How Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall Helped Amanda Seyfried Embrace the Holy Spirit

If you can remember back to season two of Gossip Girl, you may recall an episode about aspiring designer Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) attempting to earn funding for her eponymous fashion line by staging a guerrilla show at a charity gala. In the middle of the stuffy reception, Jenny commandeers the A/V system, blasting punk rock while a squad of models, clad in her early-aughts emo designs, climb on tables.

Even the most dedicated Gossip Girl superfans may be surprised to learn that two of the models in that scene are The Testament of Ann Lee director Mona Fastvold and her longtime collaborator, Ann Lee choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. In a stroke of Hollywood luck, the pair met that day, becoming fast friends and launching a creative collaboration that would extend for nearly two decades. The 20-somethings worked together on music videos until their first major project: 2018’s Vox Lux, which was directed by Fastvold’s partner Brady Corbet, based on a story by Corbet and Fastvold, and choreographed by Rowlson-Hall.

But even during the Vox Lux days, Fastvold was dreaming of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of 18th-century religious sect the Shakers. “I remember probably close to a decade ago, her saying, ‘I want to make a film about Ann Lee,’” Rowlson-Hall tells Vanity Fair. It wasn’t until 2023 that Fastvold gave her collaborator an actual script and asked her to join the team. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I mean, I was gonna make it anyway. You know what I mean? We’re collaborators for life.”

The most expansive project in their partnership to date, The Testament of Ann Lee interprets the life of Ann Lee, played in the film by Amanda Seyfried, as a musical, transforming old Shaker hymns and their full-bodied worship (or “shaking”) into sequences of choreographed, euphoric dance. With some old images and a couple written accounts as historical guidance, Fastvold’s directive to Rowlson-Hall was simple: Go crazy.

As it happens, Rowlson-Hall grew up in a family that subscribed to another intense religion: Christian Science. That sect, she notes, was also founded by a woman. “I wanted to be Jesus when I was a little girl,” she says. Being chosen for Ann Lee felt like divine intervention: “It was just tapping into my entire youth and existence, and that prayer and that desire to have a connection to God.”

Celia Rowlson-Hall attends the Los Angeles premiere of The Testament Of Ann Lee, December 14, 2025.

Brianna Bryson/WireImage.

Like the Shakers, who settled in the secluded hamlet of Niskayuna, New York, after fleeing England, Rowlson-Hall grew up in a Virginia town with a population of roughly 200 people. Her religion also prioritized celibacy and a prayerful connection to God. And like Ann Lee, Rowlson-Hall expressed herself largely through dance.

“I think I danced because I couldn’t say what I really wanted to say,” she says. “Dance has always been this way for me to communicate things that I did not feel comfortable verbalizing.” At five years old, she told her parents she wanted to be a ballerina in New York. Yet her childhood dance teacher ironically promised her mother that Rowlson-Hall’s hobby wouldn’t get too serious.

Forty years later, Rowlson-Hall has choreographed cult hits like Smile 2 and After Yang; zeitgeist-y comedies including an episode of The Other Two and Orange Is the New Black; and MGMT’s “Electric Feel” music video. She played the adult version of Aftersun’s central character, Sophie, and choreographed that film’s devastating final scene in what she characterizes as a “two-for-one special” for the independent film. Her millennial cred comes not only from Gossip Girl, but also from choreographing the pivotal dance sequence in “Beach House,” widely recognized as the best episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls. At the time, Rowlson-Hall was married to a man—but she met her future wife, Mia Lidofsky, on the set.

“I didn’t know I was queer, and so I just felt like I got punched in the throat when I saw her,” Rowlson-Hall remembers. “I was like, ‘I need to get out of the room.’ [Lidofsky] was like, ‘Every room I’d walk into, you’d walk out of.’ But we both secretly took photos of each other.” A few years later, the couple got married at the very same beach house.

Rowlson-Hall’s decades of soul-searching, religious deconstruction, and dance all led her to Ann Lee. “It was the easiest thing I’ve ever choreographed,” she says, laughing. “People are like, ‘How long did it take you?’ I’m like, ‘Not long. It was all there.’”

“I loved praying as a child,” she continues. “Being able to go into a studio and seek that thing I was seeking at some point in my life was cathartic. It felt like home in a way. This isn’t dancing. It’s not performing. It is praying.”

Those years of preparation were critical during a filming process Rowlson-Hall describes as a pressure cooker. She collaborated with composer Daniel Blumberg before honing the choreography with Seyfried, then heading to Budapest in the fall of 2024 for a whirlwind, month-long shoot. She had just two days to prepare her dancers in person. “One day was teaching 25 dancers what they’re doing, and then the second day was going to the location and rehearsing it, because the location is going to change the dance entirely. Then once the camera comes in, we have a third shift.” Each dance sequence took about four to six hours to shoot.

Rowlson-Hall spent the whole shoot living in a “nervous sweat,” trying to wrangle actors, dancers, and extras for extended long-take scenes. “There’s lit candles all around the room, and I’ve got dancers with very long hair flying about, so I’m making sure, ‘Okay, you, dancer with short hair, you’re swapping here with this dancer with long hair.’” After eight to 10 takes of a scene, they were forced to move on.

Blumberg and Rowlson-Hall both remember the particularly hectic day when they shot the film’s opening sequence in the woods with a crane. “The dancers are slipping on the leaves and tripping over a branch, and we were trying to get it in a oner,” Rowlson-Hall says. “It was the same time they were shooting the running song,” Blumberg adds. “Everyone was running around pointing, trying to find the settlement.” After lunch that day, they had to build out a night prayer sequence that would include hundreds of extras and a lot of running up and down hills in the dark.

Through it all, Rowlson-Hall aimed to channel something truthful and real. “Because we have no actual footage [of Ann Lee],” she says, “I was just going to be as honest as I could in making the movement. That felt like the best service to Ann Lee.”