Dance film - AND SO DO I by Jana Younes

A paranoid father embarks on a dance with his belated wife. His daughter witnesses it all.
Set in a realm of sensational language, The family engages in a virtual conversation of love, loss and the impossibility to forget.

Directed by Jana Younes
Choreography by Jens Bjerregaard
Starring Jens Bjerregaard, Giulia Barbone and Shayene Kamel.
Winner of the Golden Award at the filmmakers of the year film festival, the Filmmatic Filmmaker

Interview: JANA YOUNES & JENS Bjerregaard

Interview by Melissa Ramos recorded between Sydney, Paris & Beirut

ABOUT JANA YOUNES

Jana is a dancer, choreographer, photographer and filmmaker living in Beirut Lebanon. Jana’s dance life started at the age of four with ballet classes to which she added modern jazz and Argentinian tango at a later stage. She then engaged in contemporary dance that helped broadening her knowledge in present-day techniques.

Her infatuation with the combination of cinema and dance had started earlier on with her short documentary “Moving philosophy” where she applied Laban Movement Analysis’ theories for the human body on the body of the camera, studying the relationship between the two. Her aspiration to break the boundaries between the spectators and the moving subject is one of her major grounds and goals.

About JENS BJERREGAARD

Jens was trained at the Laban Centre (UK), he has been active in international contemporary dance since 1992. In 1998 He established the award-winning ensemble Urban Elves. In 2005, he founded Mancopy Dance Company and developed an unconventional structure welcoming collaborations with artists from all over the world. In 2007, he founded Archauz, the first Choreographic Centre in Denmark, where he curated festivals, organized choreography competitions and outreach programs. Jens also established youth dance companies in two Danish cities (Odense and Aarhus).

As a Choreographer and dance-maker Jens is one of the few who consistently practice dance as an abstract, transcendent form of expression. He has persistently followed his own choreographic technically challenging direction; His style is spellbinding and displays a consciousness of form and visual design. With a natural instinct for the relations in the body and between bodies Jens is not afraid of creating “movement”.

https://beirutcontemporaryballet.com/

FULL IntervieW Transcript

Melissa Ramos: Your dance film, 'And So Do I' tells a story about a paranoid father who embarks on a dance with his belated wife, his daughter witnesses the dance set in the realm of sensational language. A family engages in a virtual conversation of love, loss and the possibility to forget. Could you please talk us through how you began making this film?

Jana Younes: It all started when I began exploring the spiritual realm in an attempt to see if it's really accessible and a question that rose when I tried to communicate my experience. What is this space that flows between feeling something like grief or loss and expressing it, or the inability of expressing it, mean it's not real, that it is not accessible? And I guess this gap between them is what I was trying to look for in this film. And it comes from the idea that you write everything down and you try to film it, but you don't have proof and then you try to make one with the final outcome. So this becomes a proof of what you thought should happen, a very personal proof.

Melissa Ramos: The negative space in your film really, really works both the choreography and the visual language. And you talked about it as like this gap of the space, this sort of spiritual space. What does this space do to us viewers, in your view, when you experience in your work?

Jana Younes: I guess this negative space is exactly what I was trying to put inside the film. And it became an important element in framing the narrative, especially that this narrative is set between two different realms, although I'm filming in only one realm, which is the real realm, but every character has a place to be. So it was important to give attention to the elements of space and the representation of the characters. And I guess nothing is more important than anything else, especially that the since the woman is not physically there and the little girl is actually a younger human, it was very important for me to give each character their space, their space with their negative space. So even if they're not there, their space is not fulfilled. For example, there was a part of the space that belonged to the mom, another one that belonged to all of them, and the third one that kind of belonged to the girl. I know it sounds very architectural but also in filming the empty spaces. I tried to make the audience feel that it's still there, especially the space where the mom is which is physically not there.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah, you can really feel it in the space. And I even notice even the domestic space and how it was put together. It was a very subtle gesture, in terms of the production design. I don't know if this was intentional, but I noticed the babushka dolls at the last shot.

Jana Younes: The bosnia plant.

Melissa Ramos: Yes. It kind of kept resonating within the space, even though she's there in and out, but in the father's mind.

