Click photo to watch the Peabody acceptance speech

I am the producer and co-director of this Peabody Award winning and critically acclaimed documentary, but I never had any dreams of becoming a filmmaker…

It was through an alchemy of forces that this film was born — my lifelong attraction to true stories, my great love for the dance “D-Man in the Waters,” my strong belief in Bill T. Jones as a man and an artist, the deep affect I carry from entering adulthood at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and a healthy dose of naïveté. All of those things together inspired me to begin making the film; each one of those things, at one point, was the single propulsion keeping me going over the nine-year, arduous journey of its creation.

I saw “D-Man in the Waters” for the first time in 1989 at the American Dance Festival. I was sixteen years old at the time and until that moment wasn’t sure I wanted to be a dancer by profession. Seeing “D-Man” changed all of that and I set a goal to become “good enough” to get into the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company precisely so that I could perform “D-Man.” I joined the company 3 years later and over the subsequent 6 years in the company, had the great fortune to dance three different roles in “D-Man” (including Bill T. Jones’s), among other groundbreaking work. I eventually left the company and went on to perform many great dances, but “D-Man” remained my favorite. After transitioning into teaching many years later, I became one of a handful of dance educators Bill entrusted to reconstruct his work in colleges around the country. It was while re-staging “D-Man in the Waters” in 2012, over twenty years since its creation, that I had the realization that would seed the film: The absence of AIDS from current political and social discourse in this country has left successive generations without any way to contextualize the spirit and intensity of the art made in response to it. Thus, I decided to try to lift up and convey to future generations the life-and-death details woven into the fabric of “D-Man in the Waters,” however best that story needed to come into the world. Film turned out to be the best way.

I learned everything, from Excel spreadsheets to fundraising to line producing, as I went. I made stupendous mistakes and one great decision: I brought on board Tom Hurwitz, ASC as DP and co-director. Tom is one of the most honored documentary cinematographers with a lifetime of shooting dance. His filmic expertise, coupled with my knowledge of dance and intimate access to Bill T. Jones, shaped a documentary that doesn’t simply present a rarefied performance of choreography on screen, but that merges dance and film in service to the dynamism, nuance, and complexity of the human experience. I could never have made this film without Tom.

Tom and I determined an artistic approach for the film in which the past and present speak to one another, allowing both the history and legacy of “D-Man in the Waters” to unfold. In capturing the artistic process during desperate times, Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters demonstrates ways in which the arts can move us toward greater understanding, toward a deeper sense of community, and toward an education grounded in feeling and empathy. As we struggle in a dynamically shifting world today, it is our hope that this film won’t only carry forward an important history, it will also continue to inspire courage and resilience in the face of adversity.