Havana Rose Liu’s life has always revolved around movement.
Before Liu starred in certified cult-classic comedies like 2023’s Bottoms, she often turned to dance as a way to express herself. It’s a mindset she maintained while selecting her outfit for the July 30 opening night of Chanel’s fourth annual BAAND Together Dance Festival, which brings together friends of the French fashion house along with the general public to celebrate and showcase five of New York City’s top dance companies: Ballet Hispánico, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. The evening kicked off with a VIP cocktail hour at New York’s hardest-to-book hot spot, Tatiana, where famous faces like Misty Copeland, Tommy Dorfman, and Harper’s Bazaar’s own Samira Nasr mingled ahead of what was a not-to-be-missed performance. For the special night, Liu wore a pink, black, and silver-tinged fantasy tweed top with matching high-waist trousers from Chanel’s Fall/Winter 2023–24 pre-collection and kept her glam fresh and subtle, with her signature deep auburn hair styled in loose waves (courtesy of Gonn Konoshita) and summer-appropriate bronzed eyes and cheeks (by Tyron Machhausen).
“We really focused on movement, given the event, and this feels kindred to a unitard in my mind—or as close as you can get to a unitard in tweed,” says Liu, laughing, as we sit in Tatiana’s patio garden overlooking Lincoln Center, where the festival takes place. “It’s always important to me to feel very comfortable and mobile in the looks that they put me in, and that felt like part of the inspiration. I think at one point they said if I were to design a tweed two-piece set, this is probably what it would look like anyways, which I think is true.”
Liu—who practiced ballet, contemporary modern, and even Chinese and African traditional dancing growing up—was excited not only to witness the night’s performances, but also to reflect on her own trajectory within the art form.
“Dance has taught me kind of everything. I’ve been dancing since I was a wee little thing, and it taught me a lot of different philosophies on how to live your life, on top of just [being] a form of expression that’s very valuable to me,” she says. “It taught me discipline. It taught me the elements of crafted emotion and the choreography of life in a way that I think has really informed my acting as well. I was sort of obsessed as a kid, and now that I look back at it, I wonder if I had ADHD or something.” She laughs. “But I just couldn’t stop moving.”
Liu continues: “The best part about dance is, you don’t need to know much going into it—you can just be taken along this abstract journey. I love these choreographers and these companies and the fact that they’re all based out of New York—it’s so exciting to see the melting pot that is the BAAND.”
Chanel is a through line in the actor’s life as well: In recent months she has discovered how the house has appeared throughout her own familial history, even before she became an official ambassador for the brand.
“My grandmother passed this summer, and she was the person that I was closest with in my life. I was going through her things and she had all of these little Chanel accessories that I didn’t know even about, and it seemed to be actually one of her favorite fashion houses,” Liu says. “I felt really suddenly that ‘Oh—there’s a lineage of appreciation of this.’ It felt really special to discover that.”
Tuesday night’s showcase also served as a rare bit of downtime for the actor, who has quite a few upcoming projects on the horizon, including John Carney’s musical comedy Power Ballad, the Chris Weitz–led horror film Afraid, and an indie TV series titled Hal & Harper from fellow breakout talent Cooper Raiff.
“I looked at everything I have coming up, and these are all very different projects,” says Liu. “I can’t talk too much about what they’re all about yet, but it does feel like this past year or two, I’ve been able to really stretch in a lot of interesting new directions and genres. It’s always interesting when you have a number of projects come out over a period of time—you can really watch your own trajectory and growth as an artist.”
The BAAND Together Dance Festival runs through Saturday, August 3, at Lincoln Center in New York City.
