“I felt so wild!” The dance dynamo behind Ann Lee’s sweat-filled rituals | Dance

‘I“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone. This might make me sound a little wild, but I don’t care,” says Celia Rollson-Hall. The choreographer recounts her experience in The Covenant of Ann Lee, a fever dream of a film starring Amanda Seyfried as the leader of an 18th-century Christian sect of the Shakers, whose ecstatic prayer rituals can involve dancing for days. “The night before we started filming, I was asleep, and the ghost of Ann Lee was, literally, over my bed with angels around me and she said, ‘Go!’” Rollson-Hall laughs to herself as she reveals this. “Was this my imagination allowing myself to go ahead? “Maybe, probably. It was so intense that I’ll never forget it,” she smiles.

In Mona Fastvold, we see Lee, the daughter of a Manchester blacksmith, who has vivid religious visions that drive her to proselytize. I’d say it’s a lot like creative visions. Maybe in a different time Lee could have become an artist? “She was an artist, without a doubt,” says Rollson-Hall. She continues, “To be an artist, you have to believe in more than just what you see in front of you. It’s a combination of faith and drive, a little bit of illusion and a lot of energy. Like gunpowder.” Lee certainly had these qualities, as he led the Shakers to the United States, preaching piety, pacifism, celibacy, confession of sins, and inspiring devotion as well as anger.

The Shakers worshiped by chanting and dancing. In the film, we see Lee in Manchester in a sweat-soaked room full of people with their hands raised to the sky, then lowered and slapped on their chests, the rhythmic fervor rising to a boil. It’s a strange and powerful film, and it’s a kind of musical, although not the kind of musical I’ve ever seen before. The music, by Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blomberg (The Brutalist), is based on surviving Shaker hymns, but there was very little source material for the choreographer to work with. She had to engage her imagination, something she did not lack.

Rollson Hall grew up in a small town in Virginia and began dancing at the age of five. As a child, she loved Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. As a student, she was fascinated by Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, and when she discovered the films of the British dance company DV8, she decided: “I want to do this.” She began dancing for New York choreographers Faye Driscoll and Monica Bell Barnes, but soon moved on to choreographing music videos, television, and commercials. I loved that this was a movie that gave you something that anyone could see anywhere, not just for one night at a downtown theater.

She has choreographed for Lena Dunham’s Girls and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (in which she also played adult Sophie), music videos for MGMT, Coldplay and Alicia Keys, and her own dance films, such as Ma, about a virgin mother’s journey through the American Southwest. She recently returned to the stage, performing in a show called Sissy, featuring actress Marisa Tomei. Her style, well, it’s everything: pop, commercial, eccentric, satirical, contemporary, tap, social dance, ballet. It’s fun and colorful but so adorable. It’s “Dancing Like No One’s Watching,” except everyone’s watching Rolson Hall now.

“The Reign of Ann Lee” has a darker, earthier mood, especially in a devastating scene in which Lee gives birth four times. All her children die. Rolison Hall’s son, then a year old, was with her on the day of the shoot, and she remembers it well. Lee’s experience undoubtedly reinforced her belief that sexual relations were the root of all evil, and that the physical worship practiced by Shakers might have been a path to healing, or at least survival.

“Whatever happens to us, we accept it,” says Rollson-Hall. “So where does it live in the body? And if you feel pain and loss, how do you get it out?” It is impossible not to notice in the film the closeness between the dances of God and sin, the rhythm of prayer and the rhythm of sex. “It felt so brutal,” she says of those scenes of mass worship. “It looks like the body is about to explode.” Fastvold likened the Manchester rallies to a rave. Maybe it’s not that different from the Hacienda: people are always searching for something (escape, community, transcendence), and the body is the key to how to find it.

“Personally, I think dance is probably the answer to almost everything,” she says. “The body is where your intuition, your deepest truth and your knowledge reside. If you don’t shake it, it can be lost.” This was true of Rolson Hall’s upbringing. “I wanted to say things I couldn’t say in words, because it was so scary,” she says.

When she came out, at the age of 30, “suddenly my relationship with dance changed.” (Rollson Hall is married to director Mia Lidowski. Their wedding was featured in Vogue.) “I almost stopped dancing because I felt like this thing that was pushing me all the time was finally gone,” she says. “I’m still trying to re-find my relationship with dance 10 years later.” As she said herself, the body will get the answers.