Grace Fury: A Voice With Legs
Expanding upon her 2018-2019 film festival success with Grace Fury, Scottish dancer/ballerina turned choreographer/filmmaker, Laura Carruthers, reconciles her doubts and desires to make an independent feature film by reflecting on her foundations, retracing her steps, and assembling her discoveries. Grace Fury: A Voice With Legs emerges. With a dynamic cast of professional dancers, Carruthers takes us on a *lyrical* journey through her mind and experience over the years in tradition and on the creative frontier.
Playfully expressed in body and word, with much left to mystery and interpretation, her graceful musings, intimate to cosmic, become the film itself. As she spirals through “the elements” of her journey, she wrestles with core insights, questions, hopes and frustrations that both empower and confront the artist, firsthand – unsheltered by industry or institution. In a final moment of darkness, she draws strength from the stars. She rebounds, reaches out to open hearts and minds, and finds new resolve to keep going from a different place of awareness and purpose on her road less traveled.
The grace and fury of one woman’s passion can embody and move big ideas.
The film is a song of devotion and defiance, in unique “dance-umentary” format, with only the last fifteen minutes offering a more familiar, behind-the-scenes view of her making from different cast and crew perspectives. She speaks to everyone and all ages, but especially to lovers of artistic freedom, exploration, and purpose…to curious imaginations that want to groove with the music, movements, images, and ideas, bonded at the heart of an artist, as she grows from dancer to filmmaker to Grace Fury: A Voice With Legs.
Film Festival Recognition
Director’s Statement…
My journey in and out of circles, some long-established and some short-lived, fundamentally informs Grace Fury. Early, family-driven enculturation in competitive Scottish Highland Dance instilled the requisite strength, discipline, and desire for fast-track training in classical and contemporary dance which led me to membership in a State ballet company and its culture. These community experiences in conjunction with academic study in history, philosophy, math, and drama, graduate work in justice and ethics, and a lifelong passion for film, all influenced my curious ventures into independent production. I have created and directed various works for stage and film over the past twenty years that have migrated from one interest or idea to the next, each one influenced by the previous.
To that point, I have woven preserved elements of earlier works into this “evolved” culmination of my artistic struggles and successes. By building Grace Fury’s uniqueness, in part, from projects past, I sought to authenticate my dance over time. Moreover, I did so to bring a kind of wholeness or life to the film. That is, Grace Fury doesn’t pretend to offer a narrowly focused rendering of “perfection, but rather she exists to reflect being – aesthetically and philosophically alive. “Somewhere between” Celtic, Classical and Contemporary, fiction and non-fiction, whimsical theatre and cerebral film, the idealistic and realistic, at times confident, otherwise conflicted and multidimensional Grace Fury spirals to a new destination. From the depths of her darkness, she finds light. She recognizes her limits in co-existence with so many others in struggle to find happiness and peace and promises to grow in mind and mission, if allowed. But to reach the stars – for real – is to be true. She resolves, by cosmic duty, to keep going … in the words of Walt Whitman, to “contribute a verse”.
It’s no wonder Grace Fury defies the boundaries of genre, heretofore received as a musical dance film, an autobiographical documentary, an experimental work, and an arthouse production. As such, she also defies a dangerously dominant, utilitarian approach to art that threatens its very definition, sees it as just another route to money-making and mass addiction rather than mass development, and reduces us to tool and consumer in algorithm and business model. But, in the words of Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society “We’re not laying pipe. We’re talking about poetry”, and like other projects in the world, the daring consequence of Grace Fury’s complex being actually broadens her scope. It makes her my living, emergent experience – greater in purpose than the sum of her parts. (Thank you, Aristotle).
In her totality, I see my resistance to all the forces, inside and out, that warp and degrade human creativity, but I also find my point. Our common power to let imagination and skill run wild together and into form, so we might delight, frustrate, and engage minds, so we might open doors and conversations with each other, makes it all worthwhile. Art is one beautiful reason why we even bother to make money and to live. The art in us gives us some redeeming justification, through the worst of times and the worst in us, to thrive. Our personal stories, however remote, can be epic and timely in that effort. They can serve a broader purpose and make a difference in shaping and sustaining a healthier world. If we lose sight of that ambition and perspective, which cannot and should not come from the same routes, places and people, exhaustively for all the wrong reasons, then we lose our humanity, our true greatness –- what defines us beyond our bones and basic survival.
