[SPECIAL EDITION] Dance Documentaries You Gotta Watch
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. I highlight some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; publish news about the industry; and interview writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens. Questions, comments, concerns? You can reach me anytime at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com.
Today in the newsletter: This week I’m turning things over to Jesse Locke and Chal Ravens, the two driving forces behind the Stuff You Gotta Watch section of the newsletter. They’ve been highlighting great music-related documentaries for a few months now, and I asked them to focus their sights this week on a single theme: dancing. As the former editor of electronic music website Resident Advisor, I can say it’s a topic near and dear to my heart. (And as the parent of a young child, I'm doing a lot of it these days... mostly to Sesame Street.) Big thanks to Jesse and Chal for putting this all together. But first…
A Few Links Before We Begin…
Keith Harris eulogizes City Pages and its influential music section
Roctober is crowdfunding its 25th anniversary issue
SPIN turned 35
ROCKRGRL is crowd-funding a project to digitize material from their conferences in 2000 and 2005
Rock critic and Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
The Journal of Music celebrated its 20th anniversary with a piece by editor-in-chief Toner Quin
The Chicago Reader has furloughed a number of employees
Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)
“Vogue” was a watershed moment for gay culture, exposing the world to New York’s ballroom scene and Madonna to accusations of appropriation and exploitation. In 1990, the dancers from the iconic black and white video joined the Queen of Pop for her Blond Ambition tour, a Broadway-level extravaganza of incredible choreography, fashion, sex, religion, and biceps. And all of those dancers became instantly famous when the film about the tour—Madonna: Truth Or Dare—became the highest-grossing documentary of all time.
Alek Keshishian shot over 200 hours of backstage footage, editing in black and white to create a vérité-style contrast with the gaudy stage show. The result really does feel intimate, capturing the comedy and catfights in gory detail, right down to Madonna’s bratty behaviour, the awkward presence of her then-squeeze Warren Beatty, along with the infamous “truth or dare” scene, in which Madonna fellates a glass bottle and two dancers make cinema history with a steamy kiss.
The show itself is a thrill: Jean-Paul Gaultier’s pointy bras and gender-bending suits are as eye-popping as the sexed-up choreography, and with its simulated orgasms and Catholic cosplay, the Blond Ambition tour more than fulfilled Madonna’s brief to “push people’s buttons,” offending parents, police, and the Pope along the way. Keshishian’s film certainly added to Madonna’s notoriety at the time, but Truth Or Dare stands up as a work of its own, and one of the most unique concert docs ever made. — Chal Ravens
Strike A Pose (2016)
This documentary charting the lives of the seven dancers featured in Madonna: Truth Or Dare is packed with interesting stories—it’s just a shame they’re so clumsily told. The title of the original tour movie becomes poignant rather than provocative in Strike A Pose, as directors Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan find out that a gay kiss during the “truth or dare” scene was not only a major moment in queer film history, but also a public outing for young dancer Gabriel Trupin, who died of AIDS in 1995. Trupin’s mother appears in the film, claiming that her son never wanted to be an advocate; he attempted to sue Madonna for invasion of privacy in 1994. Two other dancers reveal that they had actually been living with HIV for several years before joining the tour, a revelation that casts an entirely different light on certain scenes from Truth or Dare.
For some, fame led to excess led to rehab; for others, including two who also sued Madonna for financial compensation, their pain seems to stem from losing contact with the woman herself, who they say they looked up to as a mother. Their different paths are fascinating, and the project is obviously a worthy contribution to the history of gay men on screen—not least because their culture was so cheerily exploited by Madonna in her documentary, as she uses their sexuality to “push people’s buttons.” But the film lacks the style and grace its characters deserve, with a maudlin soundtrack that frames their gayness as a tragedy and a cringeworthy attempt to recreate the original “truth or dare” scene with a dinner party reunion (in which the one straight man manages to make it all about himself—but of course!). — Chal Ravens
I'm Tryna Tell Ya (2014)
British filmmakers Tim & Barry traveled to Chicago in 2012 to document footwork at its fever pitch. It makes sense that fans from across the pond would helm this project, as the 160bpm street dance craze first exploded internationally thanks to the Bangs & Works compilations from UK label Planet Mu. Linking up with footwork titans like Traxman, RP Boo, DJ Spinn, and the late DJ Rashad, I’m Tryna Tell Ya captures the movement’s masterminds at their most proud.
As DJ Earl explains near the start of the 60-minute film, many of the top producers in the Chicago scene started off as dancers first. The hyperspeed gliding and rubbery-legged poses of footwork are inextricably tied to its chopped up samples and firecracker beats, as showcased in a series of vicious throwdowns at Chicago’s checker-floored headquarters, Battlegrounds.