Jana Younes: It kind of represents some sort of a continuity and also some sort of loneliness and distinction, because they're not inside each other. They're thread. And so is with the space. You know, there's not a piling up of spaces that where one comes on top of the other, but rather they are spread. And this is how the movement was allowed to be shot, even if there weren't anyone inside the frame per say, some of the shots, you could see how we allow the empty space to happen, like when Jen's fall out of the frame or when the mother enters the frame or when suddenly we see her and we don't... We see the bonsai that kind of represents her and that goes off at the very end. So these are very subtle elements that tell us that there's something a little bit not real, you know, something that doesn't belong to this space specifically, but it's a representation of another one.

Melissa Ramos: Speaking of a process. Jen's how did you start working if the movement storyline?

Jens Bjerregaard: Jana gave me whatever she had written, whatever script, usually when I'm doing stage stuff and other stuff, I, I go to the studio and, you know, see what happens. I might have a lot of notes, but they're never very specific. They're much more abstract. So I kind of dealt with Jana's notes as if they were my own and I actually started to work on with with the performers right away, and we worked in the space, which was kind of important. So we were actually able to be in the space where we filmed. So we have the rehearsals there as well. And then just to also to figure out what can we squeeze in there, because the space is not particularly big and just basically playing from a very intuitive, very much from an emotion. I tend to be fairly fast at creating material so Jana could see things quite fast, kind of agree or disagree or take it more a certain way. So I think I spent with the performance, I maybe spent an hour, half an hour, and then Jana was already watching stuff. I think when we work with Shayene girl, Jana was actually there throughout, as far as I remember, throughout the rehearsals and commented on it. I did the choreography, but it was still a collaborative process where I throw something in and I get feedback right away. Jana had pre-work on the project. It was her idea. And usually I am in a situation where it's my idea. I try to create a product. So I think I was more at the service of Jenna so that I would read and what she had written, listen to her and then very quickly make something and very quickly get response from her to where it was going and kind of came like this. And then I was just lucky that I had two very easy performers to work with that responded very fast to what I was doing. So it was a very fast, actually, very fast. They're very intuitive. Shaping process, it was more like we were shaping something together rather than me choreographing from step two to step back.

Jana Younes: If I could add something. As what Jen's just said. For one, I have to give credit to probably one of the fastest creative people I've ever met in my life, because, you know, sometimes you have intuition, but then you don't know how to put it into action physically. And Jen's is so good at this that it makes it so easy to get better from early on so that you don't end up getting on set and you're ready to film and you feel like you still have things that you could have pushed further because that already had started early on with the rehearsals. And with that happening very quickly, it was a very quick conversation from a day to day basis. Things were moving very quickly. By the time they were actually ready, we would still have a couple of weeks to shoot. So that gave us even more insights to put and that helped us and me and the production team to include those elements that gave a depth to the choreography rather than just bringing the choreography to serve the production. It was a little bit the other way around. So we were making things to help these elements flourish more.

Melissa Ramos: I'm interested in how you and Jana work together at the beginning. Jana, did you have a script and had an idea and then worked with Jen's on how that would be filmed? Or did you already have a vision of how it would be like?

Jana Younes: Everything starts very, very, very simply, it starts with, as I told you this, I needed to explore these two realms. So that came first. And then I put together these characters, which is, you know, the very first basic human connection, which is like social connection, which is a family father and a mother and a daughter. And then I had to have an element that would create some sort of complexity. So I removed the mother from one of the realms and then we put them in that space. So here were these decisions. That one came after the other. And then once we said that these are the elements that we're working with, it's almost as if you're creating a choreography and they're telling you the stage is six by six and then you have three lights and you have two dancers and one of them has a broken leg. So you work with what you have. But on top of them, there needs to be a certain structure and a certain storyline where what comes first and what comes after. So the duet came first and then the mother leaves and then the daughter comes in to leave, always elements that keep adding up and deducting from the story. And then what if we put them all together? But putting them all together means that the daughter does not see what the father sees. So we're working around this complex idea of having all of them in one realm, but only one of them seeing the mother and the daughter does not understand it first, but then she does because she's been seeing this all the time. And then later the reconnection with the daughter and the father without the physical presence of the mother. But then throughout the film, we're feeling her. So the thought of her would stay until the very end. And this is why we fall outside of the building because that's a fleeting spirit. So that process is just something as if you're building something with elements and then removing this and then adding something on top. And all the things that come in-depth for this to happen were discussed. So I would come and tell Jens the things that, you know, sometimes because we work in concepts and I think this is our strong point, like how we work together. I don't have to explain to him or that I have in mind. I can just throw an idea to him and tell him, you know, it's like tango. And then that's all I have to say for him to understand. OK, tango, there's a lot of decisiveness, there's a lot of dynamics and there's a lot of sadness. But it's sad dance being jolly dance. And so on and so forth. So that was the nice thing. We didn't have to explain to each other much. We just had to have one idea. And we both know that, OK, I got you. And this trust, I think it evolves the project super nicely. And I guess this is what made us start the dance company together, I guess.

