ABSTRACT
Check Your Body at the Door, an hour-long documentary, focuses on some extraordinary underground club dances and dancers in New York City in the 1990s, and on the elusive, artful world of club dancing. The year 2000 marked the conclusion of eight years of filming and editing on this broadcast-quality video. One reason for making the video was to redress a gap in dance documentation: no good visual records of American social dance exist (except for Mura Dehn’s classic The Spirit Moves). Although there may be “club dance” scenes in American feature films, I have never found any of them useful in terms of revealing what is really going on in the dancing.
