The Making of Young Men

One, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight.

And one, two and three,

four, five, six, seven, eight.

And one, two...

Well, I suppose this is the story

of how Young Men grew from its beginnings

as a, kind of, experiment in the studio,

which then developed into a full-length stage work.

And now, I suppose, it's become a sort of meditation

on men at war, told without words...

Great. Great, guys. Great.

..and that's what I like about dance and movement -

the way it has this ability

to tell a very complex,

emotional narrative

without the use of any words.

DRAMATIC CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

We've been interested in film-making

for as long as I can remember, really.

We joined the Royal Ballet Company together

and almost immediately bought ourselves a camera

and then a video camera.

But with our own company, BalletBoyz,

we're constantly looking for opportunities

to get dance on the screen.

Starting your own contemporary dance company is no mean feat.

You know, we were dancers with the Royal Ballet,

but we wanted to create new work.

We wanted to keep exploring.

And at first, when we started this company,

it was just the two of us

and we were commissioning choreographers to make work on us.

So, when we decided to retire from the stage,

it seems like the right thing to do, to...

..find other male dancers

that could then take that knowledge

and continue performing and creating,

exploring the possibilities of men dancing with men.

We're always looking for new people

to come and choreograph for the company -

and one day, Michael was...

looking at some different choreographers on YouTube

and found this guy, Ivan Perez.

We didn't know anything about him.

He'd been an amazing performer with Nederlands Dans Theater,

and had now begun to devote all his time solely to choreography,

so we asked him if he'd like to come over and work with our company.

The BalletBoyz.

It was 2013, two years ago,

and they invited me to see their show at Sadler's Wells,

teach a class with the dancers,

'see how the connection...

'could work.'

Just one thing,

these would be canon until...

here. Bam, bam, bam.

Then you go together.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah?

Right away, we had fun in the first class.

I enjoyed the talent, and also,

sort of, the bravery of the dancers...

..and we got together, two weeks, to do our research,

to see what was the potential.

Very quickly, in the studio,

we could see that there was something special going on.

You know, a really strong connection

between Ivan and the dancers.

Watching material he created over those few days...

I don't know if he meant it, but there was one duet in particular...

..we were watching, and,

after a couple of minutes,

I immediately imagined,

"This is a duet, this is about two men being soldiers."

You know, there's this element in the choreography

where they're struggling.

One's kind of holding the other one back,

or there's something going on,

a story being told...

and Michael said, "I think that they could be soldiers.

"If we get them a uniform, and they're in the sea."

I said, "Fine. Do it."

Stand by!

So, we decided to experiment.

We filmed the choreography,

set it in the sea, in a dramatic location,

to try and enhance the atmosphere of the work.

BELLS TOLL IN DISTANCE

STRING MUSIC PLAYS

The original idea was to make a short dance film with Ivan,

and we used that as a way to discover

whether there was a relationship there,

and clearly there was -

and we really felt strongly

about what he had produced.

And we felt that it could sustain

much longer than three minutes,

so we said, "Let's turn this into a full-evening work for the stage."

I like to question human life,

and how we are actually, you know,

we're vulnerable to forces external to us.

Within this process,

I...

connected to man-made hazards, and war is a major...

..major force.

And the fact that I didn't have so much information about it,

it made me curious.

And also, having an all-male dance company, like the BalletBoyz,

and having all these dancers

in this sort of age frame

where the soldiers could be like,

I felt it was the perfect ground to explore something like this.

This can turn into a really crazy dream.

THEY LAUGH

Yeah, until you get ready.

HE MIMICS GUNSHOTS

Yeah? So, that could be an interesting one.

Music's very important in dance, obviously.

But also in dance film, where there's no dialogue,

so the music really has to carry the work through.

And I immediately thought of composer Keaton Henson

for this project.

Keaton, we were maybe thinking

to continue with the push...

He's a composer that we've worked with before.

He's very well known as a singer and songwriter

with a huge, devoted fan base.

You know, he's virtually got cult status.

He's completely self-taught.

He doesn't read or write music,

but, straight away, he engaged with the idea,

and saw that there was something there,

and started to compose something

very, very different.

I've been a fan of the guys

since they'd used my music a few years back,

and they approached me about...

doing something a bit more longform...

..cos I was starting to get into, kind of,

working with a more classical form of songwriting.

I knew that would be something that would be challenging and exciting.

Right away, when I met him the first time,

I felt he was a sort of romantic rebel,

and I really liked that energy.