Melissa Ramos: Oh wow, you describe the set of the dance film as sensational language. Could you elaborate more what sensational language means to you?

Jana Younes: Yeah, sure. I'll go first. I don't know if Jens has something to add, but I'll tell you. So first things first, we needed to tell a story, but we also need to be dancing and at first I even had the idea of exploring an actual dialogue where they moved around. But when, again, in this very specific context, movement spoke louder than words, we tried to translate a deeper layer of thought into dance sequences that help us directly access that stage. And you know language, and in a broad sense, is a method of communication. And here in the film, instead of using the linguistics that we're used to, I try to do so with the senses. And then communication is happening between two realms. So the bridging is sensational.

Melissa Ramos: And do you feel that the layer, the word sensational language like dance, that is the essence of dance. Because it's ephemeral and that's a fleeting, multilayer of different transitions and transformation. I'm just wondering how it relates to dance.

Jana Younes: It's very funny because this is a very specific topic that we were discussing this week with said that he had wrote something about it. Dance can only happen with the involvement of the senses. It cannot happen without that involvement. And I guess the moment you want to talk about movement, you are accessing this brain, body, soul connection. And for this to happen, it's an internal action rather than something that you just go on and do. So for you to do it, you need to act. You need to smell it. You need to touch it. You need to see it. You need to engage with it and interact with it so that it happens. I mean, anything that you don't interact with, you don't see. So it's impossible to speak of dance or of movement or of any kind of experience without involving the senses and the message.

Melissa Ramos: Interesting.

Jens Bjerregaard: I also think sometimes I mean, because it has to be sensory, it comes down to some very I mean, we're talking about the whole abstract of the negative space, et cetera, but also to this the fact that when when you're performing, when you're making and because we were rehearsing in that space, we were never in the studio think we were just working in that space, the space becomes important, you know, we were on a stone floor that's hards and cold. You know, it starts to affect the whole thing of the character, the space, the apartment, the rooms are almost empty. There's just what there needs to be. The only thing that kind of jumps out in this character are the dolls. And somehow you sense that is something that the girl kept. I mean the dad wouldn't have put up those dolls, you know, like she's trying to keep some type of life in. So for me, when you're choreographing, it created a lot of limitations. Couldn't throw yourself around like you were doing on the stage with a bouncy floor. So that in itself becomes a part of psychology of the whole thing, that the spaces the floor is cold, the surface is a fairly hard to deal with and I think it is just very important to have those layers and that emotional layer inside the work or else it just doesn't make sense. If you're dealing with the choreography as a purely visual thing, it doesn't really work. It just becomes it actually becomes superficial if you don't have the... If you as a performer or can't convey the other senses to the audience as well, like so to touch, etc., it just becomes visual movement porn if you don't have these other senses. And I think what Jana was interesting in the space and how she ended up filming it was that she was very willing to cut up the dancing and not see the full-body, not see everything, not see the skill set of what we were doing. She was much more going into what does this mean at this moment rather than seeing the body doing this, which was in a way great she zooms in on certain things and interaction, instead of trying to show the, trying to show the dance.

Melissa Ramos: Talking about the space, you also used the light as components of the narrative. Was that something that you discovered while rehearsing in the location?

