Gaga Dance has become a whole way of life for the disenfranchised kids on the social margins who have embraced it, in Chinese filmmaker Yuhan Teng’s wild feature debut Gagaland, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam. The freestyle form of street dancing, whose practitioners break out moves to whatever sound is around as shopkeepers look on skeptically from their doorways, has become a TikTok phenomenon, with big-name stars and rival houses. Psychedelic and hugely entertaining, this music-driven blizzard of rapid editing, split screen, and cosmic virtual backdrops takes boundless joy in the mind-bending possibilities of digital-era wackiness. It is a bold celebration of creative self-expression as a way to rise above social oppression, as its tight-knit hive of Gaga enthusiasts use the money they earn from online subscribers to escape factory exploitation and homelessness. The frenetic and fluorescent, scrappily DIY onslaught may prove too dizzying for some fans of more classical cinema. But it has an underlying humane commitment to the dignity of the down and out, and is one of the more successful efforts to approximate networked life on-screen. It should find ample slots at festivals on the more formally adventurous side, and have no trouble finding its cult fanbase.
K.D. (Qian Jiannan) is a Mongolian migrant. He was working in a duck-down jacket factory, where he was bullied, until some homeless people helped him to get out of this grueling arrangement. His passion for Gaga Dance is only matched by his infatuation with B-Girl (Mengli Zhu), a fellow shape-thrower. He dreams of taking her back to Ulan Bator with him, and though she initially gives him the cold shoulder, a romance blossoms. They share a cramped bedroom with other Gaga dancers who have fled untenable situations, in the home of Pink Hair (Guo Donglin), an older dancer who has set himself up as a kingpin, giving the crew food and shelter in exchange for money he earns from their live-stream subscribers. A former barber, he left the army and the family business in favour of an alternative way of thriving outside the system. He styles the crew, giving them radical hairstyles and helping them find their eye-catching looks.
The dancers function as a pseudo-family, filling the void of emotional neglect they all felt growing up by caring for one another. The philosophy of Gaga is based on happiness, freedom and anti-commercialism. If you’re in it for the money, you will never be truly Gaga. But tension rises, as K.D. bristles to see his increasing online popularity propping up Pink Hair’s lifestyle. Feeling used, he decides to go it alone. A rival of Pink Hair, whose main claim to fame is that he once shook hands with Barack Obama, tries to lure him over to his camp with promises to make him an internet super-celebrity through slicker packaging. A Gaga temple prophet condemns such self-serving ways, but this does not dampen the ruthless ambition around winning the upcoming Gaga championship. Though this plotline echoes mainstream dance films, the contest here more resembles a kaleidoscopic DMT trip than a standard genre battle, as we are pushed through into a transcendent Gaga realm.
Censorship threatens. The majority of Zhenzhou’s citizens regard Gaga Dance as vulgar and cheesy, and call for it to be banned from public space. Aggressive hecklers are making it difficult to dance in squares and parks, driving it more underground, and giving it added cred as a form of poetic non-conformity and resistance. Despite disapproval from the more buttoned-down elements of society, the internet has made it possible for the craze to go global, and the gang’s subscribers continue to rise. This is an exuberant allegory of insisting upon one’s own path and artistic sensibility, rather than settling for a grey daily grind.
Director: Yuhan Teng
Writers: Yuhan Teng, Bruce Joke
Editors: Deng Bochao, Du Qingjie
Producers: Ni Ba, Liao, Jie Min, Zhang Tuoyu
Cinematography: Peng Mingwei
Cast: Qiao Jiannan, Zhu Mengli, Kennedy, Cai Xueqing, Guo Donglin
Production Design: Wei Ye
Sound Design: Lou Kun
Music: Joseeh Punmanlon, DAO, LUKA, SARS, Liu Kui
Production company: Lantern Spirit Films Limited (China)
Sales: Lantern Spirit Films Limited (China)
Venue: Rotterdam
In Chinese
85 minutes
