Move Ya’ Body, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, was produced by Hillary Clinton’s company, HiddenLight.
“I didn’t know she was a house head,” director Elegance Bratton told IndieWire about Hillary Clinton at Sundance Film Festival last month. But the former US Secretary of State played an instrumental role in his new documentary, Move Ya’ Body, which explores the queer, Black history at the root of the influential genre.
Clinton was born and raised in Chicago, where house music famously emerged on queer, Black, and Latino dancefloors in the early ’80s. The former first lady and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, own a production company called HiddenLight that helped make Bratton’s film a reality.
Move Ya’ Body highlights house music’s pre-history, namely Disco Demolition Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979. Disco, soul and funk records were burned en masse this stunt organized by local rock radio DJs. The film examines the racial and cultural overtones that led to this watershed moment — as well as how it laid the foundation for house music, as disco artists who no longer enjoyed the advances of major labels opted instead to use synthesizers and drum kits recovered from second-hand bins.
“This film is about house music, but it’s also about how queer people, femme people, women, that culture can teach us all how to be free,” Bratton said of Move Ya’ Body during the IndieWire interview.
“If you were a Black person who’s growing up in the South Side or West Side of Chicago around that time, you absolutely needed white collaboration in order to transcend the limitations of the ghetto,” he continued. “House music is that transcendence.”
The film includes interviews with Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence, who collaborated on “On and On,” a 1984 cover of Mach’s 1980 song of the same name that is widely considered the first house music recording. Lawrence also worked as an usher at Comiskey Park on the evening of Disco Demolition night.
This isn’t the first time Lawrence and Saunders contributed heavily to a documentary on house music. Interview clips with both artists helped guide the narrative of Pump Up the Volume, a 2001 docuseries that chronicles not only the birth of the genre, but how its proliferation during the UK acid house explosion in the late ’80s led to innovation of genres like hardcore, jungle, and drum and bass.
“It’s important to me that people understand where this music comes from,” said Bratton of Move Ya’ Body, whose official release date has yet to be announced. “And now that you know where the roses can be sent, please send them.”