Jana Younes: For sure. I mean, one of the ways that you could identify the different spaces is also how you light them and how much you allow inside it. And you could see if you just think that you're taking like a 180 view of the space, because that's a little bit how it was filmed. You could tell a little bit that there are places that are more lit than others and places that are more mysterious than others. And some of them, you could physically see the light. And in some others, you don't understand why this light is there. And again, this is happening because we have these two sets. One is we actually do not see and one is practically in front of us and which was not particularly easy because we were still dealing with one open space. It wasn't like you were going into one room and then you would feel there's a cold and then you would go into another and that's warm and then you go into another. And see that's a very virtual or, you know, you are still dealing with one place and the transitions needed to be as real as possible. It's like you walking from your car to your apartment. The light changes as you're walking in. But it happens so softly that you even if you had your eyes closed, you would see what kind of light is coming through your through your eyelids. And it's all natural light. But how it's changing, you would feel that you are going from one place to another. So the element of light that we needed to put needed didn't need to be very extreme. On the contrary, they needed to be very subtle and sometimes subtle in a way that they needed to look like a normal living room. It still needs to look like a normal living room and a normal dining room and a normal TV room and so that we don't end up with the lights being suddenly on a stage and we're performing and then back to reality and then out of it.

I think it's important not to think about dance as movement, but you need to think about it as language. You need to layer it against what we talked about earlier. We need to layer to multiple senses. We can't like movement is something you see. And it's visual. You need to connect it to that. And silence somehow helped to connect. That silence is just a part of the rhythm of what we do.

Melissa Ramos: Going back to the concept of sensational language, what's your view on the distinction between body memory? Because we're looking at the idea of loss then the body narrative, which is to be clear, I mean, like the present moment of the narrative, do have any thoughts on that?

Jana Younes: Yeah, actually, I have one for me. There's one distinction that presents itself. And for me we're talking one. We're talking about almost an accumulation of a set of memories and maybe some added flashbacks and then one where we're dealing with awareness, where the narrative starts serving as some sort of a timeline. So these two worlds, this is likely from going from an accumulative memory to something that is happening now that is telling a story.

Jens Bjerregaard: But I think what I started out dancing like and what really interested me at dancing was it from the beginning of my dance life was always the, you know, the physical thing, the dynamics, the dynamic values, whatever tension in the movement, I never really got too much into the psychology of things, but I kind of discover and also with a work like this that I'm actually for me, practically also because performing in this piece and it's you know, it has an aspect of acting. And I'm a dancer. I'm not an actor. And I remember actually being very instead of trying to start acting and trying to be an actor, I was very much using this kind of translation from whatever was emotional, that this emotion had certain physical dynamic values. And it actually ended up in how I choreographed this material and how I performed it, was basically to kind of keep that. To actually look at what's going on internally and dealing with it as far as physical values, as like dynamic values and actually translating it like that and putting it across as a rhythm, as a tension, as a very physical thing, which was certainly very interesting for me and actually very useful to be able to play with the material. So actually to think in a very conceptual physical manner. But the take the information from something very, very emotional and very internal. Anyway, that worked for me, I don't work for others, but this is kind of I remember doing that very clearly, as in this work as a performer and as a choreographer to really use whatever internally was going on and basically putting some physical values to it, basically, like, OK, this is the kind of tempo, this is the kind of tension that the movement has to have. This is the size. This is the type of way that the movements have to be shaped. But what actually executing it. I wasn't in an internal journey. I was more dealing with this mathematical formula that somehow that was created from the emotional.

Jana Younes: I think, for example, you could compare and this is how you would definitely make sense out of it. If you look at the little girl, Shayene, I mean, a nine-year-old does not have the same accumulation and awareness that someone like Jens or Julia, the other dancer, have. So I guess that's how you deal with it. You know, one can work with deeper layers and another has just to be - be. You know, just. Yes, just that. And I guess when you're dealing with this, because I had never dealt with it before, you know, you see kids doing a dance and then raising their arms and doing them lifting and jumping. But then when you're asked when you're asking them to convey something through the dance and you don't have much depth to work on with them, I mean, it's a nine-year-old by the end of the day. It's not like you can work on concepts. I mean, the only thing that you could work on is recent memories and then the translation of these memories into what is now being filled with them, not having to act it out. Does this make sense?

Melissa Ramos: Yeah, definitely. So that's how you know, how direct it is. And it doesn't need to go through so many filters before it becomes the dance. It is.

Melissa Ramos: Dance is obviously about movement. That's how most people think about it. But there's also pause and stillness as a major component of it. How do you relate to pause and stillness as dancers or artists?

