(L–R) Director Elegance Bratton at the premiere of his documentary “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House” at The Ray Theater in Park City. (Photo by Donyale West/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Jordan Crucchiola
The atmosphere is bordering on jubilant at the January 26 debut of Move Ya Body: The Birth of House in The Ray Theater. Director Elegance Bratton is present to celebrate a documentary years in the making, along with Director of the Sundance Film Festival and public programming, Eugene Hernandez, who is preparing the audience for something special.
“This is a film that is as fun as it is a vital history lesson into one of the most popular music genres of today,” says Hernandez, whose history with programming Bratton extends back to Hernandez’s time overseeing the New York Film Festival. “[Chicago house music] introduced some of the most legendary and innovative music producers and musicians of our time. Move Ya Body recalibrates how we think of our current musical landscape, and you’re in for a real treat.”
As Bratton takes his place at the front of the theater to introduce his film, he is wiping away tears. “It’s hard to believe I’m actually standing here in this theater, about to share a movie that is close to my heart with a festival that is so close to my heart,” Bratton tells the room. “Thank you to all the programmers who have watched all these movies and selected Move Ya Body to be a part of this incredible place. This is just very emotional for me, because I’ve dreamt of this for so long, and to finally be in my dream — God is good.”
The idea for the documentary first came to Bratton from a hero of his, Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams. In turn, Williams told Bratton that the idea came to him from — of all people — Hillary Clinton. “I was like ‘Wait, Hillary Clinton is a house head?’” Bratton exclaims. “Since when is Hillary Clinton a house head?” And while it is unknown for how long or if Hillary Clinton is a house head, she was born and raised in Chicagoland, which builds a bridge to a core part of Move Ya Body’s mission: Telling the story of the city through the perspectives of its homegrown house artists. “In making this movie, it was really important to us to not have experts talk for our participants, and really live in their stories and their experiences,” says producer Chester Algernal Gordon. “With Chicago being our main character, [our subjects] are all children of Chicago, which makes their stories essentially the history of Chicago.”
One of those children of Chicago is Vince Lawrence, who is the main figure in Move Ya Body and a catalyzing artist of the house movement. The documentary presents the origin and progression of the genre through Lawrence’s early passion for music and relentless determination to become a musician and producer himself. Along with other formative Chicago house artists, he tells the story of the crucial Warehouse club where house first started to take off, influential radio DJs who pilloried house and disco to try to drive it off the radio, and his brushes with big-studio success in a mainstream music industry that didn’t yet know what to do with house.
Prioritizing local voices and ground-floor house creators in telling their history was a deliberate measure taken by Bratton. He wanted to buffer against the continued appropriation of an art form that started in Chicago’s Black and queer spaces decades ago. The Move Ya Body team wanted the true history of house to show the genre’s real face, since superstar white DJs have become the most famous purveyors of house through 21st century pop music. Move Ya Body puts artists like Lawrence, DJ Frankie Knuckles, and Marshall Jefferson in the spotlight expressly to save them from being swept out of history for any longer. The outsider voices who have dictated the story of house music so far have been an unsettling echo of how the musical genre was originally vilified by the industry’s powerful white figures in Chicago, before being handed over to other powerful white music figures beyond the city who eventually packaged it for sale in the hands of their white artists.
“When I met you, Vince Lawrence, I knew there was a lesson in your life that everybody needed to learn,” says Bratton during the post-premiere Q&A. “Fifty thousand white people showed up to Comiskey Park [in Chicago] to destroy Black music, but really what they were trying to do was to tell a young man like Vince his place in the world. It warned him not to ever dream about reaching for anything more, and Vince is living proof that if you hold onto your dreams and you hold onto your purpose, that you will create light, and that light will draw your tribe to you — and maybe even change the world. And I felt like right now in this strange, twisted universe that we are living in, I thought that this was a lesson that the whole world needed to learn.”
A tearful Lawrence replies, to the audience, “Thank you for receiving me and taking the time to consider this story. I’m moved by so many people just showing up to see our film. People ask me what do I expect, what do I want from this film? And I said to myself that what I hoped the film would do was create a space where I got to be the person that I needed. And it seems like that’s happening.”
Bratton and his film team endeavored to shine a light on the past in order to clarify the cultural landscape of the present, and so he ends the premiere screening with a call to action for everyone listening. “I heard that the woke era is over in Hollywood. I didn’t hear when it started, but I heard that it’s over,” Bratton says to the audience. “I love watching popular AI-created streaming things to pass the time like everyone else does, but I do think that [for] those who program in these sacrosanct spaces of exhibition, there is a responsibility to maintain and to enhance the culture by what is chosen to be platformed.”
Bratton continues, “But there are two sides to this coin. We must all watch what matters to us so that there is a reason for it to be made, and for those of us who have the privilege of being in a position to program, you must be brave, because we’ve had Trump win twice. And I cannot convince myself that the media and the way we are educating them through what we choose to show them is not a part of why this man is able to run roughshod over what we have all worked so hard to make happen. Like all of us, my mind has been weighed heavy by what has been going on in our country and world. And a lot of us have been thinking, what are we gonna do about it? And I have one answer: Move ya body.”
