Early in Rewards for the Tribe, choreographer Antony Hamilton guides a group of dancers through a warm-up: “It’s not really a creative exercise,” he instructs, “so much as an attention exercise.” Be aware of your own body and the realities it creates. Be aware of your body in relation to someone else’s body. Try forming an “instant composition” by opening and closing the space between these two points. Is the body “really creating something new here? Or am I simply echoing things from the past?” Hamilton prompts.

Rhys Graham’s documentary details a 2022 collaboration between Melbourne dance company Chunky Move and the Adelaide-based Restless Dance Theatre. Under the creative direction of Hamilton (also Chunky Move’s Artistic Director and co-CEO), the performance sought to challenge ideals of perfection and utopia—whether the expectations placed upon a dancer’s body, minimalist forms in fine art, or those in the organic world. Objects were placed into the dancers’ space, like bright squishy shapes, a curtain, and a geometric structure, creating playful obstacles that, as Graham tells Rough Cut, found echoes in his approach to crafting the documentary’s visuals.

Playing at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, Rewards for the Tribe was filmed as the piece progressed from rehearsal to performance, portraying the experimentation inherent in collaboration. Through moments of lively chaos and dreamy reflection, the troupe—which includes dancers with and without disability—engage in extensive sequences of improvisation and movement while musing on their relationships to the form.

The documentary is part of a string of recent dance-related projects for Graham, whose directorial efforts also include the feature Galore (2013), the collaborative Tim Winton adaptation The Turning (2013), and the documentaries Murundak: Songs of Freedom (2011) and Words from the City (2007).

Note: the following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tiia Kelly: I was first introduced to your work through Multiply (2021) at Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago, and you’ve worked on a few projects now that incorporate dance and performance events, like your work with Joel Ma. I’m wondering if dance and movement have always been an area of interest for you, or if this has come about more naturally or by chance?

Rhys Graham: I think in the films that I’ve made, I’m always interested in quite intimate and human stories, whether it’s fiction or documentary. I’m very interested in things that are about what brings us closer to being human. And at the same time as I’ve made a lot of films, I’ve done a lot of work with performers and artists over the years that has involved stuff that’s either on-stage or it’s involved dance or movement or different kinds of performance. And I think that the more I’ve come to love working in that space, and admiring and loving what people are doing in that space, the more I’ve really wanted to incorporate dance and movement and energy in that way. I think that, like in fiction, I always try and have stuff that feels really kinetic and physical. And while it’s not dance, I think it is still a very physical kind of expression that I’m interested in when it comes to performance and film. 

I had done little mini documentaries over the years with some artists, and I got to know who the contemporary dance choreographers were. And then it was just a strange confluence of fate, really, that at the same time as Joel and I—who’s a long-term collaborator—were talking about doing this sort of weird ghostly dance film at the end of lockdown, I was also talking to Stephanie Lake and Melbourne Fringe [Festival] about doing a film around her performance [Multiply]. And then I was also talking with the people at Chunky Move about their desires to do some projects that were somehow in the cinema space. And for me, it just felt like a very strangely natural thing to do, you know? Dance in film for me has always been a huge love. So, to actually be able to do something that was a filmic exploration of dance has been wonderful. 

And they’re three very different films. But I definitely looked back and I was like, “That’s strange that I’ve just done three back-to-back dance films.” But, you know, it’s a beautiful thing to have done.

TK: So, when it came to Rewards for the Tribe, how much did you know about what the dance performance and project would be when you signed on to do it?

RG: Yeah, really little actually. In the beginning there, when we first discussed making a film about it, there had been one development workshop that they’d done over Zoom between the dancers at Restless and a couple of the dancers from Chunky Move. So, there were ideas and proposals for what the project was going to be.

I really wanted to do something that was about the process of creating a work, because I’ve done projects with musicians and performers, and more and more I’m interested in that very personal, intimate space of how you create a work and what it is you’re looking to try and bring to an audience. So for us, it felt important to get there early on and see those first experiments and explorations and improvisations. And part of the playfulness of the film was us going, “Let’s go in here knowing that this film could take us in any direction.”

One of the main things that the dancers and the choreographer introduced was that they would have obstacles for themselves—so they had obstacles in the space or they had limitations. And I decided really early on, let’s put limitations on our own process. Every day we had a rule or something that we had to obey. The first day was like, we could only shoot on a 28mm lens that was static. Everything had to be shot from there. The second day, everything had to be on a circling dolly. You probably see that there’s quite a lot of kinetic movement in it, and that was because each time we shot, we would just have to find a way to make it work within this limitation. 

So we tried to create a space where we were experimenting and playing at the same time as the dancers. And I certainly got halfway through and thought, “I don’t know what the film is going to be.” But it was exciting to just go, “Well, the dancers don’t yet know what it’s going to be either.” So let’s just all keep going and see where we end up. 

TK: Were the dancers really game to try a lot of the different, more filmic experiments? You mentioned specifically the kinetic movement, and I really loved the sequence where they have the cameras strapped to their bodies, because it’s approximating the sensation of dance for the viewer. What was the process of putting those together?

