If It Were Love

The film about Gisèle Vienne’s dance piece “Crowd” is a techno party gone rave, awash with repetitive movements, physical and emotional encounters between fifteen bodies charged with sexual energy. Through staged one-on-one conversations between the performers, we learn about the background story of their characters. In this way, the characters in the choreography become the characters of the film: there is a trans* boy, a “Nazi” boy that desires a gay boy, a girl attracted to troubled people and a woman who exudes raw sexuality. Reality and fiction begin to blend. Loud electronic music accompanies the ecstatic bodies moving in slow motion. The cinema becomes a rave and an extension of the stage, and a dance documentary turns into an exhilarating neon-lit fresco of a young, international troupe.