Anna Bass and Monica Bill Barnes (pictured) imbue their choreography with humor; how the creator 'Doc McStuffins' made her hit show that counts Michelle Obama among its fans; and two Sundance documentaries show the power of movies to liberate people’s minds.
For these 2 dancers, dancing awkwardly is their message
Modern dance is often all about being graceful and immaculate and precise. The Monica Bill Barnes dance company takes a step in the other direction.
The Monica Bill Barnes dance company
The dancers move awkwardly and aggressively, expressing sexuality by licking their shoulders or flashing their stomachs to the audience. The company is now best known for dancing alongside Ira Glass from "This American Life."
Monica Bill Barnes, the artistic director and choreographer, and associate artistic director Anna Bass joined us in the studio.
Interview Highlights:
Anna, given that you both come from traditional backgrounds, how did you decide upon your lighthearted and unconventional style?
I think we go against what people expect, and I think some of the biggest compliments I've gotten from audience members who are not dancers are things like, "Oh my gosh, I do that kind of dancing in my bedroom," or, "Yeah, I totally felt like that one time."
Monica, you write in your mission statement for the company that, "Our mission is to celebrate individuality, humor, and the innate theatricality of everyday life, and to uncover and delight in the underdog in all of us." First of all, humor isn't something that I imagine is foremost in a lot of dance troupes' mission statements, so why is it important to you?
It's important for a couple reasons. I think it really mirrors the way that I experience life; to be a working artist in America right now you really need a good sense of humor about yourself and the work.
I also feel that humor is a way that I, from the stage, can hear that the audience is comprehending and following along — we can't laugh at something that we don't understand. And so when we hear the audience laugh, at minimum I know that they're paying attention.
Anna, does that parallel the idea that you take delight in the underdog in all of us?
We really love being the underdog. We also really love being the everyman, and all of that is part of our attempt for people to relate to us, and I feel that's how we start every show, like, "OK, here we all are, we hope you guys like it, but if you don't, it's OK." We're fighters, so we like to fight for it. [laughs]
It's funny that you mention fighting, because you guys have a piece that you dance to that's James Brown's "Get On Up." When you guys are dancing to this, you kind of punch the air like you're boxers, and you bounce on the balls of your feet. Who wants to talk about what's going on here?
Monica: [laughs] This all has to do with the idea that Anna's mentioning about the underdog. There's a way in which people can only laugh at you if they feel confident enough in your performance, that they won't laugh at somebody that they are worried about or are pitying. So it's like we're taking on the entire audience, like, "Yeah, there's a thousand of you and there's two of us here. We got this."
Anna: We're confident underdogs. [laughs]
Anna, I want to ask you this. Dance is often thought of as very graceful or very sexy, especially when it's danced by women, but you two subvert those notions in your style of dance. It's not ungraceful, but there's something you're trying to say about sexuality?
Yeah, there's something about the sexy dancer that's such a known entity, and I feel like it's been done and is still being done really well by other people. For me, there's no new territory in that, so we're interested in other things.
In particular, I feel like that James Brown piece came out after we had been working for a long time, and I felt like there was this element of people saying, "It's so interesting how you never deal with sexuality," and I remember thinking, "What, you want some sexuality? Like a stomach? You want us to lick our shoulders? What are you looking for?"
There's a way of just sort of putting it on the line but giving it a new context, and I think that being women and being really interested in being powerful stage presences, a lot of the physical impulses we have are about having a power to our movement.
We should say that we're dressed in these really ill-fitting wool skirts, they don't smell good — there's nothing attractive about them. And we literally are looking at one person in the audience, and the monologue moment there is that we say, "Do you want to see my stomach? You really want to see my stomach? All right, I'm going to show you, only you, my stomach." Well, that's what I say. [laughs]
When you two first met, did you think that you had distinctly separate styles of dancing? Now that you've worked together for so long, have those styles of dancing emerged into a new, coherent thing?
Anna: Hmm, this is a good question. We met in a very typical 'New York dance community' way of each seeing the other perform, and from the very beginning I thought, "Oh my gosh, her movement suits me so well. We're almost the exact same build and height, and we have very, very similar impulses and we move incredibly similarly." And that's always been true.
Monica: To echo that, I've never felt kinship to anybody else the way I do when I dance with Anna, and that was apparent from the very beginning. What I feel so happy about, and what makes our work such a pleasure, is that I feel like it allows me to express something that I could only do with Anna.
Monica and Anna will be performing with "This American Life" host Ira Glass at the Bovard Auditorium on Jan. 31.
Sundance: From NYC to Romania, documentaries show people liberated through movies
"Escaping into a movie" is a phrase that can be thrown around a little too casually. But in the case of two new documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival, the idea that movies can actually provide a path into an otherwise unreachable world was put on dramatic display at this year's gathering in Park City, Utah.
"The Wolfpack" focuses on a New York family whose parents believe the outside world is too dangerous to let their children — six boys and one developmentally disabled girl — leave their Manhattan apartment. In fact, at one point the kids don't go outside for an entire year. The boys are home-schooled, but their real education, in what one brother calls a prison, comes through watching DVDs and videos.
The six kids re-create scenes from movies like "Reservoir Dogs" and "The Dark Knight." They make costumes and props, and re-create movie sets. They even shoot their own remakes of the films. But Hollywood's version of the real world really doesn't prepare one of the kids for what happens when he finally defies his parents' orders and sneaks outside.
"The Wolfpack" was directed by Crystal Moselle, who spent four years making her movie.
When "The Frame" talked with Moselle during Sundance, she told me how the boys in her documentary first got interested in film.