It all started when I began exploring the spiritual realm in an attempt to see if it's really accessible and a question of rose when I tried to communicate my experience. What is this space that flows between feeling something like grief or loss and expressing it, or the inability of expressing it ...

Jens Bjerregaard: I think it's important not to think about dance as movement, but you need to think about it as language. You need to layer it against what we talked about earlier. We need to layer to multiple senses. We can't like movement is something you see. And it's visual. You need to connect it to that. And silence somehow helped to connect. That silence is just a part of the rhythm of what we do. Silence is not nothing. You know, it's there to accentuate what just happened or what's going to happen next. You know, it's not nothing.

Jana Younes: And it's a conversation.

Jens Bjerregaard: And I think somehow, sometimes with the silence is what allows the spectator, it allows the viewer, the one that receives it, to actually receive it. So it's I think silence is just the part of the necessary if you want to be generous with your communication, you have to have silence inside it.

Melissa Ramos: Jana, I was going to ask you about how you started making dance films and how do you explore combining dance with cinematic language. And as you just explained, silence is very much a language and a tool that they have for cinema and dance and then combining it.
Jana Younes: Yeah, dance doesn't need to be moving all the time. As I was trying to say, it's like a conversation, you know, and when you're having a conversation, you speak. I listen. And then when I listen, I'm not doing a lot of movement because my senses are directed towards understanding you. And when you want to understand, you want to be still and you want to be digesting those words that are coming out. So when you see someone who is still is probably you need as an audience to put something inside the conversation. So you need to engage your thoughts in that still moment and that in moments you need to add something, you need to interact with it. So if you are looking at something still, it's probably because it's allowing your mind. To continue that conversation as an audience and then allow the next thing to happen and so on and so forth, and it's not just between the characters, it's also between the audience and the film.

Melissa Ramos: Yeah, you kind of answered one of my questions. What are the ways to you try to connect the audience with the moving body image? It could be a still body image, and why do you like to approach it that way? Do you use space quite a lot in your filmmaking language, have room for the audience to have that interaction, or do you have other ways to do that and in your work?

Jana Younes: I would like the audience to understand and for the audience to understand you to allow him to interact with you. Otherwise, you're just putting on a show and he's just entertained and which is not the purpose. It would just be the first layer, you know. But then I guess what I try to do very humbly is to surprise and eventually give the inevitable. So the audience will go, oh, I didn't see this coming. But yeah of course, I mean, that's what this shot was preparing me for. So before the mother disappears from the arms of Jens you could see that it's going somewhere, but then you're surprised when it happens. But then he was sure it was going to happen. So you see there's this kind of, pull and push and how much you're giving in terms of knowledge and engagement and how much is surprising and how much you're coming and saying, oh, of course you had it right. That's how it is. Just how you thought of it as an audience. And, you know, there are a few things that still, Malpensa, is that the vision is palpation by the look. And I think it kind of resume's everything we were just talking about, you know, this involvement of the senses and by just looking, you are almost touching everything that you're seeing that is moving the texture, the the shiver of the of the hand, the hair falling, it almost gives you. Time and space to feel all those things instead of just passing images that you don't have the time to get, the time to catch what it is and how it is and how it feels like inside there so that you have this involvement. I get a lot of involvement and engagement. I guess that's what I do.

Melissa Ramos: And so you were sort of expressing about the audience, you know, their involvement. Have you ever tried to approach or experimented ways where you try to make the audience dance with the film?

Jana Younes: Oh, OK. Well, you know what? If so when you're there, I think it has to do with how much you are prepared to move as an audience, but it doesn't necessarily need to be physical.

Melissa Ramos: No, I meant it more like in the head.

Jana Younes: Yeah. OK, so If it moves you because you allowed it to move you, I think, and this is something I don't think the filmmaker per say is responsible for, you know, because I mean, the trees are there and the trees are not trying to move you, but, how you're looking at it and depending on the state of mind your in, you look at it and then you connect with the leaves then you feel like a soul is floating and the tree is not trying to do that to you. It's your perception on it and what you allowed it to do to you. So I guess if the audience is moved its because the audience wants to be moved, it allows the film to move them. And I put it out there for them. All the elements that are possible for them to engage, you know, one might engage with the light, another might engage with the camera movement. Someone else would really love the little girl. And, you know, there are different elements, depending on where you come from, what you've seen as a kid, how you grew up watching things and all sorts of things that come into play to allow the audience to get moved by this or not. You know, I've had people crying in the audience. I've had people coming out saying, oh, I love it is so cool. And I said, so it's different, you know? And I've had also people looking at it and saying, oh, I didn't mean anything to me. So it's you see, it's a different kind of reaction depending on the different types of people. So as long as it moves me and the team and the people are working on this together, I mean, that is real. And if it's we then we just put it out there, you know, you don't think much about. Who will like it, who will not, who will it move, who it will not move. It might move someone who never felt anything towards any dance film.

