Dancing Inside
1996 BBC2 TX series/London Production Fund 38min documentary/digital dance manipulation with 86 year old choreographer/dancer Jane Dudley
Development of technology inspired me to propose a film in which an older and less able dancer made use of technology to choreograph a piece in which they could move in ways no longer possible for them. I had seen Jane Dudley in a film by a colleague. I approached her and proposed doing something together. At 84 she was still eager, although completely mystified by the computer. We had many talks together and needed to learn the languages of each other’s art. Jane was adamant that she did not want to talk about the past and particularly ‘when she was with Martha’. She had spent some time in Martha Graham’s Dance Company and interviewers often saw this as the only achievement in her life. Now Martha was only to be referred to in passing. Jane wanted to do something new. We both thought about possible subjects and batted ideas back and forth. I wanted her to pick the subject.. It was, and is, important to me to show older people being creative and active. This is obviously to do with the awareness I have of my own ageing and the feeling of doors being closed rather than opened, particularly in the funding world. Jane became a true inspiration to me, a role model of the best kind. For Dancing Inside she decided to concentrate on what it’s like to be older and to face death. I knew this would be challenging for me as a subject. I knew it was really hard for her but doing the film meant she was making something positive from her difficulties, throwing energy out instead of being drained. The single word she was guided by was ‘acceptance’.
This focus allowed me to concentrate on one aspect of her life and from that to refer to other things. It made the film containable. Jane chose the subject because she felt it was under represented on TV and when it was represented it was negative and depressing. She wanted to talk and show that life could still be rich and creative. She really did have something important to say through her work.
Indeed this was born out personally for me by my aunt, then nearing 90, who asked her neighbour to tape the film for her as it was broadcast late. However in the end she stayed up to watch it. She told me how difficult it was at first to face the subject but she stuck it out and by the end was really inspired. The neighbour however, told her the next day that he had not kept the tape. ‘You don’t want to watch that’ he said. ‘It’s about a depressing old woman’ Interesting because the man knew it had been made by my aunt’s niece. How could he take the decision for her? This is a common occurrence in the treatment of old people, an assumption that they no longer know what’s good for them.
Jane devised a 2-minute movement sequence and chose a piece of Shostakovich music.
After shooting it we cut it and tried a straight version and a computer treated version. I preferred it straight. The computer version added nothing to the ‘real’ as far as I was concerned. I then asked Jane to do a piece simply with her hands. She wasn’t happy at first because her hands were so gnarled with arthritis but in the end thought it a good idea. Again, this film was made when people were just beginning to use computer technology to experiment within programmes so it looks a bit old fashioned now.
As well as the ‘dance’ sections we filmed Jane doing a number of the things she talked about as difficult. We also filmed her talking. We filmed her precious possessions in her flat. I used family photos. I built her portrait into her present,now. Within the programme she was given her voice. She chose to walk in the overgrown graveyard ‘the silent house’. She chose to have the footage of her trying to get up off the floor included in the cut. Some people see it as exploitative. The sequence occurred by accident – the cameraman happened to still be running – a thing we had agreed between us just in case something interesting happened. So he went on shooting. Jane volunteered to try getting up off the floor to show how difficult it was and to encourage old people to not give up.
Sometime after the film was made a close friend of Jane’s said to me that many of her friends had felt she wasn’t coming to terms with death and ageing but now that they’d seen the film she realised that Jane had used the film as her way of doing this.