Rosalynde LeBlanc has spent over 20 years in dance as a performer, choreographer, and educator. She was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, and the Liz Gerring Dance Company. In addition to performing the work of various independent choreographers, LeBlanc has also danced with New York City’s Metropolitan Opera and for the 250th Mozart Celebration in Salzburg, Austria. She has had her writing published in the leading international dance periodicals, and her choreography presented in venues around the country.
“Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters” is screening at the 2020 DOC NYC film festival, which is taking place online from November 11-19. The film is co-directed by Tom Hurwitz.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
RL: “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters” is about the power that art has to both sustain us and to galvanize us in times of despair. The art form in this case is dance, as the film traces the history and legacy of one of the most important works of art to come out of the age of AIDS: Bill T. Jones’ tour de force ballet “D-Man in the Waters.”
In 1989, “D-Man in the Waters” gave physical manifestation to the fear, anger, grief, and hope for salvation that the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company felt as they were embattled by the AIDS pandemic. As a group of young dancers reconstructs the dance in the present day, they learn about this oft forgotten history and deepen their understanding of the power of art in a time of plague.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
RL: In 1989, when I was 16 years old, and a young dancer myself, I saw the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company perform “D-Man in the Waters” and fell in love with the dance. What moved me so much was watching this motley crew of dancers that ranged in skin color, gender, size, shape, and training, but who were all spiritually, energetically, and rhythmically moving as one.
More so than choreographic unison on the stage, it felt like I was witnessing a transcendent solidarity. I had never experienced a dance, nor a dance company, elicit such a galvanizing response. What I didn’t know at the time was that that community of nine dancers had just lost their co-director, Arnie Zane, to AIDS and was about to lose another company member, Demian “D-Man” Acquavella – the eponymous hero of the dance – to AIDS as well.
The night I saw the dance, I made the decision to become a professional dancer precisely because I wanted to perform that dance one day. Three years later, I got into the Company and performed “D-Man in the Waters” for the next six years. Decades later, I would re-stage this dance in colleges around the country and come upon the revelation that the absence of AIDS from current political and social discourse in this country left successive generations without any way to contextualize the spirit and intensity of the art made in response to it.
In some ways “D-Man in the Waters” was an archive, able to transmit the stories of love and loss of that original troupe and able to give body to the contemporary struggles to survive desperate times.
W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?
RL: I want people to think about the essential and energizing force that is community, and the ways in which the human condition is vastly more improved by collective thinking than by individualistic thinking.
The dance acts as a metaphor for this in the film because we see dancers holding, carrying, and catching one another. But in fact, the meaning of the movement is not really abstract or esoteric at all, it is very universal — we need one another to survive. It is something we are realizing every day right now as we find ourselves in another pandemic.
Whether we need an essential health care worker to plug in the ventilator or we need the neighbor to wear their mask to the grocery store, it is the understanding ourselves as inextricably connected to one another that is the only real pathway to overcoming adversity.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
RL: It was very hard to get financial backing for this film. I have been working on this film for eight years, and the reason for the long gestation was almost exclusively financial.
Perhaps that is a similar story for many documentary films, but I think in our case, up until now, it was hard for many funders to see the relevance of a film about artmaking during a pandemic. Of course, now we see it.
W&H: How did you get your film funded?
RL: We did two crowdfunding campaigns that each brought in high four-figure sums which we were, of course, grateful for, but that is but a drop in the bucket in the film world. They were both exhausting campaigns and I bow down to filmmakers who are able to run highly successful crowdfunding campaigns. I don’t know how they do it!
I have to give a big shout out to Loyola Marymount University, where I have taught for eight years and presently chair the dance department. Through LMU I received faculty research funding, access to facilities, equipment, and personnel. There is a web of LMU students, faculty, staff, and administrators behind “Can You Bring It,” and the connection to the university was hugely responsible for getting this film made.
Ultimately, we received grants from the Graves, Drollinger, Mellon, and Ford Foundations, and those carried us over the finish line, but I learned to write those grants at LMU through their Office of Research and Sponsored Projects. And there are close the 30 grants that I didn’t get. Funding is brutal! I don’t really have much insight other than to say don’t give up.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
RL: I don’t yet call myself a filmmaker. This is my one and only film, and I don’t feel that I have yet earned that distinction. I knew the story, I knew the key players, and I knew the dance, and I felt compelled to make the film because film was the best medium to tell this particular story. But that doesn’t constitute a career and I don’t know that I will ever transition to be a career filmmaker.
The real “filmmakers” on this film are: Tom Hurwitz, co-director and DP; Ann Collins, editor; Duana C. Butler, producer; and the expert team of camera and sound people who have brought their career-level mastery to this film. What I brought was the understanding of how deep to go to mine the gems of the story and of the dance.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
RL: The best advice I received was on a Post-it note from our editor, Ann Collins, that said “trust.” I can unequivocally say that this film has brought me to the edge – the edge of my solvency, the edge of my sanity, the edge of my capability, the edge of my emotional resilience.
The day she handed me that little yellow note with the word “trust” on it was one of those days I felt like I was tied to a sinking ship and that the film would never get done. I put the note in my office and I looked at it every day. And she was right. I just needed to trust.
The worst advice I got was the producer who told me this film would probably take one summer to shoot, and [cost] about $75,000.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
RL: Your emotion is your strength.
And for other female producers: 1) Motherhood is excellent training ground for producing. 2) “Budgets are moral documents.” I believe this quote is attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I believe this has to be the guiding philosophy for every producer.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
RL: Liz Garbus’ “Who Killed Garrett Phillips?” was an extraordinary story of ordinary American racism. She successfully re-injected great heart and compassion into what is such routinely practiced and de-sensitized institutional racism.
Someone pitched a project to me about making that film into a dance. Now, that would be interesting to go from a film to a dance after having gone from a dance to a film with “Can You Bring It.”
W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?
RL: Well, ironically, COVID-19 has made dance and film indivisible now. Without theaters being able to open for the foreseeable future, the screen is and will be the stage for dance.
I have done a few mini projects where I have primarily been the dancer on the screen. Of course, without being able to assemble a crew, I have also had to be director and cameraperson too. This is small potatoes, using an iPhone and a tripod, but the merger of choreographic thinking with cinematic thinking is happening all over the place. We are on the cusp of a whole new art form.
W&H: Recent protests in the U.S. and abroad have highlighted racism and anti-Black police brutality. The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make Hollywood and/or the doc world more inclusive?
RL: I think dismantling white male hegemony in Hollywood can only come with de-funding white male projects so that projects by women and people of color can receive more funding. I don’t think there can be any lasting anti-racist action in Hollywood without concerted, anti-racist funding.
The U.S. slave system was an economic system, and I believe we will only really be free from the centuries-old remnants of slavery when we start to implement anti-racist economics, not just anti-racist philosophy.