Melissa Ramos: Did you mean did you say real? As long as it's real.

Jana Younes: Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes. It had me very, very real place. And if I look at the image and I and I really believe that it's real, I put it out there and that's enough for it to happen, you know, that's enough for it to be. And we didn't try to fabricate something that would make people like this. We like it. We enjoy looking at it. We enjoy creating it and making it. And then if someone else likes it, well, welcome.

Jana Younes: What do you aspire as a filmmaker working with dance?

Jana Younes: Ahh to match the narrative of the dance with the power of the words, I guess. You would look at a dance film and you would see a dance film, but then you've never seen the feature film when there's a dance sequence that also belongs in this real world, unless it's either show for entertainment or something that is coming from imagination. Although if I'm sitting with friends, sometimes I just feel like moving around and dancing on the table and then it's fine with them. They accept it, you know. But in the film we still don't see this. We automatically either jump to, oh, I felt it in my head and then we go back as if it was a flashback or something that is completely virtual. And it's like I didn't move in this specific place in this specific moment with people around me that I have a conversation about. I don't know their plans for tonight, but I feel like doing a small sequence with a bottle of water that's sitting on the table with me and without it looking weird, you know, so I feel like this is what I want to get to eventually. They can belong to the same place and space and we can see it as something normal and usual because more and more and more people are doing it and it doesn't need to be inside a studio or with a dramatic plate. You know, it can just happen without it being the dancers are dancing now. No the humans are moving now, you know, it's just that these humans feel like moving differently than you. I mean, you have a different tone of voice. I have a different set of reactions and body reaction. So why not? I guess that's what I wish to work towards eventually and involve these two mediums without them being weird, you know.

If you're dealing with the choreography as a purely visual thing, it doesn't really work. It actually becomes superficial...

Melissa Ramos: Yeah. Do you feel like the language is a new language that people of the audience is learning or even as artists, filmmakers. Do you feel like this new language that is still there for us to discover in this work?

Jana Younes: Well, I think for sure it's just about how much we allowed it to become acceptable or not, I mean, a lot of times you watch films where it's in Spanish and then suddenly they move to English. And no one questions that, you all and this is language this is pure linguistics that say, so why not begin to accept it? And you don't need subtitles for that. You know, it's just in front of you was just given it. It's giving it to you first hand and you will understand it. So why do you accept a change from the say in German to Danish, but not accept a change from talk to move?

Melissa Ramos: Hmm. Interesting.

Jana Younes: You can have one sentence where we have both. Is it possible or a conversation that has both or if that happens without one being completely separate from reality?

Jens Bjerregaard: I think it's interesting to see when you're looking at dance and dance movies that very often some of the most interesting stuff is things that are starting to sneak into commercial stuff like music videos, et cetera, with a very often ending up doing quite interesting stuff. And I think it's our own fear. I think that if it's done right, no one will question it. No one will question what they are doing dancing. No one will question that. 'And so do I' was not a spoken word movie. And what I like about this project was that, yeah, it's a dance movie, but it's not about dancing. I think it's just it's about the choices we make. If our reference is Tricia Brown, then. Then the ones who know who Tricia Brown is, is going to understand it, but it's not going to, you know, it's not going to affect a lot of other people. But if our reference is. The storytelling and the emotion of it, you know, and then using the language as Tricia Brown or whatever, but it boils down to what is our purpose with what we are doing and are we able to convey that purpose? And then I don't think the audience has any problem shifting from to understanding dance. I think we sometimes have problems as creators to make it clear enough for people to read it. The problem is not with the audience. The problem is with us, if we're willing to speak a language that is understandable or not understandable and that doesn't mean compromising. It means clarifying.