"It started when they were young when their dad would bring home movies for them to watch," Moselle said. "Because it was their only interaction with the outside world, they wanted to be like the people in the movies."
According to Moselle, the boys would painstakingly re-create the movies they watched in their apartment.
"I've said before, I'm like, 'Well why don't you just get the script for the film?' And they said, 'No, we had to do it exactly like the movie... every gesture... everything has to be identical to the film. The film is directing us.'"
The other, oddly similar Sundance documentary, "Chuck Norris vs. Communism," is about Romania's Communist leader Nicolas Ceaucescu and how his dictatorship from the late 1960s to 1989 tried to limit access to news and entertainment from the outside world.
But in the mid-1980s, pirated videos and VHS players started flooding into the country. The VHS players might have cost as much as a car, yet Romanians quickly started organizing underground movie nights, showing films starring Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere.
The movies certainly took the Romanians' minds off of their own miserable living conditions. Yet by showing what freedom looked and felt like, the Western films also might have helped launch the revolution that ultimately liberated the nation.
"Chuck Norris vs. Communism" was directed by Ilinca Calugareanu.
When we spoke with the filmmaker at Sundance, we asked why Romanians under Communism were so fascinated with American movies.
"Besides the action and the heroes that were in the films, people were watching them to see what the West looked like... supermarkets, to see the big cars... to see the big American flats and the roads... But beyond this level of consumerism, they would also watch to see how people interact in a free society."
Calugareanu explained that, for many Romanians, American films were liberating.
"Romanians were waiting for Americans to save them for quite awhile. And we even have the saying of, 'Are the Americans coming or not?' And I think that the funny thing is that the Americans did come, but through these films and through the things that the whole generation was able to see in these films. This was our opportunity to escape, to dream, to enjoy just life, as we weren't able to do without the films. A lot of the interviewees that I spoke to later, would tell me that... we are these VHS tapes."
'Doc McStuffins' counts Michelle Obama among its fans as it brings diversity to preschool TV
Every weekend from now until the end of February will be jammed with some sort of awards show, tribute, reception or screening. On Saturday night, it's the animators' turn. The annual Annie Awards will take place honoring the best in animated entertainment — both in film and television.
This year’s nominees include big budget films like "The Lego Movie" and the preschool television series "Doc McStuffins." It's a Disney Jr. show about a little girl who takes care of sick toys and stuffed animals.
Over more than two seasons on the air, the show has gained a huge following and become a cultural reference point for discussing race on television. That’s because the main character is an African-American girl.
Early adult fans of the show included black, female doctors who started a group called "We Are Doc McStuffins." And this past November, Michelle Obama invited Chris Nee, the show's creator, to screen an episode at the White House.
Nee is a mother, and it was her son’s battle with asthma and frequent trips to the doctor that gave her the idea for the show. The Frame's John Horn sat down with Nee to talk about diversity in TV, the show's growing profile and her goals in the industry.
Interview Highlights
Where's your source of inspiration?
This was 15 minutes of pure inspiration in the shower. And when I got out I said, "Either somebody [has] done this before or I'm going to sell this show." You can't possibly imagine the things that have happened since were going to happen, but I knew I had something and couldn't believe no one had done it before.
A lot of women doctors have gotten behind this show. And a lot of African-American women doctors have gotten behind the show. But "Doc McStuffins" wasn't originally written as an African-American girl, correct?
Correct. She was very early on in the process. Disney came to me and said, "We are looking for a show that has diversity in it." We had not done any artwork, so there was no visual representation of this character. And they said, "How would you feel about her being African American?" I said, "Great." Honestly, that was the whole conversation... You just have to go back over your scripts and say, "What can I change," instead of saying, "A generic person in the crowd, three women and two men are in the crowd." I wish we weren't at the point where we had to do that, but those choices can be so simple in the [script] page when you do them early, and the ramifications are huge.
A lot of people like Geena Davis and Tony Hale have come on the show. Do you think people are participating on the show because they're parents whose kids watch the show?
A lot of them are because they are fans. Twitter has helped me out a couple of times. Patton Oswalt kept mentioning the show on his stuff and I went on Twitter, which I have [but] didn't really know how to use it. I was like, "Hey, I have a part for you."cAnd I swear to God that in two hours that deal was done. And Geena Davis, I have to say money where her mouth is ... Gender issues are obviously a huge focus for her and Doc really represents the STEM curriculum. I then said, "Hey, want to come on back and give us a little bit of your fame and put it towards the show, will you come on and do a voice?" And she said yes right away.
There's been a lot of talk in the film world right now about the underrepresentation of African-Americans at the Academy Awards and among filmmakers and actors. What is it like in preschool TV? Is it getting a little bit more diverse?
I think it is. And I think Doc has actually showed all of the networks that this show is going to do really well — you just need great storytelling, great characters and the diversity is this great bonus, you're going to touch all these other people in a powerful way. I certainly try to make sure my staff is diverse. We make sure that our voice cast represents the ethnicity that they are playing. We feel like, on this show, it's incredibly important.
As the creator of this show, how important is it to you and what kind of oversight do you have to make sure that spinoff properties — toys and electronics — are reflective of the kind of culture and statement that you want the show to make?
In terms of the marketing and the product on the show, it's opened up a huge barrier. And I think it's important to note that we are the first African-American toy to be selling in such a huge way. In the end of the day we know that these are all a business. I hope that this show is going to affect the bottom line of whether people are going to make more diverse shows. I'm thrilled with what's happened with the product line on this show. In terms of quality, of keeping the quality up, every time there's something big written, whether it's the show in the park or the stage show [at Disney's California Adventure], I write them myself. It's not easy to find time to do that stuff [but] I look at it as hard as I can.