Check Your Body at the Door

Check Your Body at the Door

Check Your Body at the Door is a film about remarkable underground House dancers and dancing in NYC’s golden decade, the 1990s. Featuring interviews and rare dance footage with legendary House dancers, it follows a group of master free-stylists to the clubs, at their jobs and in their everyday lives. Filmed on location and in a studio against a white background, in silhouette or in light pools, the one-hour documentary reveals the virtuosity of this eclectic urban dance style. Today, House is an international music/dance craze practiced worldwide. An historical record, Check Your Body at the Door contextualizes a wide variety of House dance forms and answers: What did House dancing look like? Who were the dancers? Why did they dance? Executive Producer Sally R. Sommer says the Check Your Body at the Door project began “because nobody was paying serious attention to the dancers. The club footage that existed showed hundreds of torsos bouncing to loud music under multicolored lights.” But as a dance journalist and social-dance historian, Sommer saw something different at David Mancuso’s “Loft” in 1982, where she first went with dancer Archie Burnett: “I saw amazing artists and dancing in the dark. I longed for a dance film that showed the entire body and placed dancers at the heart of the matter.”

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