Anthony W. Johnson doesn't just work across artistic disciplines—he collides them together. Since establishing Ballet Magique® as a registered trademark in 2018, the multi-hyphenate creator has been assembling what might be the entertainment industry's most ambitious fusion project: a production company that treats film, theater, music, and video games as parts of one interconnected vision.
The heart of this vision is "Alexis Colette," a supernatural musical thriller currently in final development stages. Johnson has assembled a crew that reads like a VFX supervisor's dream roster: Loic Zimmerman, art director on multiple Marvel films, and Craig A. Mumma, whose credits span from "Aquaman" to "Independence Day." It's the kind of team that signals serious industry attention for what Johnson describes as a film where "reality and illusion blur."
From Stage Combat to Screen Writing
Johnson's path to multimedia production reads like a masterclass in artistic cross-training. He's performed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, danced with Paul McCartney's "Drivin' U.S.A." tour, and earned four Lester Horton Award nominations in 2004. Dance Spirit Magazine once called him the best male lyrical dancer in Los Angeles. He served as a guest judge at the World Choreography Awards for a decade, where his company recently performed at Kenny Ortega's lifetime achievement ceremony.
But it's his upcoming 675-page book "Audacity to Act" that reveals the scope of his methodology. The memoir doesn't just recount his work with mentors like Katherine Dunham and Eartha Kitt at Chicago's Black Ensemble Theater—it details techniques spanning ballet, fencing, stage combat, understanding camera lenses, angles, and the structural differences between acting for stage versus screen. Johnson breaks down everything from storyboard reading to fight choreography, packaging decades of hands-on experience into what he calls "real-world knowledge, not regurgitated theory."
Building Beyond the First Project
While "Alexis Colette" moves through development, Johnson is already developing "Vodun," an action-adventure thriller about Voodoo for Samaco Films. His strategy involves creating properties that can migrate across platforms—a film that becomes a stage production, a story world that extends into gaming. This approach to transmedia storytelling isn't new in entertainment, but Johnson's particular blend of dance vocabulary, theatrical staging, and cinematic technique creates something harder to categorize.
His former students have landed in productions from "Moulin Rouge" to the National Ballet of Canada, and in films like "Gladiator." As a member of the Dramatists Guild, Society of Composers and Lyricists, and Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Johnson has built the institutional connections that independent producers often lack.
The test will be whether audiences want the particular cocktail Johnson is mixing—ballet meets wushu meets supernatural thriller. But with Marvel-level talent committed to his first major film production and a book that could establish his pedagogical credibility, Johnson is placing significant bets that genre boundaries are more flexible than the industry traditionally assumes.