RG: It’s really hard with dancers because they work so hard. Like each of the dancers from both of the companies, they’re dancing from morning to night, usually doing eight or nine hour days every day. And the level of physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion for the dancers is pretty intense. So, it can be really hard to actually ask for those things. I had lots of ideas that I wanted to play out and explore, but a lot of them just simply had to work in and around the work that they were doing. They didn’t have a lot of time together. And because the artists are from different places and some of the artists are working with disability or with physical limitations—I mean, dancers always are nursing injuries. It’s amazing to watch them work because they’re kind of on the front lines of being arts workers, it’s so extreme what they do. 

So what I did try and do [was say], “Look, there’s a day, can we just strap a camera to everyone’s bodies and sync them all up?” And actually, I loved that. There are much longer sequences of that, which I just thought were so weird and beautiful. Everyone’s improvising and we’re just cutting in-between cameras. And things like getting people to do improvisations in their hotel rooms or out on the streets, the dancers were always so up for it. And I think as the trust emerged between all of us, that became more confident. 

Even though this is a dance film, it’s still strictly speaking a documentary. So, you’re asking people to do things out of their generosity of collaboration. But having said that, everybody contributed so much and we got so many beautiful encounters with the artists in their own time, in their own spaces, and with that really playful approach.

TK: I really love those dreamy dance interludes as well, and how you play with the ‘obstructions,’ where you cut between the final performance and the planning of it. I was so caught off guard when the first one happened, and so excited when it happened again later. When it came to editing and finding that form, what was it like establishing that sort of rhythm to the film and playing with that?

RG: I worked with an incredible editor, Delaney Murphy, who is just… the things that she created out of the footage we had and the connections and sparks were just so surprising and beautiful to me. But I really had this feeling [that] I wanted to do something really clumsy. Again, in the work that’s being documented, there deliberately are things that work against the dancers. The objects aren’t reliable, there are things swinging in. And so I just went through the timeline and literally threw in blocks of the performance in a very, very random way. I wanted it to be arrhythmic and I wanted it to be off kilter. And we did end up finessing that a little bit in terms of duration and stuff, but basically, I tried to follow intuition, because I think it’s fun to throw a few things in front of the logic of filmmaking. 

And [like what] Antony says at the end, you know, there’s a whole lot of things that were behind the making of the film… like, I don’t think you’d know that we made these crazy rules for ourselves. You don’t know that I was throwing things in on accident or arrhythmically, but if there’s an impression of that, then that’s good. I think that’s kind of exciting. And while it’s not super adventurous, it’s just something that, as a filmmaker, you feel like it keeps it alive and breathing for you beyond the shoot. You can rewatch it and it feels like a different film each time.

I think it’s fun to throw a few things in front of the logic of filmmaking. 

— Rhys Graham

TK: I’m glad that you bring up that line from Antony because I was going to ask about it—the idea that all the thinking that goes into a performance isn’t articulated in the end result. Because I think it’s resonant for anybody working in any creative form. You put so much into a project and the person who receives it will not necessarily receive all of the effort and time. I was going to ask you a very broad question about how you feel about that as a filmmaker—whether there is a tension for you between the process of making something and the final version.

RG: I’ve got two answers. One of the filmmakers I love the most, and a filmmaker who works with dance and bodies incredibly is Claire Denis, the French filmmaker. And I remember reading about how she works with her screenwriter, Jean-Pol Fargeau, and they write a huge amount of content—like their scripts are long. They have a lot of prose and then little precise moments that they choose to then film. And so when you watch the films, sometimes it feels like you’re not quite sure what this moment is or how it relates to other moments, but underneath it all, there’s kind of an intelligence and a logic that is still guiding the film. So even though sometimes it can feel like it’s leading you into a bit of a space, or it’s making you ask questions of your own relationship to the material, you still feel the assuredness of the filmmaker underneath. 

And I’m not trying to make any kind of false equivalence between a work like this and Denis, who’s like a crazy genius master. But I think that that’s a really lovely way to work—don’t try and throw it all up on-screen. You can bring a whole lot of ideas, a whole lot of collaborations, a whole lot of relationships. And if you choose these little precise moments, even if they seem very simple, hopefully there’s something vibrating beneath it all that has that human relationship. And so when Antony said that, I was like, “Yeah, that’s the perfect analogy.”

And [Delaney Murphy] said to me the same thing […] Because imagine being an editor and having hundreds of hours of material. And then making these choices and getting to this final point and then kind of going, look, I don’t know if it’s all on-screen, but maybe that’s okay. I think there’s a generosity to that approach, which is very in line with what I love about film, to go back to the same thing: it’s the human connection element, the sparks between us, between our bodies, between our emotional landscapes. That’s the stuff that really affects me. And I think that you can get that impression when you try and choose those brief little moments out of a bigger world of ideas and choices and obstructions.

TK: I also know you worked with Bus Stop Films and Jana Castillo as an Inclusion Officer on the film. What sort of conversations were you having around inclusion and accessibility while working with dancers with and without disability, from the filmmaking side of things?

