Check Your Body At The Door. The Movie

"This project was begun because nobody was paying serious attention to underground club House dancers. Any club footage of the 1980s and early ‘90s showed hundreds of torsos bouncing to the music, but few dancing bodies. Check Your Body at the Door is a large project involving 30 years (and counting) of shared relationships and histories involving many people, a lot of thinking, planning, teaching, watching and dancing – plus years of filming. Its mission is to educate people about underground-club House dancing and dancers - in the past, now and in the future - by various means: showing films to teaching in workshops and in academic classrooms; giving information about the people, the dance, dancers, the music, and the scene in print, online; and presenting everything from performances to scholarly panels.

The film, Check Your Body at the Door, was specially made to show the dancing and the dancers. When Archie Burnett took Sally Sommer (dance critic and historian) to the Loft in 1982 she saw amazing artists: “I wanted to shoot a documentary that put dancers at the heart of the film, using Archie as guide."