NEW YORK, NY.- Choreographer Fatima Robinson made her name, at 21, with an epic Michael Jackson video. Two decades later, she orchestrated the moves for 1,000 performers at a Super Bowl halftime show. Then she rose to become Beyoncé’s director of choreography.

But among the most meaningful work of her career has boiled down to a series of handclaps.

When Robinson was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother took her and her two younger sisters to see “The Color Purple” — a family milestone. After that, “I saw the movie probably every year of my life,” she said. The girls were inspired by the onscreen sisters’ patty-cake-style routine; they made the claps their own and share it to this day, often in emoji form. If “we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” Robinson said, it’s a symbol of peace. “We know that’s, like, that special love that we have for each other.”

Now, as the choreographer for the latest version of “The Color Purple,” a movie musical directed by Blitz Bazawule, she helped devise the onscreen clapping pattern for the young siblings Celie and Nettie. “It was sooo special,” Robinson said. “That sister love in this movie is so what I have with my sisters.”

“The Color Purple,” based on the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, arrives with a mantle of heavyweight backers and performers, including producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg and stars Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, Taraji P. Henson and Colman Domingo. In Robinson, 52, they added perhaps the most elevated hip-hop and R&B choreographer working today, who has worked in music, TV, film and live events, including Super Bowl halftime shows in 2022 and 2011. (She was also recently named a creative director for the New York Knicks City Dancers.)

“When we needed something amazing, we called Fatima — that’s what it was,” said Mary J. Blige, who has worked with her several times, including on NBC’s live production of “The Wiz” in 2015.

Bazawule, a Ghanaian filmmaker, grew up on her videos — he recalled school friends in Accra trying to copy the moves she had Aaliyah doing — and made her the first hire when he landed “The Color Purple,” his Hollywood feature debut.

“Not only is her cultural depth so incredible,” he said, “but also she understands this journey that has been the African American movement, starting of course from the continent all the way through the diaspora.”

“The Color Purple” follows Celie (Barrino-Taylor) from an impoverished childhood in Georgia, through abusive relationships and toward independence in the first half of the 20th century. The story encompasses social dance of the era, like the Charleston, but Robinson and the filmmakers wanted the film to feel contemporary. “It was a lot of talks about what our ancestors did then and what we could do now,” Robinson said in a video interview from a hotel room in Denver, where she was choreographing a recent TV special for Mariah Carey.

Robinson was still in her pajamas — a pink Indian batik printed with cats; fabulous — and paused to roll up the shades and welcome room service. “It’s going to be a slumber party,” she said of our interview.

Her verve is all over “The Color Purple” — in the macho, drum-circle swagger of Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and his fellas building a house in “Workin’” (a new number written by Bazawule, who is also a musician) and in “Hell No!” when the gutsy Sophia (Danielle Brooks) pushes back against misogyny with a chorus of shoulder-shimmying, neck-swiveling ladies. Brooks earned an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress; the movie is also in the running for best ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild awards.

Bazawule even had Robinson help out on nondance scenes, so that characters would stay true to their groove. He was impressed by the way she traced the history of moves like the cake walk. “I’d send him links of Black dance from all over the world” — stepping at historically Black colleges and universities, Jamaican club scenes — “like, how can we incorporate some of this?” she said.

During production in Atlanta, Robinson assembled a skeleton dance team to block out the choreography, then filmed rehearsals on her phone, panning up from a foot, climbing up a ladder to zoom out. She and her team edited the clips, and she and Bazawule pored over them to fine-tune. “I think what was special was how much she understood that the camera was also a character — it moves just like the people move,” Bazawule said.

For Henson, who plays the sultry chanteuse Shug Avery, Robinson’s technique was foundational. “The way she choreographed helped me find Shug — the way she walks, moves,” Henson said. “It’s sensuality and — sex, let’s just say it.”

Robinson’s inspirations for Shug included Darcel Leonard, a lead dancer on the 1980s variety series “Solid Gold” — “I would imitate her all the time” — and daggering, a crotch-forward Jamaican dance hall style.

For Shug’s showstopping entrance number, “Push Da Button,” at a swampy juke joint, Robinson turned off the lights in rehearsal, and found her snappy, Bob Fosse-meets-Lola Falana rhythm. The darkness pulsing with coiled bodies wound up onscreen too; because Robinson had recorded the practice sessions, Henson said, she already knew how to work the camera angles. And when Robinson was at the monitor during shoots, “she would see things that Blitz wouldn’t see, because he was watching something else, and she would just come in and whisper” a way to amp it up.

“I’m not a dancer, I’m a mover-weller,” added Henson, who studied musical theater in college. “And she just knows how to choreograph stuff to make you look good, to make you shine.”

Robinson had no formal dance training when she started popping up in Los Angeles clubs in the late ’80s and early ’90s. She was working as a shampoo girl at her mother’s hair salon and going to cosmetology school, then letting loose at night: “I always say, clubs are my classroom.”

Toni Basil, a singer, dancer and choreographer, spotted her and offered her an audition for rapper Young MC. That didn’t work out but the gigs that followed opened Robinson up to the hip-hop stratosphere. “When I danced for Big Daddy Kane, Jay-Z was our hype man,” she said. “I’ve known all these people for years.”

After touring as a performer, creating dance naturally followed, even if she wasn’t looking at it as a career yet. “I remember Rosie Perez” — then a dancer friend — “calling me and saying, ‘You have to charge money, and you have to call yourself a choreographer,’” Robinson recalled. “And I was like, OK. And after I got off the phone, I looked up how to spell the word ‘choreographer.’”

After she did “Remember the Time,” a nine-minute Michael Jackson video — directed by John Singleton and also starring Eddie Murphy, Iman and Magic Johnson — she began taking classes, especially in African dance. (At Bazawule’s suggestion, a sequence in “The Color Purple” is based on the traditional Ashanti Adowa dance, complete with costumes and props from Ghana.)

Robinson still tracks the global dance scene — now easy to filter through social media, and her dancers — but doesn’t go clubbing as much. She lives in Ojai, California, and values her serenity there. “My life is tea ceremony and in my garden and in nature,” she said.

The calmness she exudes gives her collaborators faith. “I’ve never seen her break a sweat, other than while dancing,” Blige said, even on extended music video shoots or high-drama award shows. “When you break down or you give up, she’s confident that you’re going to get it.”

Director Hype Williams, the ’90s wunderkind who worked with her in videos for Usher and Busta Rhymes, saw her as more than a “brilliant” dancer. “She’s someone who taught me things about what I wanted to do with the medium,” he said. “She taught me to think differently.”

Robinson has long understood that she has a place beyond the dance world, and ambitions for it. In 1999, she choreographed an influential Gap commercial, “Khaki Soul,” that Williams directed. After another dancer was cut, she was unexpectedly cast herself. The producers told her they liked her look.

“So I go and I cut up a linen shirt and I make my head wrap, and I style myself,” she said. Jewelry was a no-no, but she convinced the producers that culturally she needed her big hoop earrings to go with the head wrap. She opens and closes the video, which helped usher in a resurgence of “Lovely Day,” the Bill Withers tune it was set to.

Not long after, Robinson said, she passed a mannequin styled in her likeness — head wrap, hoops and all — in the window of a Gap store. “And that is where I realized that I can help push culture forward,” she said.

Lately she has expanded beyond dance, into producing; and a directorial debut, set in the world of drill teams, is on the horizon. But she is not leaving behind the movement that got her where she is. “I mean, I dream choreography,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.