“I’ve spent quite a lot of my life attempting to maneuver trauma out of my physique,” says choreographer Celia Rowlson-Corridor, whose singular imaginative and prescient of our bodies in movement brings the core tenements of the Shaker motion to startling life in director Mona Fastvold’s stirring historic musical drama “The Testomony of Ann Lee.”
Over the past fifteen years, Rowlson-Corridor has left her mark on the stage and display screen, working with everybody from Gaspar Noé to Lena Dunham, and on movies as totally different in tone and plot and style as “After Yang” and “Smile 2.”
Practically a decade in the past, Rowlson-Corridor first collaborated with Fastvold and her inventive associate Brady Corbet on their musical drama “Vox Lux.” In contrast to her earlier movie work, the place she labored on a scene or two, “The Testomony of Ann Lee” required a whole movie’s price of choreography. t“I wished to convey into the movie among the passages that Mona had researched,” Rowlson-Corridor mentioned. “They danced all by the night time and continued till six within the morning. That was actually useful data. It had me pondering, how would the physique be after dancing for 10 hours?”
Co-written by Fastvold and Corbet, the movie facilities on the life and work of Ann Lee, a visionary non secular chief from 18th-century England who believed herself to be the feminine reincarnation of Christ. Performed with gusto by Amanda Seyfried, Lee was a founding member of the Shaker motion, who later settled in New England after looking for non secular freedom throughout the Atlantic Ocean.
“The movie is about motion in a approach,” Rowlson-Corridor instructed IndieWire. “The principle type of this faith is motion and singing.” Whereas there was some written documentation with descriptions of their dancing, the Shaker motion existed almost 100 years earlier than the appearance of the movement image digicam. “That allowed me to have the inventive freedom to think about what it might have seemed like,” Rowlson-Corridor mentioned. She added that there are some “stunning artworks of the Shakers in worship as soon as they’re in America,” displaying them “making these very tight, round spirals, which I recreated on the finish of the movie. However that’s actually all I needed to go off of. So this was a lot extra of a inventive deep dive for me.”
Rowlson-Corridor started work on the choreography for the movie two years in the past, working at first on brief exams in January of 2024 earlier than the movie started capturing in Budapest in Could that very same yr. “I had one week to place all of the dances collectively,” she mentioned. Though the timeframe was intense, she was capable of create constructions for all the dances. After she arrived in Budapest, she lastly started working with the principal forged and dancers. “Every little thing modified,” she remembers, including, “Once we went to the precise filming location, the whole lot modified, once more.”
When creating with an actor or dancer in thoughts, Rowlson-Corridor begins with one query: “What’s their character going by and the way can the dance get them to that subsequent place?” Extra questions observe, Rowlson-Corridor provides, like “Are they shifting by grief? Are they shifting by pleasure? What do they need? What do they want at this second?” She finds that these questions are useful for the actor as a result of they know that they don’t seem to be simply doing dance actions, “They’re shifting with such particular intention that,” Rowlson-Corridor mentioned, “it’s virtually prefer it’s not dancing.”
A terrific instance of this ethos comes throughout the group’s journey from England to the USA. “I very a lot knew that sequence was going to be essentially the most exacting dance,” Rowlson-Corridor mentioned. Filmed aboard an operational duplicate of an precise 18th-century ship, the Götheborg of Sweden, the sequence sees Lee and her congregation worshipping by motion every day on the ship’s deck, rain or shine. Because the Shakers are disparaged by the ship’s crew and pummeled by violent squalls all through their arduous seafaring journey, Fastvold retains her digicam as centered and regular because the worshipers themselves, with their our bodies shifting out and in of the body as they pray.
Rowlson-Corridor knew the choreography right here wanted to be sharp and clear as a result of, as she recalled, “we had been going to be going from sunshine, snow, wind, and rain. I knew that these had been the laborious cuts that [Fastvold] wished to do, and so the motion couldn’t have that kind of circulation factor happening, otherwise you received’t get a clear edit.” Rowlson-Corridor additionally felt that the motion right here wanted to really feel like a army train, or another repeated motion like going for a stroll or using a motorcycle, that turns into so routine, “you don’t have to consider methods to do it anymore,” she mentioned, including that editor Sofía Subercaseaux “discovered such a good looking edit in that dance.”
Rowlson-Corridor additionally stored in thoughts that within the story, the actors and dancers should not taking part in actors and dancers; they’re extraordinary individuals who use motion of their worship. “Whether or not they’re a blacksmith or work in a mill,” Rowlson-Corridor mentioned, “they’re individuals who use their palms. I assumed lots about preserving the decrease half of the physique grounded right here, within the earth, and the higher half of the physique is having the dialog with God.” She instructed the dancers to think about that their palms are akin to “antennas to God” and that they need to “not do the motion till they’d a particular factor of their thoughts of what they’re asking to obtain, or are asking to let go of,” she mentioned.
This steering will be seen in Seyfried’s most bodily and emotionally demanding scene, a montage by which Lee provides beginning 4 totally different occasions, every ending within the loss of life of her little one whereas nonetheless in infancy. In an earlier sequence, Lee believes she’s discovered freedom and love with a fellow Shaker named Abraham (Christopher Abbott). Seyfried channels the ecstasy of their union with joyful actions, a smile on her face. That is then contrasted with the load of this trauma, which pulls her to the bottom, writhing in ache, searching for a brand new type of launch.
When conceiving the choreography for this sequence, Rowlson-Corridor thought lots about the best way the physique shops the whole lot that you simply undergo. “We’re simply these sponges,” she mentioned. Though she finally discovered freedom by her religion, Lee is a girl who was, based on Rowlson-Corridor, “born into this world that provides her nothing.” Her trauma is then intensified by the lack of her kids and her lingering grief.
As she labored on Seyfried’s show-stopping quantity “Starvation and Thirst,” carried out in an asylum the place Lee has been locked up after having a breakdown after her fourth little one’s loss of life, Rowlson-Corridor mentioned that she might do the dance solely as soon as earlier than she felt like she was both “going to throw up or begin crying,” she recalled, “as a result of if I actually sat with what she was going by… It’s simply a lot, and what do you do with it?”
The irony that the Lee and her fellow Shakers used motion to be able to ascend past their trauma wrought on their our bodies will not be misplaced on Rowlson-Corridor, who shared, “I’ve at all times used dance to attempt to transcend, to get out of the physique,” however she mentioned, “you need to use the physique to get out of the physique, however to get out of the physique, you need to go much more into the physique.”