Melissa Ramos: Or taking you to another place?

Jens Bjerregaard: Taking it to another place and clarifying what is important and I think I think I said this half an hour ago or so, but that we are willing to go in and film it in such a way that we don't see the full body moving. But we are in the opening scenes to seeing a series of close ups between Julia and me. You know, we don't see the whole dance. I mean, we don't see my beautiful duet choreography. The first three minutes. We see bits and pieces of it, but it tells the story. So therefore it's the right thing to do.

Melissa Ramos: How did you choose the soundtrack for 'And So Do I' ?

Jana Younes: That matters is that is a whole different story. All of it was made for the film. Yeah. And the way I was supposed to work with me go crazy to the idea, but they're used to it. I guess I always work on the choreography first and once I completely finished the edit all of it, then we composed the music. So it's kind of working the other way around. And I have three different composers. To work on them and their things up to, for instance, the tell as one Canadian beautiful Canadian artist whose sound also represented the presence of the mother, I basically had to send her footage and tell her we agreed to using your instrument, you know, using your voice, using your senses. So really, the whole work is around these these senses. And once once we gave each character their definition in terms of sound, for example, they had the little girl with the ballad and the piano and the happy, happy little was that even visually, it went from normal base to more like Charlie Chaplin kind of speed. And the options and the comeback of the instruments also give the audience some sort of understanding what sound belongs to whom. So we were layering things up all the way to the very, very, very last moment with the sound design. And some elements worked here but didn't work here. So we had to break things up and then work with two or three different people, some music composers, the sound designers. And what was really all layering up was intense work. It was the most intense work in the whole film, to be honest. The music, the soundtrack.

Melissa Ramos: Do you work that way? Having music at the end?

Jana Younes: Absolutely inventive. Great at this, because he he can work with silence, you know, he gives the motion. And if I and sometimes, you know, as I told you, if we're working on concepts, then it will sound like the content they want sound like this very specific moment. So we're not really composing music to that specific part of the dance, but how this whole thing is coming up. So the dance is the music is not coming to describe what we're seeing, but to add another layer that we don't see.

Jens Bjerregaard: Jens, so working conceptually, but without sound or music, that's something that you do quite a lot in your in your practice. And where does movement come from? Silence.

Jens Bjerregaard: I've been in this business for a very long time. I'm old in the dance business. I think I kind of made up this concept very early on. If if the dancing can't stand alone, if you can't remove the set, if you can't remove the music and then there's this nothing. You know, if I couldn't just dance it without any of it, then it wouldn't be right. So I always think the dancing and the choreography is something that needs to be able to stand alone. I even think in something where I didn't have to do it, it ended up, and so do I, that in principle we could have instead of filming and so do I. And it is just something that happened because this is always what I do with stage work and so on, that we could have performed it, you know, and it was actually all connected. We could have been a 14-minute site specific performance in that room and there could have been audience standing around. It actually connected up in that way. So I think it's the way I've always been working that the dancing needs to be complete and somehow needs to also be the glue that holds everything else together. It's not like you adding to dancing to something else. And dancing without music is a great freedom. You can stretch things and you can attack things in a different way. And I find it's great freedom rather than and it's a problem. And I just I'm a great believer in dance. So if dance can't stand on its own without music, without anything, then it's you need to go back and realize that you need to make it better.

Jana Younes: And just because we need to go back also to that idea of cinema, you know, and then the moving picture, not to speak about the early films, also, this is also how things were sending out. You know, the visuals were being showcased and things were being played on top of them. So it was this way around. Now, when someone is making a film, you don't go around and say, OK, this is the soundtrack, now let's make the film. So in a dance film, it doesn't necessarily need to be different than that because we're still working in the realm of the cinematic experience. So we need to have the visuals and adapt what we see that the music to what we're seeing or the sound or whatever, you know. And what feeling does it give you? Because a lot of times you can put a sound and then if you just muted and throw something else on it, you say, aha, but this works better, you know, so why limit yourself with one idea and work on it and sometimes you might get stuck on your initial idea. And I think this leaves me room to change my mind over things and then stretch and cut in, I just need to add that thought, from the cinematic point of view.

Dance can only happen with the involvement of the senses. It cannot happen without that involvement. And I guess the moment you want to talk about movement, you are accessing this brain, body, soul connection.

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