BARE / Before the premiere

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Dancers of Anima Ardens are warming up on the day of the premiere.

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[synopsis:]
An unconventional dance documentary featuring the brazen and entirely nude choreography of Thierry Smits’s new dance, Anima Ardens. The film follows 11 men who audition, rehearse, and perform this challenging piece exploring masculinity, power, and voyeurism. With charged performances, and so much skin on display, the proceedings could easily veer into eroticism; instead, this masterfully constructed film grapples with the complexity of artistic collaboration while deconstructing rote concepts of sexuality.

Directed by Aleksandr M. Vinogradov (VamFilms)
Choreography by Thierry Smits (Cie & Studio Thor | Thierry Smits)
Music by Aleksandr Vasilenko
Sound mix / sound design by Freek Vrijhof

VamFilms © 2020

BARE chronicles, chronologically, the creation of Belgian choreographer Thierry Smit's dance piece Anima Ardens, which translates as Burning Souls. While dance documentaries are inherently fascinating - all that sweat, drama and beautiful bodies - BARE has another angle: Anima Ardens is performed by 11 naked men.

The filmmaker Aleksandr M Vinogradov is well aware that some audience members will be viewing his film for the nudity and he, like the dancers, never flinches from his artistic intentions for fear of indulging our prurience. But he also acknowledges it with scene breaking montages that are extreme close-ups of the dancers body parts in motion. The camera pans down a sweaty torso and the editor cuts just as we reach the pubic hair. If the story weren't compelling enough, this simple trick would keep an audience glued to the screen. The first penis, that is the first penis close-up (there is an abundance before that) doesn't arrive until almost two-thirds of the way through the film.

If Vinogradov is exploring themes of artistic control, soul and body baring, and voyeurism, Smits has his own convoluted explanation of what Anima Ardens is trying to achieve. "Nudity is my choice," he says, "because in these days our body is the last territory of absolute freedom. And its still quite brave to put nudity on the stage." He also adds that "it's not only an erotic nudity, it's important to mention it, and it's not an obscene nudity, it's a nudity that is beautiful." And the men are beautiful. Beautiful in that celestial way that dancers, bodies honed by relentless physical exertion, usually are. They are individuals, initially differentiated by body hair patterns and tattoos, but slowly becoming personalities.

The dancers are told up front that they will be nude and that the rehearsal process will be documented on film. Smits is obviously admired as only one dancer balks at the naked stipulation and the rest submit to a gruelling and heartbreaking audition process. It is like an extended cut of the opening of All That Jazz mashed with A Chorus Line without the musical numbers. Smits is alternately a father figure, a taskmaster and a sympathetic ear. It is hard to tell what he is looking for but he has a grand vision in mind and is searching for the dancers to bring it to life. There are tears as dancers are let go, both from them and from the audience.

When it is time to get naked, the dancers further differentiate themselves. Some are brazen and strip down in an attempt an unselfconsciousness or bravado, some are reluctant and shy. But they begin to tease each other, waggling their dicks at each other, compensating for nervousness with hijinks. And then they work. Smits is in full taskmaster mode and the nudity becomes secondary to achieving perfection in movement. Smits shouts, "It has to be more energetic, you are males here." Their masculinity is on display but also subordinated to Smits and to the art. By the end of the film, in a lengthy single static camera angle in the dressing room, the dancers are inured to their nudity. They wander naked and unconcerned, until one spots the camera, and they begin to play to it. Instead of taunting each other for being nude, they gleefully tease the camera.

BARE, like an expert burlesquer, has one final tease. We have seen the sweat of rehearsal, the sweat of constructing the stage, the sweat of Smits' struggle to articulate and create his vision. We see the audience arrive. But we never get to see Anima Arden in its final form or how the audience reacts. And by that point we are invested enough, we know these men, these dancers, intimately, that we hunger for both.