If It Were Love is filmed theater, and by filmed theater that does not mean the stage, but the process, the transitions, and the trying of theater. Patric Chiha, best known for his docufiction Brothers of the Night, about Roma men in Bulgaria who consider themselves “gay for pay”, illuminates theater director Gisèle Vienne’s dance piece Crowd on tour.
It makes the important distinction to not distinguish what the audience sees and what we are privy to backstage, allowing relationships to bleed into the text of the play. The show centers around the 1990s rave scene, told through the sometimes fluid, other times erratic motions of the dancers, and how they interact.
The theatricality of performance bleeds into reality, and the fluidity between real relations and acting is blurred in a way that makes the film closer to the experience of what a live performance of Crowd may be, than a direct live taping would be to watch at home. Based on its choreographer’s experience with these raves, the backstage conversations on lust, queerness, and the nature of gender meld with the onstage dance. Through this, we see them as actors on a stage instead of what character Crowd does give its performers naturally.
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Gisèle Vienne is one of Europe’s strangest, yet most enthralling, voices in modern theater, and it’s only fitting that her work is shown with this surreality. In the past, her work has started conversations for its fascination with the macabre, with a puppet show on homosexual serial killers generating quite a bit of buzz. She heavily leans into both queerness and violence, juxtaposing tender acts of love with a more painful eroticism, and it’s always at least memorable.
Currently, she is on her second collaboration with screen actress Adèle Haenel, a Swiss-German near spoken word adaptation of a short family drama. It’s a softening for the theater director, a potential maturation from the transgression that has characterized her work up to Crowd.
The choppy editing at times breaks the fluidity, but sometimes we do need to be taken out of the entrancement at the motion of bodies. The conversational aspects of the film are curated, words that may be natural, but are plucked from backstage to emphasize the freedom found in motion.
Dance is shot as if it is in a dream, floating in the middle of it instead of held at an arm’s length like a ticket-payer would be. This is what makes If It Were Love a truer experience of the show than others, as for a performance like this to succeed in its intimacy, one must go inside it.
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When applying context to the show in this way, the performance takes on a new subtext. With those conversations between the melancholy introspection that comes with dancing alone in a crowded room, Crowd begins to take shape as a retroactive realization of queerness. Instead of staying in the highs of the rave, it falls into the cracks, lingering on how bodies move, studying them, yet trying to accept it at the time as pure appreciation of motion.
With the inlaid conversations Patric Chiha shows of the backstage, If It Were Love grows lonely, longing for these frank conversations on sensuality, and the freedom to reach out and touch another, instead of just waiting in the motion of desire. The dancers move together without regards for gender at times, or a direct acknowledgement of homoeroticism at others. Crowd both relishes in the ability to touch without the pressure of society here, and a distant longing to have the freedom now to accept these desires so openly again.
It asks the question of whether or not this contact could have been love, and if it could be now. Its retroactive realization makes the film sit harder as an elevation of the performance beyond just recording it.