Russell Maliphant places movement front and centre of A Christmas Carol and dance is also boosting screen successes like Lovers Rock and Giri/Haji
Dance and cinema have a common source. The clue’s in the name: motion pictures. Movement is at the root of both art forms. That crossover is most obvious in early cinema, with its gestural acting style, its stunts and spectacles, in its long – now mostly long over – love affair with the musical. Nowadays, in western cinema at least, you’d be harder pushed to focus on movement in the movies. It’s there, of course, but most films press all their means – actors, scenes, music, movement – into the service of a different master: the narrative.
Jacqui and David Morris’s new A Christmas Carol movie, then, comes as something of a shock: a feature film that puts dance front and centre, all the way through. A crazy idea! How does that work? The bottom line, I think, is that the directors make no pretence at narrative realism. It is nominally set inside a toy theatre, the film footage is often layered with paper cutouts and newsprint; Siân Phillips’ fireside voice narrates in the background, and every character is doubled by an on-screen dancer and a voice actor. Dance fits in by being as artful, as artificial as all the other means.