Star AZ gymnast taught Mikey Madison of 'Anora' to dance: 'We wanted things to feel fiery'

Anora, played by Mikey Madison, first meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) at the strip club where she works. One night, Vanya, the "prince" in the anti-fairy tale that is the film "Anora," arrives looking for a Russian-speaking dancer; Anora is summoned and takes him to a VIP room where she performs a lap dance on him. But before doing so, she tells him to sit on his hands. 

That specific detail is a way of making sure Anora, who also goes by Ani, has control over how she is touched. It came from Kennady Schneider, who was Madison's choreographer and a movement consultant for the film, which swept the 2025 Oscars with six wins, including Best Actress and Best Picture.

"I remember her asking me, 'Is this something that is actually said?' I was like, 'Yes, I say that,'" Schneider said in an interview with The Arizona Republic. 

Schneider is a pole dancer and teacher in Los Angeles. After graduating from the University of Arizona in 2019, where she spent a tenuous four years on the gymnastics team, she found healing and a path forward through pole dancing. Since then, she has danced with Usher in Las Vegas and at the 2024 Super Bowl and appeared as a character in the Starz television series "P-Valley." 

A star at UA gymnastics, but struggling under the surface

Schneider, who grew up in Las Vegas, verbally committed to the UA's gymnastics team when she was 15. She competed in almost every meet over her four years on the team. 

Known for choreographing her own floor routines, Schneider would often be seen dancing on the side of events even when she wasn't competing. But despite her buoyant exterior, she felt suffocated by the strict rules of gymnastics and the isolation and racism she experienced as the only Black member on the team.

"I truly don't remember enjoying gymnastics at all," Schneider said. "It kind of became something I just knew was a job."

As a fine arts major with an emphasis in photography, she channeled those feelings into her art. Her first solo show, "Seasoned," explored the experience of Black people in high-level sports. The show included videos of Black UA athletes in motion and portraits of all the Black gymnasts that Schneider competed against. She contrasted those powerful images with pictures of herself crying and falling during meets that she found on Google. 

Sama Alshaibi, a professor of photography at the UA and one of Schneider's mentors, was struck by the intentionality of the images of that show. 

"You always had to negotiate what you were looking at. You were really aware that you couldn't just consume the image of the Black athlete like you would if you were just watching TV," Alshaibi said.

Despite her difficult relationship with gymnastics, Schneider said she did feel joy when she stepped onto the mat to perform. 

"I loved when I could just salute and walk onto the equipment or on to my event because nobody could touch me. That was when I had full agency," Schneider said. 

Her gymnastics background was part of the reason that, when she discovered pole dance, she was immediately drawn to it. 

"Shifting from the gymnastics world to the pole dance and dance world, I honestly felt so free," Schneider said. "I had all this trauma from the sports world. And then as a dancer, I'm like, 'Wow, this just feels good.'" 

'How am I going to support myself?'

Schneider learned how to pole dance as a way to support herself financially. 

After graduating from UA in 2019, she was accepted into a master's program in Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. She struggled with her mental health while in graduate school as she grappled with the loneliness of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emotional upheaval of the Black Lives Matter protests. And she realized she had no idea how to make money after she graduated. 

"I could make art. I could conceptualize anything," Schneider said. "But toward the end, I was like, 'How am I going to support myself?'"

That's when she started teaching herself how to pole dance, with the intention to start stripping once pandemic restrictions were lifted. In 2021, while she was still in graduate school, she auditioned for and began dancing in strip clubs.

"I'm not stripping for empowerment, I'm stripping for freedom through monetary gain," she said.

She does a style she calls "West Coast slink," which is "a lot lazier looking" than what is commonly performed in clubs in the South, where "stripper-style" pole dancing evolved.

For Schneider, whose family is from Louisiana, learning these dances was a way to reconnect with her ancestral history. "How strippers dance today draws its direct links to Black culture," Schneider said. 

For example, the movement known as twerking is commonly thought to have originated in a celebratory dance from Côte d'Ivoire that enslaved Africans brought to the U.S., which then filtered through generations of Black Americans. The word "twerk" was first used in a recorded song with a hip-hop track by DJ Jubilee in 1993 — a combination of the words "twist" and "jerk."  

"In the strip club, I'm doing things that I know the client, the audience, is going to like," Schneider said. "But as a pole dancer with my own movement practice, I just try to do things that interest me and make me feel good."

From Usher to 'Anora'

In 2022, during the final semester of her master's program, Schneider auditioned to dance for Usher's Las Vegas residency. She booked the gig and started rehearsals immediately — she didn't even attend her graduation. 

During that time, a colleague referred her to Madison, who was looking for a pole teacher. 

Schneider initially thought Madison just wanted to dance as a hobby, but soon learned that the actress was training for a film. The two clicked and Madison and the film's producer Samantha Quan asked Schneider to be a consultant for the film.

Although Schneider choreographed certain scenes, like when Ani dances on the floor in Vanya's house, she also worked with Madison more broadly to figure out how a dancer like Ani would move. 

"What Mikey told me about who Anora was and her personality and her feistiness — that influenced how we texturized the dance," Schneider said. "We didn't want anything to look ballet-like or polished. We wanted things to feel fiery." 

When Madison won the Oscar for Best Actress, she mentioned Schneider in her acceptance speech. 

"Thank you to Kennady Schneider. Thank you to our incredible consultants," Madison said in her speech. "I just want to recognize and honor the sex worker community."

'I bawled my eyes out'

When she watched the final film, Schneider cried. 

She loved the opening montage, which shows a series of moments during a shift at the strip club. Shot ethnographically in a single 30-minute take, the montage is meant to let the audience "experience a night with Ani," director Sean Baker said in an interview with Letterboxd.

"You're seeing all the interactions, all of the talking, all of the sales tactics, the emotional capacity that she has to go through to get through a shift," Schneider said. 

Schneider especially felt moved by the final scene, when Ani breaks down for the first and only time in the film.  

"Feeling the ability to release or process with a man, especially when you have to interface with so many men and become a fantasy in our line of work … to have an image of vulnerability at that moment of Ani was just really touching for me," Schneider said. "I freakin' bawled my eyes out." 

From her experience working on the film and with the series "P-Valley," Schneider realized that she ultimately dreams of being behind the camera, not in front of it as a dancer. Her next goal is to produce a short film — she just finished writing her first script.

But wherever her art practice takes her in the future, she's sure of one thing. 

"I'm gonna pole dance until I'm 95," she said. "I'm going to be doing this forever."

Reach the reporter at  reia.li@gannett.com . Follow  @reia_reports  on Instagram.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Star Arizona gymnast taught Mikey Madison of 'Anora' how to dance