Film ‘a step into dialogue’ on police brutality
Albany artist mixes media to make space for societal reflection
“A space to push back in order to push forward.” That’s a phrase that is spoken several times in the first moments of the film “a love letter to Brian, Lesley, and Michelle,” and it describes not only the physical and intellectual space in which protest and change occur but also the film itself. Created by Hettie Barnhill, an Albany resident and a visiting professor in Skidmore College’s Dance Department, “a love letter” weaves together movement, narrative and deeply personal reflections to explore some of this country’s most painful and troubling societal issues.
“It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, documentation and experimental performance,” Barnhill said in a recent interview. “It talks about all of the topics you continue to hear about — white fragility, diversity and inclusion, anti Blackness, anti-queerness, racial fear and the fact that there is a new police-involved death happening every single day. For some audience members, this may not be new for them, but this is not in the past. This film continues to stay present and future because of how the fabric was woven in America.”
The UAlbany Performing Arts Center will present a free screening of “a love letter to Brian, Lesley, and Michelle” on Thursday, Feb. 9, at 7:30 p.m. at the uptown University at Albany campus. There will also be two free screenings for area high school students and home-schooled students and parents, on Feb. 8 and 9 at 10 a.m. each day.
Barnhill originally conceived the work as a theater piece with a video component and talkback. But when the pandemic shut down the live shows, she and her husband and collaborator, Robert Gertler, began morphing the production into a hourlong film that could be presented remotely for a variety of venues. (Gertler served as director of photography, lead editor and sound designer.)
“The film made it much more equitable to be able to go into living rooms, classrooms, gyms,” said Barnhill, who has performed nationally and internationally and was an original cast member for the
Broadway shows “FELA!” and “Leap of Faith” and was a 2017 nominee for the New York Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Choreography. “It’s a beautiful way of having conversations about these topics in this experimental, interdisciplinary way, in many different venues, with many different audiences that are diverse in gender, ideology, race and beliefs.”
The film is now an official selection for numerous film festivals, including the Montreal International Black Film Festival, the Colorado International Activism Film Festival, the Silicon Valley International Film Festival and the Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival. Barnhill also received a certificate of recognition from the California State Senate for her achievement in “using film as a vehicle for community engagement and education.”
While the making of “a love letter” began in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, its beginnings go back to 2014, when 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., just 15 minutes from where Barnhill was raised in East St. Louis.
“Mike Brown wasn’t new information for me, but what it did was it made me numb, and I was terrified of that feeling,” Barnhill recalled. “I’d rather feel anger or sadness — the numbness felt like living death to me, and I noticed I wasn’t the only one. The only thing I could do was dance to get myself back to physical feeling.”
During a visit to her mother in St. Louis soon after Brown was killed, Barnhill participated in local demonstrations and took footage of the protests. Over the ensuing years, while living in California and New York, she gathered interviews, wrote dialogue and shaped the movement and themes that she brings together in “a love letter.”
“I’m very much a person who is affected by the world going on around me, and my intersectionality as a Black, queer female has always played a part of how I wanted to show my art in the world,” she said. “By practice, I am a dancer, choreographer and director, and I wanted to see theatrical experiences that dealt with what it means to be silenced — not just death but the many ways Black bodies, Black minds, Black human beings are silenced in written text, in narrative, in history, in the future.”
The film incorporates explanations of challenging concepts and references to recent events, alongside emotional stories, striking visual effects and flashes of unexpected humor. Movement is the through line, tying together the varied sections. Trained in a wide range of dance styles, including ballet, tap, jazz, African and modern, Barnhill focuses here on pedestrian movement — movement everyone does, as she puts it.
“As a teacher and as a choreographer, my intention is to share movement that comes from what we do in our human lives, and connect that to our emotion and our lived experience — connecting our gestures to our memory, connecting our physicality to our cognitive experience,” she said.
Dance has been her outlet since childhood, she says. “It became my saving grace, my medicine, a place for me to belong. It opened so many doors for me, and I knew it had the power to effect change.”
Now Barnhill is opening those doors for others through her interactive social justice platform, Create A Space NOW, which provides workshops, trainings and opportunities for artists of color and intersecting identities to develop their own work. It’s inspired, she said, by “the memory and lived experience of a community raising me that included my church and my school, a community that had hands in my success and pushed me to go past what I thought I could.”
The choreographer and her husband decided to settle in the Albany area with their now 3-year-old daughter because of its diversity, artistic community and activist mindset. With “a love letter,” she is inviting local and regional audiences to “step into a dialogue, not just a film,” she said.
“I’m asking them to participate actively, to think, to discuss, to have conversations that continue after the film, even in the most uncomfortable places. It takes continual conversation, not just during Black History Month, not just when another incident happens. This film is an invitation to discuss the hard topics in many different circles and many different spaces, and it’s for every single person.”