They call it the martini shot, the last one of the night.
But this is also the last shot of the season.
Salli Richardson discusses details with one of her AD ‘s about a large overhead shot of the ballroom to show us dancing continuously, for editing coverage.
It is close to midnight and we are spent, 20 or so Black dancers representing the Kirkland side of the late 19th Century New England aristocracy of The Gilded Age. We made it to the Brooke Astor mansion in Sleepy Hollow at 8:15 a.m. Up until now we have negotiated small waltz moments designed to provide party context for this romance. Sometimes the men danced our ladies around half the circle and then helped each other over cables and lighting instruments for the off-camera half. Other times we stood and watch the proposal from different sides. The standard hurry-up-and-wait of shooting film days prevailed. Mostly, we annexed in a beautiful gigantic bedroom upstairs when not on set.
But now our choreographer John Carrafa and his intrepid associate Taeler are busy helping us remember the sequence of waltz patterns we learned. The dancers have a few minutes while the crane and jib get moved. We review transitions, speak combinations at each other, scramble to make our brains function.
I have no doubts though. These are top shelf black professionals in New York. The casting was deliberate; John explained to us the first day that as the dancers who represented the historically white wealthy had been at this all last season; he did not want their Black counterparts to look less fluent in the local social dance of the time. It is Herculean to get right the nuances and specificity of the waltz, maintain spacing throughout, look like you’re having a good time and not hit the camera.
So John sought the highest level of trained black dancers available these shoot days.
These dancers have slain all day.
Yesterday too, when the call time was 3:30 a.m.
And I am sure I am not the only one in hard shoes who loves John’s goals.
I wrap my hand around Gabrielle’s back, wedge my index/thumb valley in hers.
“You good?”
“Yeah, I will be,” she says, the corset tighter than it was the last time they put her back in it.
“We’re almost there.”
Djassi DaCosta, Paige Fraser, my partner Gabrielle Sprauve, Tiffany Mellard, Liz Marie Chestang
But she is ready for these final long passes around the ballroom. Like the rest of us, she is one of the elite professional working black artists as formidable at communicating with the body as Phylicia Rashad and Denee Benton are with words. She will be fine.
We will all be fine.
The first AD yells, “Action.”
We get the track instead of the thicket of Black chamber musicians playing earlier. But we dance. We dance for a long time. We have each other—we bonded and it is the way I understand our stockpile of aches and pains.
But then we feel something else, maybe support from ancient Weckquaesgeck leaders whose land we are dancing on.
We also have the DNA of ring shout makers, all conjured when we circled counterclockwise.
We feel them.
Frederick Douglas, Antoine Dubuclet, Paul Cuffe, ancestors who would be tickled for sure. Nina Simone, Diahann Carol, Syndey Poitier, Baba Chuck Davis, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Garret Morgan, the citizens of Greenwood—
Someone’s calf is seizing.
A hip or two is on fire.
And at least two of us are being held upright only by prayer and a partner.
But the ancestors are present. Alvin Ailey, Toussaint Louverture, Octavia Butler, we feel them help us through.
They push the legs.
They lift our faces.
They hold our bodies.
It is everything that Ryan Coogler and Misha Green and Ava Duvernay get right when they feature the intangibles of Blackness at work.
We finish and I am briefly ecstatic.
I look around at these dancers I adore, grateful that in a time when it is almost impossible for a person of color to feel safe, I got to experience this divine moment.
I hug Gabrielle, glad she is so easy to partner and excited that her real one is swinging in for me in Aida at The Met Opera.
“I think we did great as gilded rich black folk,” I tell her.
She agrees.
Asę