He was also referring to Arvo Part,

referring to other composers that he was looking up to,

and he was willing to search in himself,

what is that beauty that he could bring? What is that emotion?

'So, the guys asked me to come in

'and start work on a stage show,'

and Ivan would show me...

..a rough idea or just a movement

that he was thinking of, and I would...

develop on that and take that away and write...

..a theme or a piece around that, and bring it to him,

and that would spur him on to further movements.

That could be great, because this starts by a simple push,

and this starts, sort of, domino each other. "Boom!"

It starts kind of growing, so this could be great if it starts...

"Boof!" ..and then we get the movement going.

-Then slowly...

-HE HUMS

Then the whole thing starts...

sort of jumping, or...

I like a lot how he was observing, how...

he was taking the time to be in the studio with us,

and to not rush,

to let the melodies emerge,

to let ideas emerge,

and to push himself.

'I was really excited to work with him.'

OK, OK, stop, stop.

Good, good, guys. Yeah, great, great.

Thank you.

THEY APPLAUD

-Lunch.

-Yes.

I think, yeah, we were just saying,

Ren was staying in the, kind of,

slightly minor...

really creepy stuff, and I think...

-Yeah.

-And it just seems like such a good point to suddenly...

"Bom-bom."

-Yeah, and to flip the piece into another territory, definitely.

-Yeah.

Like, I think we've got it there.

-I love it.

-Cool. Great. Great.

There was no question in our minds that this...

..choreography was very strong,

the ideas were strong,

the dancers looked fantastic.

The choreography...

It just slowly built and grew,

and Ivan would go away

and come back, choreograph some more,

go away again and think about it.

And the result of that is

that the choreographic process becomes so rich and complex,

and had a huge amount of integrity, I think,

and we hoped that it would work on stage

and hold an audience.

BalletBoyz, I guess,

has a reputation for being an all-male dance company...

..but, quite early on,

we had the idea that, perhaps, we were missing something.

For this particular storyline, or narrative,

we felt there was space in it for a woman's voice,

and a little research showed us that there were great characters

and great storylines that would lend themselves...

and so we had an audition.

'I saw that BalletBoyz were auditioning,

'so I came along...'

..and, after the day of the audition, like,

it must have lasted about a few hours, but Billy and Michael...

..gave me the job that day.

So, then, I think we started a month later...

..and Ivan gave us really strong characters.

We didn't have much to do,

but what we had was really significant

in the power and the meaning behind it.

And as I was creating the project,

each of the dancers were kind of finding their own place,

since I was using their natural characteristics...

and Bradley, right away,

became the strong fighter,

the believer.

The one that would sweat the most.

Go, go!

Nice.

Go!

When we hire choreographers and they come into the studio,

we never really give them the full background on our dancers.

We like for them to see the dancer in the studio,

and to base their choices upon that, and it was interesting.

From day one, he started to work with Bradley.

And Bradley had just joined the company -

so, really, he was our new recruit.

And they formed a really good relationship in the studio.

And I think Bradley, being brand-new,

was just so keen to please.

He had just this enormous amount of energy about him,

and would do anything for a choreographer.

So when we started working with Ivan,

I was completely new to the company,

I was quite fresh.

So it was such a big experience for me to work with somebody like that,

and it really shaped the way that I worked from there onwards.

And he was such an inspiration

to have in the studio each day.

And by the same token,

he knew what to get from Matt,

who's been with us probably the longest of all the dancers.

He found something else completely different for him.

-Go!

-He seemed to have...

He seemed to get to know each of us personally,

and know how to get the best out of us,

and he must have seen that I had some kind of acting skills.

In the studio, we'd done activities and tasks

to bring out, sort of, the best in everyone,

and he seemed to bring out the best in my acting skills.

Great, great.

Can we mark from that one?

Matt Rees is a very special performer because...

..he always gave me the feeling that he was not a professional dancer,

and it always seemed a little interesting.

Because you never knew if it was intentional,

this approach he had to dance...

..and he really strike me when we were working on theatrical ideas,

and he would always bring it to a place

where he's connected to the action,

he's connected to why he's doing it,

and connected, also, to the response of the physicality.

AIR RAID SIREN BLARES

STRING MUSIC PLAYS

APPLAUSE

We were completely delighted with the stage show...

but we thought that there was more to it,

there was more we could get out of this idea -

and it, kind of, coincided with this ambition we've had,

for such a very long time,

to create a dance feature film.

And so this seemed like the ideal moment

to take what we had on stage and turn it into a movie.

