David here, with an interview from Private Romeo director Alan Brown on his latest film Five Dances, which opened this year's Fringe! Film Festival in London, a celebration of multiple queer films and artists.
Chip (Ryan Steele) and Theo (Reed Luplau)
‘I purposely wanted to test myself – I wanted to work in a freer environment. And it was terrifying - purposely so!’ Alan Brown laughs as he describes the genesis of his latest feature. Five Dances received its European premiere as the opening night of the third London Fringe! Film Festival, a volunteer-run festival that has quickly grown in stature since 2011.
Five Dances is Brown’s fourth feature, following the great success of his homo-Shakespeare adaptation Private Romeo, currently available to watch instantly on Netflix. Brown slides together dance and drama as he tells the story of Chip (Ryan Steele), a young dancer who’s moved from smalltown Kansas to the bright lights of New York and joins a small dance company rehearsing Anthony’s (Luke Murphy) new choreography. [more] Brown includes each dance in full, preceded by a numbered title card. ‘Jonah Bokaer, the choreographer, did not see any script, and he didn’t even see a treatment for the film,’ explains Brown. ‘I purposely wanted him to create an abstract piece for these dances. Jonah was with me for the auditions, so we could cast people that would work for him also as dancers.’
Alan Brown (photo: Peter Ross)How, then, did he structure the film together with those dances? ‘By the seat of my pants!’ Brown exclaims. ‘I’m usually very, very, very prepared – by the time I go into production on a film, I’m able to walk in with a very meticulous shot list, and have really worked out as a director and a writer every moment in every scene, and at least emotionally, I have answers to every question.’ Five Dances was a remarkable departure from the security Brown was used to, and he wondered if he was making a mistake. ‘My friend said ‘No, it’s really good to be terrified, and you should let yourself be scared.’
The film began, then, as a desire to film Bokaer’s choreographer. ‘I really went into it not knowing what was going to happen - not really sure how it was going to play out as a feature film story. I went in ostensibly saying this could turn out to be a short film, or a series of 3 or 4 interlocking short films. We didn’t really know until we got into the room.’ It was with the casting process that the narrative took shape. ‘I was particularly fortunate to have Ryan, who turned out to be a wonderful natural actor with great instincts, and I really ended up fashioning the story around him.’
From a film that grew from a pure desire to add a cinematic touch to dance, Five Dances quickly became a strong character piece. Chip is on-screen for almost the entire film, and becomes reliant on Steele’s emotional clarity and talent to draw the audience into the narrative. I mention how I saw the film’s narrative beats as being as cyclical as the dance, slowly circling out to explore the other dancers as the film progresses, before twirling back to a tighter focus on Chip as his love story with Theo (Reed Luplau) develops.
‘I would love to say we purposely did that, but…,’ admits Brown, continuing to describe just how fluid and unpredictable the production was. ‘We got into the editing room, and my editor and I… we weren’t scared of the dance, but we didn’t really know how to respond to it at first. We really anxious to edit the dramatic scenes. And then there was this moment, probably around a month in, it was so clear when it happened – suddenly, every day we would come in and all we wanted to do was work on the dance. It was like the dance took over the film.'
Chip 'can do anything'
‘I think we did so much in tandem, going back and forth. We spent months and months reshuffling this bulletin board of cards. It was difficult knowing where to put the dance in, and where it made sense. I wish I could take credit for consciously melding the dance and the story so well, but I think it just happened naturally. The story ended up reflecting the dance, as opposed to the other way around.’
Dance is an infrequent but passionate subject in the history of cinema, but the prominent examples – The Red Shoes, Black Swan – are heavily narrativised and mould the character’s psychosis with their physical motion. Multiplex hits about modern dance, like Step Up or Save the Last Dance, are less vivid depictions of the power of dance and more expressions of dance as an empowering tool for the characters. For Brown, Five Dances was a project where he was keen to depict the pure physical motion of dance. ‘Our approach to shooting the dance was we were going to cover the dance the same way we would cover a dramatic film. We were going to look it as normal action.’
Brown and his cinematographer Derek McKane film the dance sequences with a fluid tactility that winds amongst and often mirrors the movements. It’s a graceful, powerful depiction of dance that is rare in cinema. Despite the dances’ isolation within the narrative, they seem to reflect the emotional content of the narrative. Did Brown and Bokaer design it like that? ‘Well, Jonah was not there during production at all. Jonah made the piece separately before we went into production and then left. When he choreographed it, he knew we were shooting it and where we were shooting it, so he was very aware of the fact that it would be unlike an actual stage dance performance.’
Ryan and Chip in motionThe sensuous love scene between Chip and Theo was approached in much the same way. Filmed in the romantic glow of a single overhead light in the middle of the night, the scene uses the studio space in a very different way to the rehearsal scenes. But to Brown, it’s two sides of the same coin. ‘This was a film about dancers, and their bodies, because they’re about their physicality. And I felt that having the love scene was very much an extension of what was going on in the story.’ Did the sexual orientation of the scene have any bearing on its conception or production? ‘It grew out of a political desire of mine to include that as part of the story. I don’t want to say it was purely a political decision, but I realised while you can see heterosexual sex on-screen, you don’t really see gay couples having romantic sex in mainstream movies.’
But Brown is, it would seem, from a different generation. ‘I called up Ryan and Reed, and I said ‘I would like to do a love scene, and how do you feel about this?’. And being twenty-one and dancers, they both said ‘fine’. And I said ‘well, I think we should talk about this’. I felt that they were young, they didn’t understand the implications of being on film, because they’re used to live performance. I brought them in and we sat down, and it was the most astonishing discussion – I gave them this impassioned speech about the importance of presenting positive gay imagery on the screen, and how very little of it exists. I was almost in tears - and they were almost looking at their watches, bored. I think they kind of took this for granted. It was easy thing for them do politically, and in terms of their art, they’re very comfortable in their bodies.’
So where does Brown’s art go from here? ‘I’m actually going to do, in the great French tradition of anti-musical musicals – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Christophe Honore’s Love Songs?’ I love that film, I reply, touting, as I will dare to here, my recent article on the film. ‘Gorgeous film. I’m also a great fan of earlier films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. So I decided I’m going to make an anti-musical musical. It’s a love triangle involving traumatic brain injury, and songs. It’s about a man who has an accident and loses his memory, and forgets his wife, and falls in love with a man. In making Private Romeo and Five Dances, I became very interested in taking art forms that are not basically filmic – taking live art forms and putting them on film.’
Five Dances played as the opening film at the 2013 Fringe! Film Festival, London, on Thursday 11 April. You can find out more about the film on its official website. TLA Releasing have rights in UK, US and several other countries and will release the film later this year.