Pursuing Passion: Two Dancers Think of a Movie

PURSUING PASSION

A 5-minute documentary on the dance teachers at my dance studio, Bamachol Dance Program, and how they each studied for a specific career in college but left it all to continue their passion for dance as a teacher. 

DAY 1  My partner, Vanessa Yanes, and I thought for a very long time about what we wanted to do with this assignment. We had one goal: to make the most creative documentary we could. This was mainly because we wanted to create a piece that would make our teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, for lack of better wording, piss her pants from how good it is. 

Vane had her mind set on an abstract piece based on the New York Times Op-doc, Five Days of Fear, where filmmaker Bartlomiej Zmuda asked one question to various interviewees, "What do you fear the most?" I was obsessed. The idea of asking 8-10 people one solid question and almost comparing their responses in how they react, think, and express it seemed so original and unique. 

Five Days of Fear by Bartlomiej Zmuda

We proposed it to Stok with the question "What was your first love?" She hated it. She told us that was not a documentary and that we were essentially just creating a montage of different answers rather than creating one goal to document through. Vane and I were fuming. Our rage and seeking of approval powered us to scratch our brains until they started bleeding of the most absurd and impractical ideas. We decided to break till the next class.

DAY 2 Dance. We discovered our shared interest in dance. Me being a dancer currently and Vane previously being a dancer, we decided this was the best route for us to both be passionate about our project. Obviously, we thought big. Vane has a very big obsession with professional ballerinas and obviously 'tis the magical season of the nutcracker so our original idea was to document the process and studio goes through to prepare for this performance. We emailed Miami City ballet to see if they would let us film and interview ballerinas. It has been 37 days since and we have still not received an answer. On to plan B!

awkward...

After an immense amount of effort to compromise on a topic, we decided there was no possible way we were going to ditch it, so we needed a more practical way of getting what we want. Rather than thinking of the topic, we thought of location. We researched Vane's old studio but decided it was probably not a good idea since neither of us had a current relationship with it. We were so beyond frustrated that we couldn't think of ANYTHING!!! I think it may have been all the questioning and brainstorming that got to us because we took one second to breathe and realized that I literally dance at a studio... and boom, our location was set.

Once again, our minds were only on how could we blow T Stoks brain. I dance at an Israeli Dance Program in Aventura, Florida. It is a VERY niche place with an extremely close community of Latin Jews so I wanted to build on that. I very casually mentioned that all my teachers studied something very not dance in college. I've never seen Vane's eyes widen so fast. Finally, a sign of relief, we have a topic: dance teachers that didn't study dance but now work at a dance studio... okay, we kinda have our topic.

DAY 3 We decided to just ride this wave and shape the topic better through the interviews. At a dance rehearsal, I confronted all 4 of my teachers and told them I was going to make a documentary that would require an interview and for my partner and me to basically follow them around filming them. I then texted them to set up interview dates and times. Everything was perfect. Until it wasn't. 

Stay tuned to see how we found out that making a documentary is not easy,

ms.spielberg