We’re given a rare glimpse into the inner circles of the TekLife crew: In the scenes where dancer AG breaks down the evolution of various moves, Traxman taps out beats on his MPC and Spinn produces a series of stoned vocal takes. Though Rashad would sadly pass away just two years after it was filmed, the spirit of his Double Cup continues to flow over. — Jesse Locke
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The Summer of Rave 1989 (2006)
A farmer named Stuart MacIntosh is The Summer of Rave 1989’s true hero. A brief scene in the 2006 film has him looking back on a massive outdoor event that found 20,000 ravers congregating on his fields in Buckhamingshire. In the aftermath, “if I ever went into the Red Lion, which is a very nice pub, they would all move to the other end,” he says, referring to his neighbours. “But looking back on it, I’m quite proud of what we did. It made a lot of people have a lovely weekend. And I bet a lot of them still remember it, to this day.”
The rave that MacIntosh helped facilitate was the climax of the summer spent at 120 BPM and the squelching sounds of acid house. A disaffected generation in the UK—sick of a decade of rule by Margaret Thatcher, inspired by the Tiananmen Square protests in China—surrendered themselves to the power of rave. Ecstasy had become widely available, but as music journalist Sheryl Garatt notes, it was rarely combined with alcohol, leading to euphoria instead of aggression. Madchester mutated into its own version of the party with bucket hats bobbing to the Happy Mondays at the famed Haçienda Club. Even football hooligans from opposing teams put their rivalries on pause to join each other in a blissful escape.
Yet as 1989’s raves became big business, unwelcome visits from drug cartels and police crackdowns led to the party finally crashing. All good things must come to an end, but the spirit of ‘89 lives on forever in clips of Bez shaking his maracas on Top of the Pops. — Jesse Locke
Cunningham (2019)
“I never was interested in dancing that referred to a mood or indeed that expressed the music [… ] The dancing does not refer. It is what it is.”
Born in 1919, Merce Cunningham founded his dance company in New York in 1953 and became one of the most influential choreographers of the century, continuing to work until his death in 2009. Cunningham, a restrained documentary originally released in 3D, is a fine attempt at bringing his radical philosophy of dance to the screen. The doc arranges archival footage and interview excerpts around newly filmed flashes of Cunningham’s most groundbreaking pieces. His bodies move with animal force and balletic grace, seemingly ignorant of the concept of a stage; they leap and ricochet and topple into each other, on rooftops and in forests, in empty plazas and grand buildings.
Per Cunningham’s insistence on abstraction, the music often seems to be doing its own thing. We see John Cage extracting soft thuds from his prepared piano, and get a glimpse of their creative and romantic relationship, including wonderful shots of the composer on tour with Cunningham’s company, hopping out of the VW minibus to forage for mushrooms. As for the other excerpts, there’s not more than a music credit to the works of David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Conlon Nancarrow. These are men of abstraction; interested in texture, duration, and asymmetry, and in the frontiers of electronic music. Their music, too, does not refer.
Chance sometimes played a role in their compositions, as it did for Cunningham. Applied to the dynamics of a dance performance, these vectors of abstraction made it seem like “nobody is responsible,” but also “not irresponsible,” as Cage remembers. “That creates a wonderful feeling about the possibilities of society.” — Chal Ravens
More Stuff You Gotta Watch
Jesse Locke and Chal Ravens have been writing the Stuff You Gotta Watch column for a few months now. Click the button below to check out the other music-related documentaries they’ve highlighted in the newsletter.
Only When I Dance (2010)
For teenagers living in the poverty stricken favelas of Rio de Janeiro, ballet offers a way out. The 2009 documentary Only When I Dance follows young Brazilian dancers Irlan Silva and Isabela Coracy as they leap towards a brighter future.
There are steep costs to attend the Centro de Dança Rio dance school, but families of prodigious talents do whatever it takes for their children to succeed. It’s heartwarming to see how proud Irlan’s father is to have his son’s name tattooed on his arm, while Isabela’s parents take on multiple jobs and predatory bank loans. At the finals of a competition in Switzerland, Irlan makes the risky choice to perform a solo paying tribute to legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. This gamble pays off as Irlan wows the judges, eventually leading to his final destination in America, where he now performs with the Boston Ballet. Isabela also found her way to Ballet Black, an international dance company for POC performers. The dedication displayed by both is almost as astonishing as the ways in which they spin and soar on the stage. — Jesse Locke
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The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! Full disclosure: My day job is at uDiscover Music, a branded content online magazine owned by Universal Music. This newsletter is not affiliated or sponsored in any way by Universal, and any links that relate to the work of my department will be clearly marked. Feel free to reach out to me via email at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. On Twitter, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time…