Chbeeb’s creations have aided his career - after appearing in the fourth “Step Up” film he’s been hired as a choreographer for the fifth - but he makes them as experiments. These homemade videos posted on YouTube don’t advertise a song or a singer (or, as many videos seem to, a luxury product) they advertise what traditional industry-made music videos often occlude: the dancer, the choreographer.
There wasn’t really an industry, and it was hard to find jobs the traditional way. “YouTube is the platform for my generation,” Mr. Chbeeb has no formal dance training, but he competed on several seasons of Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance.” His hip-hop dance crew, I.aM.mE, won the 2011 season of “America’s Best Dance Crew.” Sie’s favorite videos are by Phillip Chbeeb, a popper also known as PacMan. (Actually, the more heavily edited “All Is Not Lost” and “Skyscrapers” are anomalous in this regard the live re-creations restored them to the OK Go norm.) Much of the popularity of OK Go videos derives from how they casually defy the music-video convention of beautiful bodies chopped up by fast cuts.
If this strategy sidestepped most of the differences between music videos and concert dance - like the challenge of extending a choreographic idea past a couple of minutes - it captured some of the charm of OK Go videos: Usually filmed in a continuous take, they share some of a live performance’s sense of potential accident. Pilobolus, in turn, recreated the video live in some of its performances - a stunt slightly varied the following year with the tango-themed “Skyscrapers.” Members of that company appeared in the video for “All Is Not Lost,” a kaleidoscope of bodies on a glass table filmed from below.
Marshall is a fan - led, in 2011, to a collaboration with the venerable dance troupe Pilobolus. More success - the 2006 video “Here It Goes Again,” a clever routine on treadmills, won a Grammy Ms.