So, one of the first things we had to do

was to get the dancers back into the studio,

and make sure that they were really defining the characters correctly.

Once you get her, and it's all about,

you can maybe move in space a bit.

Because if you're like, "What? What? I have her."

So you provoke some movement, you know?

And then...

So, once he gets you,

the idea is that he's going to walk a little bit in the room.

Obviously, when you're on stage, people are sitting

maybe 200 feet away.

And on the screen, the camera was extremely close.

And the justification for the movement, the narrative,

obviously needed to be adapted.

Yeah, so, in a way,

she is actually somebody's mum, or something.

Yeah? Or she could be anybody.

LAUGHTER

Or she could be bringing a story,

or, in a way, just the female energy.

Some of you feel relieved.

The stage version had been quite ambiguous.

It was not set in a particular moment in time,

and all of the dancers had different things to say

about different aspects of soldiering and war.

But for this, we felt like it needed to be much more specific.

The characterisation,

the narrative, needed to be closely followed

by particular dancers playing particular roles.

So, we had to take the original choreography,

and turn it to this new purpose.

THEY LAUGH

Our initial idea for the period in which we'd set this film,

we were pretty open at first...

..but, looking at the choreography,

there was one scene in particular,

in the stage performance,

that was called "Lookout"

and we always imagined this to be set in a trench.

So, trench warfare.

So, that really set it firmly, for us,

in the early part of the 20th century.

Because we didn't want to have the dancers portray particular soldiers

in a particular battle, we needed to make a, sort of,

abstraction of army uniforms of that period.

So, we asked designer Katherine Watt

to help us put together the look,

to help us design the costumes

that our particular group of soldiers would wear.

We knew that she had a fantastic eye for detail,

and a highly specialist, sort of, understanding

of what dancers require in their costumes.

It's OK making something that looks great,

but the dancers really need to be able to move in them.

After seeing the stage version at Sadler's Wells,

I wanted to get involved...

..cos I found the choreography

and the musical score

quite moving on a personal level.

When I first saw the boys lined up in their outfits,

that pit of nervousness that I first had dissolved,

and I saw all the different combinations

and elements working together.

There's always that chance that...

you might get it wrong, and they might not work.

The uniform design had a combination of different elements

to represent many nationalities.

Some of those were....

..the soft caps,

and the cuff and collar styles

were German influence.

The boots and the trench coat design were British,

but the helmets and overcoats were French and Belgian.

And the way the tunics were cut away

and tailored at the centre front

were like the Scottish military.

The uniform and the boots were restraining a bit, I guess.

They were really well made but we were so used,

we are so used to having costume that has to serve us,

and that costume had to serve the movie, the subject itself.

The score was the next thing we had to look at.

We knew that what we really wanted - this is a movie -

we wanted something epic,

a colossal soundtrack.

And so we basically had to set Keaton back to work -

recomposing, rescoring,

reimagining.

So, the score itself,

I wanted to build it on a couple of, kind of, themes and ideas.

When you're working with dance,

there's a certain element

where you have to set the scene.

For me, the important thing was

finding some kind of emotional hooks that I could work with.

So the first of those for me was the idea of an inner sound,

something that sounds like it's happening inside your head,

like you're...

hearing the...

..madness outside, but from within.

So, I worked with the orchestra

quite a lot to try and train them out of their clean,

incredible playing,

and try to encourage them to play ugly,

and to play pained, and to create sounds

that they weren't necessarily in control of,

which isn't necessarily the easiest thing.

Making a dance film is one thing.

Making a dance film on location, about war, is another.

So, we didn't really know it would work.

I mean, you can hypothesise in the studio

about what it might be like to dance in a trench,

or in a battlefield, or on a parade ground,

but until you're actually there, on location, you don't know.

So, it was quite a risk.

We dug craters,

we found...

The forest was nearby where Jenny and Brad do their scene.

We had a parade ground

for the basic training scene,

and we dug our very own trench.

The location was actually really challenging,

because it wasn't like on the stage or in the studio,

where it's all flat.

Like, we were in a trench, and on a normal floor with a lot of rocks,

so we have to dance on that, and it was really challenging not to fall,

not to trip,

and to still deliver the movement as it was supposed to be.

My character in the film is,

I think, someone who...

doesn't really want to go to war,

he's not really interested in it -

just has to go through it,

and he waits for only one thing,

and it's to go back to his home town,

and find his family again.

He is in the trench, and he receives this letter from home,

and the letter brings some really bad news.

