By Glenn Dunks
Dance is such a physical art. It is a beautiful medium, of course, but one that doesn’t always allow for great documentaries about it. Watching it can be a divine experience (Wim Wenders’ Pina, for instance), but to get into the nuts and bolts of the craft is difficult. A trio of new documentaries highlight these strengths and weaknesses. All three put their focus on black dancers, and all have strong queer themes as they navigate a creative space emerging through the pain of racism and the AIDS epidemic. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters by Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz, Jamila Wignot’s Ailey, and Firestarter — The Story of Bangarra by Wayne Blair and Nel Minchin each highlight the bodies and the stories. But it’s the former about the iconic titular choreographer and one of his most famous works that best captures the athleticism, the drama and the intimacy of dance...
Can You Bring It is ostensibly a documentary about Bill T. Jones, but directors LeBlanc and Hurwitz have wisely chosen to frame its narrative about a brand new production of his piece ‘D-Man in the Waters’. This show was produced in the aftermath of his lover and business partner’s death from AIDS, but in demonstrating how art can be mouldable and flexible, we see discussions around gun violence, on-campus rape and Black Lives Matter make for contemporary reverence to its performers. By choosing to make a film about one dance in particularly means that its directors really allow an audience to become more deeply immersed in its power for an entire feature’s length. Where others may glide over entire works like a brisk walk through a gallery, there is far more nuance to be found in the way Can You Bring It illuminates on D-Man's thorny subtexts and subtle textures.
Thankfully, this directing pair (their first time as co-directors) have incorporated just enough cinematic rigour into its storytelling to leave an even stronger impression. Hurwitz’s cinematography (aided of course by Ann Collins’ editing) doesn’t leave the camera static, preferring instead to follow the dancers as they go about moving through the choreography. The camera drifts across the stage as they leap, a close-up is shot in striking hand-held, the camera shifts from the front to the back and the sides creating a variety of POVs. In the film’s best shot, a rehearsal dance is filmed in the round as a camera spins as a dancer runs around it. It’s a small filmmaking choice, but a vitally important one to the film’s success. It’s because of these small things that the film is capable of recreating the dizzying, potent impact of live dance.. As a viewer it brings us in to the physical dance as much as the meaning and the history. It allows us to admire the bodies and these stretching, pulling, flexing muscles, the sheer athleticism of dance—as well as, of course, the choreography itself.
I was less impressed by Ailey, which is far more conventionally assembled. This isn’t a problem necessarily, but by covering a large swathe of Alvin Ailey’s life means we actually get far less insight as it speedily moves from his childhood on to his death from AIDS. Wignot’s film also uses a production, this time celebrating the 60th anniversary of Ailey’s dance company (albeit not one choreographed by Alvin Ailey), but Ailey is far more interested in the man himself. Which is fair enough; he is a fascinating subject. He trained under Martha Graham, his youthful memories informed many of his works including his experience with the church as well as his friendship with Chauncey Green.
Too often, however, Ailey is mere anecdotes and so deeper connections to his work become hard to find. Little is gleaned about his personal life, although two emotional, yet far too brief highlights do fill this out. This includes his decision to hide his love of dance for that would make him a ‘sissy’, and the dance world’s later discovery of his worsening illness from AIDS. Wignot is just never able to latch on to a dramatic core. Because of this, the ferocity of Ailey’s work—the anger and the power and the athletic beauty of his work—never shines through. We watch him be lauded at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1988, yet nothing is made of the fact that President Ronald Reagan was right there alongside him at a time when Ailey’s world was being decimated by AIDS. It’s because of this, that Ailey himself gets lost.
Somewhere in between these two is the Australian documentary Firestarter, which won the 2020 AACTA prize for Best Documentary and which I saw as a part of the Sheffield DocFest’s virtual festival. Like Ailey, it chooses to place a strong emphasis on the personas, in this case it is the three Page brothers whose Bengarra Dance Theatre revolutionised modern dance and brought the politics of First Nations people to such a broad audience. Like Can You Bring It, is wants us to get a deeper understanding of the dance itself. The fusion isn’t always a total success.
Blair and Minchin, as well as co-editors Karen Johnson and Nick Meyers are wise to incorporate plentiful archival footage from the dance company’s vaults. The video is incredible and puts a spotlight on the choreography and production that was a part of a larger wave of Indigenous art in Australian culture. Firestarter also incorporates footage from Stephen Page’s award-winning dance feature Spear (starring Page’s son, Hunter Page-Lochard who more may know from Rachel Perkins’ film adaptation of Bran Nue Dae), which adds a visually rich component of brown and green landscapes and exterior sky-flushed tableaus that sit in beautiful contrast with the interior on-stage dance performances.
However, those recurring issues of dance documentaries return. By covering so much ground of the Page brothers, as well as Bengarra’s history and its long legacy of dance, we don’t get to truly get inside the choreography. There are so many brilliant clips here of modern and traditional Aboriginal dance, but I wanted to learn more about what they were saying. The story of the Page brothers is a deeply affecting one, and Firestarter is a powerful ode to their influence on dance both in Australia and internationally, but the film itself doesn’t really reach the level of its subject. It very quickly falls into its linear narrative and traditional forms, which feels like something of a betrayal to the complexities of the work committed by Bengarra and the Page brothers.
Release: Can You Bring It is currently playing on Kino Marquee and a whole host of virtual theatres from Kino Lorber. NEON has released Ailey in cinemas nationwide. Firestarter continues to play festivals, but is available to rent for Australians (and those with a VPN) on YouTube, Fetch, Amazon and GooglePlay.
Oscar chances: Dance isn't a favourite subject of the documentary branch. Pina in 2011 felt like a surprise, even if in hindsight it was a given. Beforehand, Dancemaker in 1998 is the closest you get and the branch is very different now.