Following the hit docuseries Dance Life, DANCE FOR YOUR LIFE is a high-stakes feature documentary following ten of Australia’s most exciting and influential young dancers, as they compete for a coveted spot with a world-renowned international dance company and the chance to step onto the global stage as a professional dancer.
DANCE FOR YOUR LIFE features some of Australia’s best dancers including breakout stars from the hit show Emily Smith and Conor Bann-Murray, along with Max Ostler who previously lit up the stage on America’s Got Talent. The film follows a once-in-a-lifetime journey where friendships are forged, fears are confronted, and futures are forever changed.
Before the documentary releases in cinemas nationwide on Thursday 2 April, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the films director, Luke Cornish, about choosing to follow up his series with a feature film, how the stakes have increased, and working with renowned choreographer Dean Lee.
Nick: With Dance For Your Life following on from the first season of the TV series Dance Life, at what point in the process did you decide or realise that this follow up was best suited as a film?
Luke Cornish: It’s a few different reasons. The main thing is, like, we didn’t want to do the exact same thing again. We didn’t want it to be a revolving door of new students coming in, and then seeing the same year of training, graduation, et cetera. We wanted to freshen it up, and I thought of a million different ways to freshen it up, including following Max Oster, one of the stars of the first season, when he was living in LA. We had loads of ideas and iterations floating around, but nothing was landing or feeling good.
We knew we had this incredible cohort at Brent Street. And Jade, our producer and co-creator, kept sending me these videos of a girl called Abby, but Jade told me that this is her last year, you’re not going to get her again, and she is the best of the best of the best that I’ve seen for like 10, 15 years. Last year, we had the best boy we’d ever seen, and now we have this chance with the best girl Brent Street had seen.
Then, basically, Janet Jackson’s backup dancer, a legendary dancer and choreographer, Dean Lee, who was opening up a school in London. And he talks about how he’s never met a bad Australian dancer, and he wants to properly launch this school, so there was an opportunity to send the best of the best from Brent Street over there. So, from there came this alumni versus rookies audition to go to this school. And it was electric, man. We filmed everything. We filmed the crying, the vomit, the injuries.
I sent a letter to our crew the day before we started shooting, basically saying, “Tomorrow you’re going to see a group of people who have been dancing and training for 18 years of their life. This is a full time job for them. And now, they’re getting the chance, they’re allowed to fight for an opportunity. Everything is riding on this for them. What’s Plan B?” And the stakes of it all made sense in a feature film format. It’s clean. It’s the auditions, 10 days in London. Like, it’s freaking condensed.
Nick: The stakes are really felt in two ways, and it reminds me of a Steven Sondheim quote that I love. ‘When you can’t say your emotions, you sing them. And when you can’t sing them, you dance them.” I found that you really captured both the emotional journeys of these dancers by interviewing them and getting them to open up about their lives so sincerely, but you see it in their dance too. Was that something you also noticed and focused on when making this film?
LC: Yeah, that was number one for me. I was always looking for the emotion in the dance. Because it was going to give me those scenes that connected to their missions of being backup dancers. The emotional journey is what the audiences care about. That’s what the story is. So, I definitely wasn’t just looking for the best dancers, but I was looking for people who were going to give me a little tear in my eye.
I love, and people love, Emily, who is such an underdog in this. She was in the first season of the documentary, and you put a mic on her and she was just so comfortable talking through her feelings. She’s an incredibly expressive person, both on and off the dance floor. She’s kind of a documentarian’s dream. And that’s part of the filtration process.
Nick: Something else you do so well in this documentary is you make the Brent Street studio feel like this behemoth of a character. I was intimated just being inside of those walls, looking through a screen. How much did the stature and scale of Brent Street feed into that cinematic vibe?
LC: My background is street dance, but I absolutely knew about Brent Street. Recently, our co-creator, Jade, was on a podcast and she mentioned how she was scared to go in there. And she admitted that to the head of Brent Street, Lucas. She said she was scared because they were such esteemed representatives of the industry. And that kind of put extra pressure on Lucas too!
Sometimes in a documentary, these characters just say stuff and do stuff that you can’t ask for. Like, we never even subliminally put that idea in their brains. One of the girls who was there, suddenly went off to the O2 in London to perform, and she came back to Brent Street and just spoke about how she wanted to make Australia proud. And she cried, and we all cried. And that just was the power that came from Brent Street.
Nick: One of the standout things you explore in this movie is males struggling with body image issues. It’s not something I think we see a lot in film, and it’s not something even in society that is talked about a lot. It’s very powerful and impactful hearing these guys talk about their struggles. How did that subject come up in the conversations, and in turn make its way into the story?
LC: Thank you so much for bringing this up. I knew I needed a strong theme. And when there is a good plot with good people, naturally there is meaning behind it. And the thing I was upset with myself from the first season was that the gay dancers, and I’m gay myself, kept telling me that no one would book them because male backup dancers are traditionally the hetero love interest. You’re a masculine guy who would lift the female dancers up and give her this sexually charged look. And a lot of them struggled with the idea that they looked more feminine. They looked like the gay best friend. They could be a great dancer, but they “look like that”. And what was lovely is that some of the straight boys, like Max Ostler, also said the same things because of his eye. We touched on this stuff, but we didn’t end up going there.
Body image is such a red hot button topic within the industry. And everyone you ask about it now will say that finally things are changing. But it was still heartbreaking to explore that. And as a gay man, I didn’t want to hide from that. I’m going to dig into it because I wanted that to be expressed.
Thank you to Luke for his time, and to Mushroom Studios for organising the interview. Dance For Your Life is in cinemas April 2.
