When writer-producer Holly Sorensen pitched Step Up: High Water, the new offshoot of the 2006 film Step Up, she set the fame-hungry dancers in Oakland, California.
Oakland’s hip-hop history, she felt, would lend reality to a show about life at a next-gen performing arts school, where street dance replaces ballet. But when she got the gig, producers said Oakland was out: No tax credits.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to tell me where we can shoot because it has to have an indigenous dance culture,’” she said. “Atlanta was the obvious choice.”