RG: Film can be a really hostile environment. And people talk a lot about accessibility and making it something that people can enter based on a whole diverse set of needs or experiences, but the reality is that in Australia and most of the world, we’re still lumbering around with a really kind of archaic machine of how to make films, and the expectations on people are unwieldy and unreasonable. I’ve experienced it personally when personal tragedy has struck in the middle of a production, and it’s unforgiving. It’s like, well, if you walk away, then you lose everything. Nothing seems to ever be able to stop for a film, but it’s just not the way it should be. 

In Australia and most of the world, we’re still lumbering around with a really kind of archaic machine of how to make films, and the expectations on people are unwieldy and unreasonable.

— Rhys Graham

Jana has ambitions to be a filmmaker. She’s already a really accomplished dancer, storyteller, and artist in her own space, and has been working in film. And so, she came on board quite early to talk about the creative accessibility, to be able to give us very specific reflections on what it means to be a dancer, working with disability in a space that has traditionally been very unforgiving physically, and is still an incredibly demanding space. 

But at the same time, we were having more industrial conversations with Bus Stop that had to do with making sure the shoot and the way we structured it was accessible, that we were able to be really sensitive to and service the needs of the subjects in front of and behind the camera. And also to ensure that the themes and ideas that were on-screen were also reflected in our production models. So we included a lot of people doing attachments or working with us on the project or using the film as a kind of entry point for their own work. And I think that was really meaningful, to open up a space of mentorship. And ideally, I think there should be new production models that are much more accessible so that workers, if they have physical disability, they can be full-time employed and the production model really allows whatever their capacities are to flourish within that model.  

TK: I’m glad that there are systems that are being put in place that are making it more accessible.

RG: I don’t think there are, really. We’re trying to. We are still up against a very slow-moving beast that is the model of traditional filmmaking, and it’s very, very hard to get enough funding. Until additional money is given to extend the shoot times of projects, you know… for as long as we try and compress time into the shortest possible shoot, with the maximum shooting hours per day at high intensity, the talk of accessibility doesn’t mean anything. It’s meaningless until, realistically, we can appeal to a production model that’s like, instead of a 25-day shoot doing ten or twelve hours a day, we say, we’ll do shoots that allow people to do the work that they’re able to do. And sometimes that might mean doing 60 days and doing half days, but everyone’s working at their absolute best and doing their best possible work. Then it becomes genuinely accessible, which is what I think the ideal is.

TK: The last thing I wanted to ask about was these intimate detours you have in the film, these small moments with each of the dancers either in their homes or natural elements. I loved Darcy dancing while vacuuming the house, or Benjamin in that beautiful costume, which is such a striking image. I was curious how you determined with the dancers what each of those personal moments would look like?

RG: I’ve always felt one of the really important parts of documentary is that you spend enough time talking with, filming with, and being around the subjects before you do the really personal stuff. Often they’re interviews. So you have a genuine connection, and you allow the people to guide you in terms of the things that matter and are meaningful to them. And in all the docos that I’ve made, I’ve tried to use that as a practice. So when you film people in their own environment, you’re doing something that really reflects who they feel that they are, and they’re speaking with their own voice and from their own experience. 

And so we definitely did that with this. The kinds of environments that we filmed the artists in, they were the things that they connect with, that they feel speak most powerfully to who they are as people. And because each of those artists, as much as they’re collaborating, they also have their individual expression and their individual journey, and they’re all extraordinary artists in their own right. So, we just wanted to make sure that we captured those cinematic scenes around the individual in their own little dream space in a way that, to them, felt like they were at their most comfortable, their most connected, and their most personally creative. 

And [the scenes] were always guided by them. We certainly suggested things and asked questions. You know, “What do you love?” “What do you feel most connected with?” “What expresses you best?” And then from those things, we started planning. And we shot those very late in the production. The interviews and those sequences were the final things, really, that we filmed.

TK: Was Benjamin’s sequence shot in Queen Victoria Market?

RG: Yeah, yeah. 

TK: Was it difficult to shoot there, or did you just go in the middle of the night?

RG: Nah, we just went. But that’s a great example. Ben does these amazing, kind of dreamlike costumes, and I suggested a few things to him and he was like, “Well, actually, there’s this amazing viewpoint where you look down on the city from the markets and the sparkle of the building is the sparkle of the costume.” Which is exactly what you see in the film. And it’s so beautiful. But again, as a filmmaker, if you say, “Oh, you should do this, you should do that,” there’s no way we would have had that kind of connection that he was able to bring to it. 

So the prescriptive behaviour never works that well for me. I think in this case, that was a great example of Ben offering us a gift of a really beautiful performance moment and saying, “Well, this is part of who I am, so let’s film it for your film.” Whereas he could easily have made that for his own film somewhere else. 

TK: Yeah, of course. Oh, it’s so beautiful.

RG: Isn’t it gorgeous? I love it so much. He’s such a striking and extraordinary artist.

Film Camp is currently fundraising to help distribute the film. You can learn more and donate here.

Rewards for the Tribe screened at the 2024 Sydney Film Festival on June 7 and 9.

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Tiia Kelly is a film and culture critic, essayist, and the Commissioning Editor for Rough Cut. She is based in Naarm/Melbourne.