He loses everything that he was supposed to go back to,

so he loses all hope, and...

..realising that, he just wants to...

finish the war by the quickest possible,

so he takes his glasses off,

his coat, and leaves his gun behind,

and just goes on the battlefield,

and he just waits for whatever needs to happen, to happen.

For this project, the dancers did a lot of research,

from books and photographs,

as well as films from the Imperial War Museum collection.

We wanted them to portray the scenes of men at war

in moments that will resonate across a landscape of all wars.

So, to look at the experience of soldiers in general,

and to find details

in the scenes that chime

with what we know now.

It's about a soldier who's been traumatised by the war,

by the horrors of the war.

So, it's a pathology that came up,

which is called shellshock,

and, basically, they were moving

their bodies without consciousness.

It was unconscious movement coming from a brain shock.

And it's quite hard,

because I had to improvise it.

We couldn't set movements on it.

And I think it comes from a place of emptiness in the feelings.

So, from there,

you can explore the unconsciousness,

and the surprise of the body movements.

My character in the film,

she's a nurse,

and she wants that job mainly to find her love,

and she steals an army uniform...

..dresses up as a man, and tries to find her lover.

She finds him...

..but that scene only lasts a little bit

before being pulled away.

So, it's like that last moment of love,

and after all that travelling to get to that man and, you know,

such a journey and such a risky situation...

Yeah, it's a really tragic ending,

and we get pulled away by war.

The broken bones scene was originally a group section,

and Michael and Billy decided that they wanted it as a duet,

so they gave Leon and I this idea

of being physically injured

and unable to move,

and really struggling to get up and continue -

but, mentally, still having that fight and that challenge.

So, we played around with the material from the group section,

and developed this duet.

I thought that I'd find it hard

to act with a duet like that,

but the location really helped.

The struggle was real, so the acting felt real.

It didn't feel like it was acting.

It was very natural, the restraint,

and the struggle through the mud,

and wearing this heavy...

costume, with the thick mud and the rain.

I think that it made our reactions natural.

We've been filming dance for a very long time,

but I don't think, until this point,

we've really considered it to be...

..an expression, an artistic expression, quite as much.

This film was really an opportunity

to put everything we'd always thought about,

and wondered about,

into practice, and create our own piece of art.

Directing the dancers on set was an absolute joy,

because obviously I've known them for a long time.

They're like our own personal army,

and they're extremely good at taking instruction.

And because it's a silent film,

we're not recording any sound on the set,

I could really get involved in the direction.

ON WALKIE-TALKIE: 'And again.

'Getting angrier, Matt.

'Another one.

'And another one! Matt, get in there, smash another one.

'Stop him! No more! Go on, push him out the way!

'Mark, jump on him, jump on him, jump on him. Take him to the ground.

'Take him to the ground. Let's do the action. Go. Next one.

'Take him all the way down, all the way down.

'All the way down.'

In the short film version,

I was a bit of a lost soul,

kind of headed for nowhere,

oblivion, a bit...

airy.

And then, in the feature film,

I become more of a sergeant,

more of a bully,

more of an angrier person.

I tried to take it to the extreme

as much as I was allowed to.

Go!

Go!

Shooting this film on location

was a real challenge for us all in our own ways.

Every time we were on set doing a new scene,

you'd find that we were complaining

about things like being cold or hungry,

or tired, and then we had to almost stop ourselves,

and remember that we were

playing real soldiers,

who had endured far worse

than we could have ever possibly gone through doing this.

One that really stood out to me -

that was probably the most challenging,

physically and mentally -

was the crater scene.

Ten minutes before the actual filming

of the crater scene, me and Brad sort of mapped out how it would be.

So I tried moves out, and feeling that we were in the crater.

Working with Matt was so great, as well,

because both of us

were so involved with our characters

that when we were doing the duet and I looked at Matt in the eye,

it was almost as though it wasn't Matt any more.

We were two different people.

The characters that Matt and Bradley play...

..are polar opposites of the human spectrum, really...

..but they're almost the same, as well.

It's quite hard to explain.

I see Bradley as the perfect new recruit,

and Matt as more of the war-torn,

damaged soldier.

But somehow, there's this love between the two men,

and I think you know,

from the very beginning,

that only one of these characters

is going to survive this journey.

And it's still an attempt.

The only thing we can do is to attempt to touch the subject.

It's definitely bigger than us,

and I think it's also bigger than the spectator, but...

..at the same time, we're all...

..given some time in our lives

to look at it, instead of ignore it,

and I think that already gives it the value.