to do, how much room they have and how fully their individuality belongs.
A point of view.
Room for other people.
The quality I keep returning to in Goebel’s work is the connection between a strong creative point of view and other people’s expressive freedom. Her vision creates a place in which their movement matters.
That asks a great deal of a director. You have to care about the whole experience and remain attentive to the person inside it. A visual decision can help someone feel powerful. A rehearsal can help them trust that feeling. The final image carries some of the care that made it possible.
Goebel makes movement the main event because movement is already full of meaning. A body can say something about its owner’s confidence, history, pleasure and imagination. Giving that expression a stage is an artistic achievement. Helping more people believe they belong on it is a reason to admire the artist.
About Parris Goebel’s work
What is Parris Goebel known for?
Parris Goebel is a New Zealand choreographer, dancer and creative director. Her work includes choreography and creative direction for Justin Bieber’s Sorry video, the Savage x Fenty shows and Nike’s Goddess Awakened performance.
Which Emmy did Parris Goebel win?
She won the 2022 Emmy for Outstanding Choreography for Variety or Reality Programming for Savage x Fenty Show Vol. 3.
What was Goddess Awakened?
Goddess Awakened was a Nike event held in Paris on July 5, 2023. Goebel directed, choreographed and led its forty-minute performance, which featured more than thirty Nike athletes and partners.
Sources: interviews with Fashionista, i-D and British Vogue; Nike’s account of Goddess Awakened; and the Television Academy’s awards record. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about the choices that give creative work its character. For more of those thoughts, or a conversation about the story behind your own work, meet Rob.