Grace Fury is my voice, real and sincere, not by exclusive platform, but by artistic action from the ground up, with all I’ve got and the help of friends. She is the walk in my talk. She is the change I want to see in myself and in the world, to paraphrase another great spirit. She respects the grace and intelligence of her audience, which is not her failing, but a compliment and a call to action, an invitation to dance for 76 minutes and to collaborate forever after. She is my activism and my peace – my Grace Fury. May all of her edges and curves, moods and mystery, insight and imperfection – her full, nuanced being – brought to life with little institutional or industry support “touch for good” and move hearts to join me in her message of hope and faith – in us. (Published March 15, 2021)
Cast & Crew…
Executive Producer
Carruthers & Co., LLC
Producer, Director, Choreographer, Production Designer, Writer, Editor, Voice
Laura Carruthers
Co-Producer
Mark Grossman
Associate / Casting Producers
John J.Todd, Matthew Powell, Seth Belliston
Dancers
Seth Belliston, Laura Carruthers, Matthew Powell, John J. Todd, Kim Mikesel,
Deanna Doyle, Richard Glover, Evan Swenson, Monica Stephenson,
Lauren Hamilton, Lawrence Neuhauser, Kelly Ann Sloan,
& Carlos Hopuy
Graphics
Mark Grossman, Laura Carruthers
Alex Theatre – Glendale, California Unit
Chief Director of Photography
Anka Malatynska, ASC
Documentary Camera
Liz Hinlein
Production Manager, First Assistant Director
Kim “Kacy” Palmieri
Co-Director of Photography
Danny Alaniz
Lighting Designer
Jared A. Sayeg
Light Programmer, Board Operator
Chris Osborne
Camera Operators
Danny Alaniz, Michael “Jake” Kerber,
Edd Lukas, James Takata
Steadicam
James Takata
Camera Assistants
Barry Sebert, Tom Funk, Daniel “Benny” Bailey
Data Managers
Lance Hashida, Jennifer O’Leary, Mark Grossman
Dolly Grips
Paulie Lambiase, Deric Ned, Casey Slade
Lead Make-Up/Hair
Ann “Abby” Lyle Clawson
Key Makeup Assistant to Ms. Lyle
Emily Blackmun
Makeup Assistant to Ms. Blackmun
Michelle Anyanwu
Costuming
The Dancers
Wardrobe Consultant
Richard Glover
Wardrobe Assistants
Ann “Abby” Lyle, Seth Belliston
Still Photographers
Josh Reiss, Terry Pratt
Catering/Craft Service
Andrea Bessey, LA Spice Catering
Production Assistants
Velvet Blackbear, Abelardo “Abel” Orta
Set Construction
Darrell Comte, ArizonaTheme Built
Alex Theatre – House Staff & Crew
Director of Marketing and Events
Maria Sahakian
Theatre Manager
Jack Allaway
Tech/Stage Liasion, Superviser
Robert O’Neill
Event Services Manager (Front of House)
Lee Lightfoot
Master Electrician
Brendan Grevatt
Stage Electricians
Kyle Ross, Max Foreman,
Jacob DeWilde, Brianna Pattillo
House Audio
Darren Mora
Master Carpenter
Boston Stergis
Stage Carpenters
David Hemphill
Equipment Vendors
VER
Hollywood Rentals
Atomic Production Supplies
JL Fisher, Inc.
