Dance in Circles Review—A Poetic Achievement from Yuming Zhang
Two women. One story. An unforgettable dance piece. One of the best short films of 2023 making its way through festivals like the 46th Asian American International Film Festival and the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora is Dance in Circles, a short that combines dance and narrative to create a uniquely tragic viewing experience.
The short is written, directed, and produced by Yuming Zhang, an award-winning filmmaker attending NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her short follows two women: Feng (Serena Lu), an Asian woman with a mysterious bandage around her head, and Flora (Assata Gaines), a black woman afraid to enter the elevator at the beginning of the short. Although many dance films will often begin with dancing, Zhang spends the first two minutes establishing each character without dance.
It’s a bold decision, one that takes a bit too much time at the start, but audiences who watch this film find their patience rewarded. The two women perform a dance duet to the tune of a phenomenal original score from Yichen Cai and Caroline Luo. The dance feels improvisational, but every camera movement feels calculated and precise, sweeping through the dance and taking us with each character on their journey.
Through a series of flashbacks, we learn about what these women have gone through. Flora was the victim of an uncomfortable encounter with a man (Gage Brunton) in an elevator. It’s a sequence that only builds in tension as the film continues as the man towers over her. The image of a white man asserting control over a black woman in a confined space makes your skin crawl.
Feng experienced a vicious, brutal attack at a bus stop from an Asian man (Wei Wong). There’s a fascinating choice at the center of this scene. While Flora’s scene feels like a more conventional depiction of a person of color falling victim to a white man, Feng’s backstory sheds light on something else entirely. It’s a hate crime that does not immediately register as a hate crime, but it’s a truthful, valid situation that explores how Asian women may sometimes find it challenging to feel welcome and safe, even with people who share their ethnicity.
Both of these backstories may strike a chord with many survivors of traumatic situations. Through the lens of a dance film, Zhang proves herself to be a director unafraid to depict the harsh realities of a woman’s experience. Womanhood can be lovely, complicated, messy, fun, and, in this case, mortifying. Dance in Circles works effortlessly on a thematic level while also functioning perfectly as a narrative. As the dance piece goes on, it becomes more frantic, matching the tempo of the flashbacks. By intercutting between three sequences, everything becomes one multilayered story.
The film ends on a gutwrenching note. It finishes with a bit of an anti-resolution. Although these women were able to express their trauma through dance, Zhang does not go down the easy route of having the dance be the solution to their ugly histories. By the time the credits roll, you’re left with the awareness that traumatic experiences don’t have an easy solution. Feng’s bandage is bleeding. She’s healing, but with time. Flora finally enters the elevator but is suddenly reminded of the terrifying experience she had in an elevator. She’s healing, but with time.
Zhang’s film may have you change the way you look at the people you see around you. Whether you’re performing a dance or simply sharing an elevator with someone, that other person has decades of life experience that you can never be fully aware of. They’ve gone through pain, suffering, and healing, just like you have. Decades of combined life experience can exist in one elevator, but particularly as women, you glance at each other, and you look away. Because that’s life.
Daniel Cho’s cinematography brings Zhang’s story to life in an intricate fashion. The visual language here is bleak and gorgeously shot. The textures of the flashbacks feel familiar to what people see every day. Luyan Li’s choreography is also a shining light that allows this film to truly take shape. Lu and Gaines give phenomenal performances as the two leads. Their roles require a physicality that is not easy for an actor to pull off, but they bring strong emotions to both their dancing and their emotionally heavy material.
But a strong directorial voice emerges here with Zhang’s heartbreaking work. A phrase that often gets thrown around in an attempt to minimize stories like this is “not all men” are terrible. Zhang’s film does not make the implication that they are. The whole point of female-led stories like Dance in Circles is to show that all women have their unique, individual experiences surrounding men that have shaped them into who they are today. Zhang’s combination of dance and narrative gives an emotional, powerful perspective that should be highlighted more often in an unforgiving world.
