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As a child, Clay loved making home movies and took up dance to make friends; today, he has turned both of his creative pursuits into a highly successful career
[This story first appeared in Koktail Magazine Issue 3.]
All photos courtesy of Clay Boonthanakit.
It was his infectious energy and catchy introductions at the beginning of Steezy’s viral YouTube videos that caught my attention. That and the fact that our last names are both 12 letters long. I just had to reach out and find out about more about him and what it’s like to work in the field of dance and content creation for one of the most well-known online dance studios in the world.
It turns out that Clay Boonthanakit—AKA “your boy Clay” as he quips in videos—wasn’t always so charismatic and popular. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he tells me he was “awkward, overweight, and bullied as the only Asian kid in the entire school.”
By the time he was in eighth grade, Clay and his family had moved to California, following his dad’s career in the film industry as a storyboard artist. “There were a lot of Asian people at my new school. It was 80 per cent Asian.” Thinking this was his ticket to making friends, he found himself still out of luck. “I couldn’t believe it—I still didn’t fit in! I was still overweight, still awkward and unconfident in myself.”
“I just didn’t grow up feeling like I had people like me and I suddenly I did.”
It wasn’t until his older brother Max introduced him to the Freestylers’ Club that life started to take a turn for the better. “He saw me sitting alone by myself during lunch because I didn’t have any friends,” Clay recalls. “He said, ‘Hey, you should check out the Freestylers’ Club. Some of the kids go to the French teacher’s room during lunchtime, and they do dance battles, rap battles, and beatbox and stuff.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, that is not me.’”
Despite the reluctance, Clay went and checked it out anyway. In the classroom, the tables were pushed to the sides, and a polka-dotted mat was rolled out in the middle of the floor. There was a guy in the centre doing nutcracker windmills, and everyone else was gathered around him, cheering.
“I was so pumped! I thought it was really cool.”
Excited, Clay went home that day and looked up how to dance on YouTube. He learned a few things online and a few more things from the other members of the Freestylers’ Club and eventually, he joined the all-male dance crew of the high school. Fast-forward to senior year, Clay became the captain of the dance crew and the president of the Freestylers’ Club. He also led the dance crew to victory at the world championships… three years in a row.
Clay leads a Steezy dance tutorial
“I was in love with dance. It was incredible. People were kind, and my potential for growth was limitless, and I made friends—that was really the most special thing. I just didn’t grow up feeling like I had people like me and I suddenly I did.”
At this point in the interview, Clay asks me if I now would like to hear about how he got into videos. He makes my job easy.
“I always loved watching movies,” says Clay. “I’m no film buff; honestly, I can’t name all of Martin Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s films, but I like movies and I like action.” As a child, Clay would make his own home action movies, filming fight scenes in his neighbourhood and patching footage together in iMovie on his mom’s early MacBook. The most impressive thing about all of this was that, at the time, he didn’t even own a video camera.
“I just turned the MacBook around like this,” he shows me, “and recorded against my chest as a kid.”
One of the most enjoyable parts of filmmaking, Clay says, is finding music that fits perfectly. And by perfectly, he also means the opposite.
“I remember filming a fight scene but putting it to the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It be Nice. It was so ridiculous, but I just love of being able to control the emotion of a viewer.”
While looking for dance videos to learn from on YouTube after joining Freestylers’, he was also interested in crossovers between dance and humour, and making them. By the time he was in high school and then later film school, he would have access to enough dancers whom he could hit up to humour his unconventional video ideas. “I guess it’s tumbled, and now we’re a dance tech company for eight years,” Clay laughs.
“It’s about making something that matters to people.”
Steezy, which of course is street speak for having effortless style, has been dubbed the “Netflix of dance”. Like Netflix, Steezy is a bona fide tech company, one which experienced a lot of success during the pandemic when brick-and-mortar dance studios were shut down worldwide. Initially a dance blog when it was founded in 2014, it launched its first online class a year later and now offers over 1,500 class in various genres, from ballet to K-pop. Co-founder and CEO Evan Zhou has stated that Steezy subscribers grew by 540 per cent from April 2019 to April 2020, and both Clay and Evan say that its multi-thousands of users come from over 100 countries. To get an idea of just how large the community might be, the company has surpassed a million downloads on the App Store.
A member of Steezy’s founding team, Clay’s official role in the company is the director of video, which he says is “a glamorised name for a YouTuber that works at a tech company”. Sounds fun, but it is serious work as YouTube is the company’s organic marketing outlet that brings in most of its new users. “It’s kind of incredible that a YouTube channel that’s kind of silly and just showcases dancing in a fun and interesting way can really be a great entrance way for a lot of people,” says Clay.
Clay is responsible for coming up with and seeing through all the various series and standalone videos you see on Steezy’s YouTube channel, which is just shy of one million subs at the time of writing. “And it’s not just bringing these amazing dancers in, I have to make them comfortable.” He continues, “It’s kind of funny, but a lot of dancers are not great speakers; they’re better speakers with their bodies. So I’m sort of there to translate what they feel and make sure it comes across on sound and on camera.”
The Steezy crew with Clay in the middle doing a headstand
Clay also makes his fair share of appearances in Steezy’s videos, not just with his idiosyncratic intros but sometimes as an instructor or commentator. He explains, “I love teaching. I love teaching dance and a lot of other things too, like I’m really into spirits and cocktails”—he makes the connection to our magazine—“I love teaching about these sorts of topics and making something complex feel simple.”
When asked, then, to break down content creation for us in simple terms, he says, “It’s not about the act of creating content. It’s about making something that matters to people, whether that’s entertainment, a how-to video, or something that’s emotionally supportive and empathetic and makes people feel heard. Evan made this analogy once: When you want to hang something up, you go to Home Depot, and you grab a screwdriver. But why do you buy a screwdriver? Is it because you want a screwdriver? No. It’s because you want a hole in the wall. It never had to be a screwdriver in the first place.”
As someone who was once desperate for connection, Clay also discusses its importance in creative work. “The people around you are a great litmus test for your videos. If you’re willing to showcase a rough draft, it means your final drafts are gonna have so much input and from real people. So don’t be afraid to share.”