Rose Brand
Tempe Camera
Argyll, Scotland Unit
Director of Photography
Alan McSheehy
Assistant Director of Photography
Alick Fraser
Sound Operator / Recordist
Cameron Mercer
Jib Operator
Kenneth Moulson
PDG Helicopters
Carefree & Kirkland, AZ Unit
Director of Photography
Jim Jacques
First Camera Assistant
Mark Grossman
Production Assistant
Renee Sarkis
Graphics
Torsten Voss
***
Pasadena Dance Theatre, CA Unit
Director of Photography
James Chressanthis, ASC
First Assistant Camera
Scott Birnkrant
Key Grip & Dolly
Scott Johnston
Production Manager
Mark Grossman
Production Assistant, Props Master
Steve Heggarty
Production Vendors
Panavision, Inc,
Chapman/Leonard, Inc.,
Grosh Backdrops & Drapery,
J L Fisher, Inc.
***
MUSIC
Brigadoon – Frederick Loewe
Prologue/ Brigadoon
Down in MacConnachy Square
Come to Me, Bend to Me
The Chase
I’ll Go Home With Bonnie Jean
Johann Sebastian Bach
Goldberg Variation No. 22
Invention No. 4
Toccata and Fugue
Sifonia No. 15
John Allan
The Opening
Performed by John Allan (ASCAP)
Francis “Fritz” A. Doddy
Fire: Ablaze
Earth: Groundwork
Wind: Freedom Finale
Performed by Elias Arts LLC
Elias Arts Music Design (ASCAP)
Laura Carruthers
Other and all traditional and Classical music arrangements
Music Mastering
Matthew Murman
Film & Audio Mix/Mastering
Bob Giammarco
AE Media, Inc. – NY/Phoenix
Special Thanks
Connie Carruthers, Mark Grossman,
James Chressanthis,
John J. Todd, Seth Belliston,
Matthew Powell, Deanna Doyle,
John Abarta (pipes & percussion),
John Allan, Susan Winsberg,
Fritz Doddy, Vincenzo Lorusso,
Cynthia Young – PDT,
Bob Harvey – Panavision,
David Stoller – Enterprise Travel,
Robert Schimmel – KOWL
To all friends and colleagues, at home and abroad, who have inspired and helped along the way
Critical Comments…
“Thought provoking and freeing, immensely entertaining and trailblazing…to weave together all of these artistic disciplines into a cohesive whole is nothing short of miraculous and impossible to forget…leaves you ready to watch it again…an absolute must see for connoisseurs of the arts and unique, compelling artistic expressions.”
— Richard Propes,
The Independent Critic
“…master visionary with that magic combination of creative rebelliousness to make her mark…a fully immersive, fantastical experience…a journey of self-discovery through the eyes of a dancer that dares to challenge the paradigms…an important story with a very human appeal…”
— Jana Ritter
in Magazine / inmag.com
“…a very good job on the editing… It really did capture the beauty of the art form and how fluid those movements are…There’s a level of calmness that comes with watching these performances… so much honesty in the way she is delivering her thoughts…this documentary was refreshing and inspiring. True creatives and artists will appreciate the work that has been done.”
— Amanda Guarragi,
Candid Cinema
“…can’t help but notice a natural exuberance and magnetism that translate across Celtic, classical, and contemporary techniques…Her overarching artistic philosophy is intrinsically bound to her unshakable insistence that art have a place in today’s increasingly money-focused and conformist culture…impossible not to be inspired…The film is a beautifully intimate experience… but it also speaks to the greater human experience.”
— Analise Electra Smith-Hinkley,
Notes From The Salon
“…definitely one of the most rare and unique artist/storytellers I’ve come across in a long time.”
— Mike Sargent,
Reelworld/Niteshift, WBAI-FM / NYC
“Breathtaking choreography and cinematography…riveting, thought-provoking…biopic dance documentary interspersed with poetic narration and gorgeous scenic video clips…”
— Wendy Schadewald,
Short Redhead Reel Reviews
“The piece seems to combine all the training, technique, and passion Laura has for all the forms she’s explored into a kind of catharsis… explores the childlike frivolity of the title character, but also offers social critique, a call to action…”
— Joya Mia Italiano
Huffington Post
“…breathing new life into Scottish Highland Dancing…Grace Fury offers up boundless variety.”
— Pop Culture Passionistas
“…stunning…well executed, well scripted, and well performed…”
— Herbert Golder,
Writer, Director, Professor of Classical Studies,
Boston University