Five Dances is a quiet, intimate portrait of a boy learning how to move through the world – not just with his body, but with his heart. Every step he takes feels like a confession, and every touch carries a story he’s not ready to say out loud.
The classic tale of finding success and romance in the big city is given a contemporary, and unconventional, spin in Alan Brown’s new film, FIVE DANCES. Collaborating with internationally renowned choreographer Jonah Bokaer, writer-director Brown has taken five gifted New York dancers, and fashioned a story about Chip (Ryan Steele in his first film role), an extraordinarily talented 18 year-old recently arrived from Kansas who joins a small downtown modern dance company. In his first weeks of rehearsal, Chip is initiated into the rites of passage of a New York dancer’s life, where discipline and endless hard work, camaraderie and competitiveness, the fear of not being good enough, and the joy of getting it just right, inform every minute of every day.
Shooting in and around a Soho dance studio, Brown and his longtime cinematographer Derek McKane capture the exhilaration and emotional turmoil of a small dance company, and all of Chip’s poignant firsts—the forging of friendships, being chosen for the important solo, his first ever love affair—with the intimacy and immediacy of a documentary. The result, FIVE DANCES, is Brown’s most dynamic film.
An extraordinary dancer, Ryan Steele, dominates “Five Dances,” the camera pivoting on his every sinewy stretch and turn. Almost all of writer-director Alan Brown’s latest feature transpires in a Soho studio where a small troupe is rehearsing five pieces choreographed by Jonah Bokaer. But rather than adapting the pieces to conform to his paper-thin narrative, Brown explores the tensions and contortions of dancers expressing fresh emotion through a pre-existing art form. The result avoids docu-style randomness while furthering only the most rudimentary story and character points, allowing the dance to speak largely, and magnificently, for itself.
