NY Export: Opus Jazz

NY Export: Opus Jazz premieres on PBS March 24th, 2010. That’s tonight!

The Congolese Okapi and the ballerina are two of the rarest, most elegant living creatures to remain among earth’s biodiversity, and yet only the ballerina has successfully captured its own majesty and relevance on film. “The first film conceived, created, produced, and danced by dancers from the New York City Ballet” touts the film’s website, NY Export: Opus Jazz, was among the best of the films to screen at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival. The project is a highly cinematic rendering of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 ballet that casts away pointe shoes and tutus for a piece performed in sneakers and jeans.

Two soloists from the New York City Ballet, Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, were the creative forces behind the project. Even with minimal filmmaking experience, they were inspired to push past the in-the-moment self-expression as directed dancers and translate their expert knowledge of movement onto film. “Dancing, you wait for casting to go up and everything is very passive until you get up on stage,” Ms. Bar explains. “Even though Sean and I are successful you still feel like you are at someone’s mercy—you’re at the director’s mercy and you’re at the choreographer’s mercy—and the window for creativity shrinks.” Mr. Suozzi corroborates the need for conceptual creative expression: “There are so many times, being a dancer, that I have my own ideas. This was a way I could be in control. I got to do something that’s mine.”

Suozzi and Bar first conceived of a film adaptation of Opus Jazz while performing its revival for the City Ballet. “When we were learning the ballet and first performing it,” says Suozzi, “it was just such a fun experience and everyone liked it so much it was on our minds a lot… All of us felt really lucky and connected to be a part of it.” But even though the ballet was progressive for 1958, the duo still felt a facelift would do the ballet service. “When we got on stage and the costumes were these dated things we felt goofy for the first time, whereas the whole rehearsal process when we were in our own clothes in the studio we felt really cool and contemporary. We never thought about the ballet being dated.” (Suozzi is referring to the thick knit Technicolor sweaters and tube socks the City Ballet pulls out of a Cold War era vault for the stage performance of Opus Jazz.) “How do we get back to feeling the way we felt in the studio?”

By updating the costumes and grounding the choreography in real life locations, Bar and Suozzi took a note from West Side Story, another Jerome Robbins masterpiece whose cinematic visual sense gave the choreography new life. They teamed up with Jody Lee Lipes, a director and cinematographer who has already made the film fest rounds with Afterschool and Tiny Furniture (as cinematographer), and his own directorial debut, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same at SXSW ’09. Lipes shot and co-directed along with Henry Joost whose documentary, Catfish, met success at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

As the screenwriter, Lipes was faced with a challenge. “It needed to be scripted … and in my own mind there is an internal logic to what is happening in it, but because it is a ballet I didn’t want to put too clear of an A to B arc to it.” While the film is decidedly non-narrative, Lipes and Joost achieve real tension and release, leaving the audience with the sense they have gone along on a journey. Lipes captures New York in the rich hues West Side Story could only fabricate on a studio lot, and shooting the city on anamorphic 35mm from a helicopter, this DP was like a fat kid in Candyland, yet he never loses control. His lens respects all the formal qualities of dance, but frees the viewer from the fixed point of view of a seat in Lincoln Center, without fracturing into the schizophrenia of a music video.

Three of the five movements of the ballet were shot in abandoned New York locations that were set to be revamped. The High Line before it’s makeover as a public park, McCarren Pool, overgrown and awaiting restoration, and an abandoned building in Red Hook describe a city left to grow wild. These locations are perfectly paired with these young and sometimes mischievous dancers who give such seductive, engrossing performances that the film is deeply moving, especially to those who don’t think they like dance.

Masterful in every approach, NY Export: Opus Jazz is frankly exultant. To borrow a saying from Ken Burns, “It is the product of hard work and love, but only the love shows.”

“We didn’t know how hard it would be even though people told us,” Ms. Bar says with nonchalance. “I think it worked to our advantage to be naïve in that respect. There was a lot of learning and growing that happened because of it.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, unlike the Gap who reproduced Robbins’ West Side Story choreography for the 2000 Gap Khaki campaign, Opus Jazz isn’t selling anything. In fact, it is this exact depiction of New York as a non-commercial entity that makes the film so special. Showing New York as a synergism of people, a flurry of movement rather than the materialistic Mecca of Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada, it provides a much-needed antidote to consumer culture and a timely reminder that there is still a side to the city that is pure and bohemian at heart.
-Christianne Hedtke