dance of desire
by Douglas Messerli
Emma Gilbertson (writer and director), Joshua
Hubbard (choreographer) Crashing Waves / 2018 [4 minutes]
Even since Jerome Robbins’ and Robert Wise’s West
Side Story (1961) and even more so, after Claire Denis’ version of Billy
Budd, Beau Travail (1999), I have been puzzled why more directors of
LGBTQ films that do not define themselves primarily as musicals, do not
incorporate more dance into their films. Dance seems the natural way to express
the bodily desires which are so difficult to express by so many LGBTQ
individuals through language.
But, of course, it is precisely in that bodily expression that the
danger of discovery most lies. Two boys or two girls can talk endlessly about
sex—as they often do in films—but once the body becomes involved it is an
entirely another matter, an expression that becomes itself an admission of
sexuality instead of simply a statement of desire.
Despite this, however, dance presents it in such a stylized manner that
it seems more palatable for some audiences, wherein in the languages of love
and homophobia become intolerable, restricted by censors and other so-called
legal or self-defined moral dictators.
British director Em J. Gilbertson’s film not only tells a love story between two young men of the projects, but explores precisely these issues, pointing to the fact that is those who attempt to restrict the behavior of individual bodies through words that are most often the true immoralists.
In
this beautiful four-minute piece two young men of a housing project
(choreographer Joshua Hubbard and dancer Phoenix Chase-Meares) meet up on the
grounds below and from the get-go play out the general hostility between young
males in such situations, who define their small turf as if were an empire.
They perform a fight much in the manner of the major figures of West
Side Story, which through their bodily contact, instead of ending in
murder, ends in an erotic pas de deux as the dancers, darting their
heads in either direction to check out who may be watching, as engage in a kind
of mock tango before waltzing and moving on to various other dances which
quickly escalate into
By
the time they are ready for the kiss, their lips move into sweet pleasure at
the very same moment when some voyeuristic bullies watch in shock and horror,
one on them mouthing silently the word “fuck,” another recording their actions
to film.
Alas, as happens in real life too often, the language dominates the
bodily act of love, as one of the pair goes walking off, breaking with the
other over the bullying sentences that will surely follow.
Los Angeles, August 28, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review
(August 2023).
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