Debra Cash: NPR/WBUR
05/09/11
Check Your Body at the Door - Rough Cut (54 minutes) Film
Review by Debra Cash
Published: May 9, 2001
Early in her landmark documentary, "Check Your Body at the Door," Sally Sommer flashes through a series of magazine covers featuring menacing black thugs, ecstacy-blurred urban babes, and a disco ball strapped with yellow police tape. These are the images of underground and hip-hop club life regurgitated endlessly by the press through the 1990s. Such images fueled the voyeuristic coverage of the recent court case involving Puffy Coombs and are still being recycled in the scenarios behind glossy music videos.
But for ten years Sommer, a critic and dance historian, followed the dancers past the bouncers and guards frisking them for weapons. She and her talented videographers took their places at the edges of the smoky circles in places such as The Sound Factory Bar and the now-dufunct Les Poulets in New York City. The clubs' habitues, she found, were dancing not out of a much-reported-on nihilism but out of a rock-solid commitment to their own dignity. They were creating a community - albeit a transient one - a parallel universe that was not subject to outsiders' control.
Playing Virgil to Sommer's Dante is the incredibly buff, cosmopolitan Archie Burnett. Burnett shares his knowing assessment of the personality quirks and technical range of his fellow "club heads" and adds few stories of his own. He introduces us to Brahms "Bravo," LaFortune, a dancer so wittily contrary he has perfected doing Fred Astaire to the heavy pulse of house music and challenges himself to invent dances that last just as long as it takes him to ride an elevator between a skyscraper lobby and the 39th floor. Debonair in his pork-pie hat, "Bravo" is big and dangerous looking--the very stereotype of the tough black dude. It turns out that he holds down a demanding day job as an architect, and routinely walks his daughter to school. While you're at it, the film says, check your stereotypes at the door, too.
We meet Irenia Herrera, a sultry Latina AIDS activist living with her grandmother and daughter who matter of factly discusses kicking a heroin addiction; Willie Ninja, who was featured in the film "Paris Is Burning" discussing the intricacies of transvestite vogueing and the moves he lifts from kung fu movies; and Asia Moon, a Korean woman subject to rumors when she goes "missing in action" from the tight-knit community of dancers and DJs.
Sommer's one calculated risk pays off stupendously. During 1992-93, she invited a group of club dancers to leave their usual context and perform against the white walls and floor of a film studio. What they lose in ambience - more than adequately represented elsewhere in the film - Sommer offsets by the clarity of the images. When Burnett describes how he plays up his natural angularity and is captured in the studio shots by the late cinematographer Michael Schwartz you can actually see the aesthetic choices he is making. When Willie Ninja vogues, the two-dimensionality of his moves seem to rise from the similarly blank background of catwalk fashion photography.
Other observers have been able to convey hip hop and house dance's enviable virtuosity. But it has took Sally's Sommer's patient commitment to delineate the way virtuosity becomes identity.
--Debra Cash comments on the dance scene for "Here and Now,” a program of National Public Radio
