When Monique Watson was growing up in Havre de Grace, her mother rounded up girls from their church, St. James AME Church Gravel Hill, to start an informal dance group.
Watson also grew up on 2000s-era music videos, Baltimore Club music and dance, and “just being Black and dancing in my grandma’s basement with my cousins,” she said — but she credits the liturgical dance group with sparking something within her.
“The spirit of music and church … that is where my passion for movement comes from,” Watson, 29, said.
In a full-circle moment this past winter, Watson’s childhood church hosted two screenings at Horizon Cinemas in Aberdeen of the 2023 musical movie “The Color Purple” — which Watson danced in.
Now living in Los Angeles, the Harford County native has appeared on the TV series “All American,” performed during the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, danced with Beyoncé for a video shown at the Oscars, and traveled Europe last summer with the Weeknd’s tour.
“I don’t really like to define myself as a particular style of mover,” Watson said. “I’m just a dancer. I just move, and I move to what moves me.”
In doing so, she’s lived up to what her Havre de Grace High School classmates knew she was destined for when they crowned her with the superlative of most likely to be famous, she recalled.
“I have done — in three years, insanely — all the things that I wanted,” Watson said.
She took her first hip-hop class as a middle schooler at Upper Chesapeake Summer Center for the Arts at Washington College, which she attended to play the viola.
Later, she was a cheerleader at Havre de Grace High School, where she graduated in 2013, and founded a dance team in 11th grade, coming up with moves after school in the band room, she said.
When the school’s decades-long band director Richard Hauf sought her out to choreograph a dance for the band to perform at a halftime show during Watson’s senior year, it was because he’d taken notice of her skill.
“Monique was just a born leader,” said Hauf, 53, who retired from Havre de Grace High School last summer and now teaches at St. Margaret School in Bel Air.
“You quickly noticed that she had an ability to make those around her be better, in numerous ways. … Her selflessness, her passion, it was infectious. She really just stands out in a 30-year career.”
It was also in Maryland that Watson dove into the world of musical theater, cast as one of “The Dynamites” in a production of “Hairspray” at the Community College of Baltimore County’s Essex Campus as a high school student.
She’d only intended to dance when she auditioned but got roped into singing, too.
“We didn’t know how talented she was,” said her father, Arthur Watson.
His daughter was “so active” growing up, Watson, 69, said. He initially took her interest in movement for an inclination toward sports, but after her performance in “Hairspray,” Watson said her enthusiasm for dance “just spiraled.”
“Dance and theater was, I guess, in her blood,” he said. “I guess it’s always been in her blood, we just didn’t notice it. … I don’t even think she saw it, until college.”
As a student at the University of Maryland, Watson attempted a different path in the Air Force ROTC. “It just was the trajectory that I was supposed to go,” she recalled, noting her two sisters’ involvement in the Air Force and her father’s 20-year Army career.
“I don’t mind costumes, but I did not want to wear a uniform every single day,” she said.
She kept dancing and directing for a team called Phunktions and joined a team in Washington, D.C. called Culture Shock before dropping out of college early.
“Somehow the dance bug hit her again,” Watson’s father said.
In her last two years working with Culture Shock, a nonprofit hip-hop organization that brought Watson into D.C. and Maryland schools to teach and perform, she served as a deputy artistic director. She was also working at the Dance Institute of Washington after college — but wanted to set an even bigger example for her students, she said.
“I could not be telling them that they could do and achieve all these things … but I wasn’t taking my own advice and doing it for myself,” Watson recalled thinking.
So she took a leap that catapulted her into “The Color Purple,” an adaptation of the eponymous Broadway musical and Alice Walker book with Oprah Winfrey among its producers.
Watson got a call in the fall of 2021 to audition for a crew that would workshop the movement for the movie. The audition, she said, was set to a gospel song.
“It was kind of like putting everything that I grew up on, on the floor,” she said.
Eventually, she headed to Atlanta for more rehearsals and to film, learning the lyrics to the film’s songs and partaking in vocal rehearsals, she said.
Watson recalled persevering through overnight shoots and Georgia heat, in addition to donning uncomfortable heels. But she felt the excitement of her family when she returned to Harford County for her church’s screenings — and the gig led to more.
While initial work was underway on “The Color Purple,” Watson learned of an audition to perform in Super Bowl LVI; Fatima Robinson was choreographing the movie and the halftime show, which included Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and 50 Cent.
Watson asked to be included, despite initially being considered too short for the gig, standing at 5 feet, 3 inches, she said.
She made the cut, performing with over 100 dancers — mostly Black and people of color, she noted — during the 2022 show, appearing on top of a car at the 50-yard line while Mary J. Blige sang.
“I love the daredevil stuff,” Watson said, adding that during Kendrick Lamar’s performance, “I remember looking out at the audience and taking a moment, and I was like, ‘Wow. I think I belong here.’”
That same year, she danced with Beyoncé for a pre-recorded video of “Be Alive” shown at the Oscars, and also choreographed by Robinson.
“I don’t know any dancer who doesn’t want to work for Beyoncé, let’s be real,” Watson said.
The performance was filmed on a tennis court in California, and included dancers who were working on “The Color Purple,” she said, describing it as a whirlwind process.
“The monochromatic colors of us looking like little Black princess tennis balls on this court, I thought that was amazing,” Watson said.
Back in Harford County, she’s made an impression, said Hauf, who’s watched her succeed. A decade after their first collaboration, he invited her to choreograph from afar another dance for the Havre de Grace High School band in the fall of 2022, to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.”
“This is what Havre de Grace can produce,” Hauf said he told students. “Monique still, even though she’s on the other side of the country, she’s still influencing her hometown. … I’m proud of her.”
With her sights set on the future, Watson — who shares educational resources for dancers on Instagram and is completing certification to become a pilates instructor — said she’d like to teach in Maryland again one day.
“The universe always places me where I’m supposed to be,” she said.
