On Sunday, a 200-person flashmob appeared in New York City’s Union Square. Wearing brightly coloured suits and T-shirts with slogans like The Future is Female, they performed a carefully choreographed, five-minute tribute to Hillary Clinton, as Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling played over loudspeaker.
The “pantsuit power” flashmob and its resulting video, which was released on Tuesday, was orchestrated by film-makers and real-life partners Celia Rowlson-Hall and Mia Lidofsky in an attempt to “dance Hillary Clinton into the White House”. Over the course of nine days, the couple, who are based in Brooklyn, pulled together volunteers from all over North America, organizing a 10-camera shoot on a micro-budget and sourcing hundreds of suits from thrift stores all over New York.
“I was feeling frustration that people have a hard time connecting to [Hillary Clinton] and feeling her humanity,” said Rowlson-Hall, a choreographer, director and actor whose debut feature Ma won the audience award at the 2015 AFI film festival. Kneeling at a coffee table in their Williamsburg apartment after an all-night session of editing, holding a half-eaten apple which she jokingly described as their collective breakfast, she told me, “We were tired of the narrative of the candidates being ‘two sides of the same coin’ with one as a lesser evil. We wanted to turn attention to the positive qualities of Hillary, and focus on the people in the United States that she and her campaign are including.”
Lidofsky, whose first TV series, Strangers, will premiere early next year on Refinery29, added, “Ever since Hillary announced her run for the presidency, there’s been a heightened sense of sexism in the air and in the press. There’s such a double standard in the media. They focus on her emails, her apparent lack of transparency, and how much she smiles and what she wears. And we wanted to say, ‘Hey, we’re behind you. And we wanted to pay homage to her pantsuits, as we think of them as her superhero costume. She’s a superhero to us.’”
Rowlson-Hall and Lidofsky met while both working on the set of Lena Dunham’sGirls. They belong to a vibrant community of young, creative women making their own way in an often male-driven film and television industry – the type of people, perhaps, that you might have expected to have supported Bernie Sanders. “So many of my friends were supporting Bernie and I wanted to make it clear that I was ‘with her’,” said Lidofsky, with a nod to Clinton’s campaign slogan. She cited Clinton’s pragmatism and experience as the reason she voted for her in the primaries. “She’s a warrior and a pioneer,” she said. “She’s been working for 35 years, and I look at that as a way to progressively and actively change the system, because she understands it.”
What a Clinton presidency would mean for America is something that Rowlson-Hall, whose work is always imbued with meticulous symbolism, gave careful consideration while choreographing for the flashmob. Each movement of the dance contains messages about issues at stake in this election, like a thumb and forefinger motion that represents an ovary and reproductive rights, or a reference to Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic national convention: “When they go low, we go high.”
Participants in the dance travelled from as far as Toronto, and included US residents with green cards who couldn’t vote, but wanted to “contribute to world peace”. Men danced alongside women, and all ages were represented. In one sequence, the camera pans from a pregnant dancer to a woman dancing with her toddler on her hip.
Children made the shoot seem even more crucial. “There was this moment when these little girls arrived in their soccer outfits to the rehearsal,” said Rowlson-Hall, “They’d just come from a game, and their moms had brought them to learn the dance. I started weeping. I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re fighting for them’.”
The resulting video is an uplifting burst of energy, a tonic to the often negative and divisive tone of the election. “We believe that with empathy, the story can be changed,” said Lidofsky, who as an LGBT woman found herself psychologically affected by the Orlando shooting this summer. “For the first time in my life [after Orlando], I felt like a target, and I felt that my partner and the love of my life was a target. A lot of our black friends have expressed that they were born into that fear. This video was about the message of love over hate, and reaching out to our communities and shining a light on how Hillary could support us, and how, in the end, your vote matters.”
Within a few hours, the first share of the video had been viewed 300,000 times on Facebook. Should one of those viewers include Hillary Clinton, Lidofsky and Rowlson-Hall had one message for her.
“Hillary, we love you, we’re with you, we’ve got your back,” said Lidofsky.
“And,” added Rowlson-Hall, laughing, “we will choreograph your inauguration entrance.”
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