Savion Glover, Honey Balenciaga share favorite performance films and musicals

Savion Glover and Honey Balenciaga sit in different corners of performance culture, but their screen favorites point to the same lesson: movement on film becomes a living archive when working dancers recognize themselves in it. Glover’s tap lineage runs from Newark to Broadway and into animation; Balenciaga’s voguing path runs from New York ballroom culture into fashion and Beyoncé’s orbit. Together, their choices show how musicals and performance films shape taste as much as they reflect it.

Savion Glover: tap, Broadway and the motion-capture bridge

Savion Glover was born on November 19, 1973, in Newark, New Jersey, and became known early for his youth, technical precision and influence on the revival of tap. His 1996 Tony Award for Best Choreography for Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk confirmed how firmly he sat inside Broadway history, but his reach did not stop at the stage. His career has moved across Broadway, television and film, making him one of the clearest examples of a dancer whose footwork became a language that could travel.

That history gives unusual weight to the way The New York Times described Happy Feet in December 2006. The paper said the dancing in the animated film looked "powerfully familiar" to lovers of tap because it closely resembled Glover’s style. George Miller said the whole film hinged on persuading Glover to wear a motion-capture suit and become the tapping feet of Mumble, and The Times identified him as both Mumble’s dancer and choreographer. In other words, a tap master from Newark was not merely referenced on screen, he was the movement engine under an animated character.

That detail matters because it shows how a performance film can become a handoff between generations and mediums. Glover’s work on Happy Feet made tap legible in a family animation context without flattening the form’s precision, and the film’s resemblance to his style was important enough for the Times to name it directly. For viewers who follow dance, the project sits alongside Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk as proof that tap can carry narrative, character and technical detail whether the audience is sitting in a theater or watching a penguin move on a screen.

Honey Balenciaga: ballroom, fashion and Beyoncé’s orbit

Honey Balenciaga, also known as Honey Gonzales, was born on August 15, 2001, in New York City to a Nuyorican mother and Honduran immigrant father, according to Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue also noted that Destiny’s Child’s "Bootylicious" was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the day she was born, a detail that places her arrival squarely inside the pop era that would later shape her own visibility. She is widely described as a Brooklyn native, a voguing superstar and a movement director, with profiles in PAPER and Vogue tracing her work across fashion and performance.

Her importance is not just that she performs in Beyoncé’s orbit. ABC News has described voguing as a dance scene that has been seen as "a safe space for artists," and it connected Balenciaga to Beyoncé’s big-screen blockbuster and the ballroom tradition. That link places her inside a history that is both underground and highly visible: ballroom as a community-built performance space, and then as a source of movement vocabulary for major commercial stages, music videos and film.

Balenciaga’s rise is especially revealing because it shows how vogue does not simply travel into pop culture as decoration. It carries a set of techniques, attitudes and references that have been built over time in ballroom communities, then refined in fashion shoots, stage work and screen appearances. When Vogue profiles her as a Beyoncé-approved voguing superstar and PAPER focuses on her performance work, the emphasis is on a dancer whose authority comes from both style and lineage. That is why her screen favorites matter beyond celebrity taste. They are part of a career built on translation, from the floor of a ballroom to the frame of a camera.

Why these favorites matter to live performance

Taken together, Glover and Balenciaga show how artists use film and musicals to define their own craft. Glover’s path runs from Newark to a Tony-winning Broadway breakthrough and then into a motion-capture performance that made animated feet feel rooted in tap history. Balenciaga’s path runs from New York City and Brooklyn into voguing, fashion and a mainstream pop universe tied to Beyoncé, while still carrying the ballroom tradition and its sense of community protection.

That is why a list of favorite performance films or musicals is not just fandom in their hands. It becomes a map of training, memory and artistic inheritance. For Glover, the screen can preserve tap’s exacting rhythm and make it legible to new audiences; for Balenciaga, the screen can carry voguing from safe-space ballroom culture into larger public view without severing it from its origins. Their choices show how performers judge movies by a different standard than critics do: not simply whether a scene is beautiful, but whether it teaches the body something it can use later.

The larger story is clear in the facts attached to both artists. Glover’s technique was strong enough that Happy Feet could be built around it, and Balenciaga’s movement vocabulary is rooted enough in ballroom that her presence can bridge fashion, pop and film. In both cases, movies do not sit apart from live performance. They feed it, preserve it and send it back onto the stage with new audiences already watching.