‘Move Ya Body’ Director Elegance Bratton Unearths Foundations Of House Music, With Assist From Former First Lady: “Hillary Clinton’s A House Head” – Thessaloniki

deadline.com:

House music typically thumps at 120-130 beats per minute, in 4/4 time. That’s an awfully clinical description of the sound that shakes the floor and the walls at dance clubs around the world.

What’s truly important — it makes you move ya body. That, in fact, is the title of Elegance Bratton’s new documentary – Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which screens at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival on Monday after holding its international premiere at TiDF on Saturday.

Bratton, director of Pier Kids and The Inspection, hails from New Jersey, but his documentary takes him to Chicago, where House Music emerged in the late 1970s. “Out of the underground dance clubs on the South Side,” notes TiDF, “a group of friends turn a new sound into a global movement.” One of those friends, Vince Lawrence, played a key role developing the music, which grew out of disco.

Ironically, or fatefully, Lawrence was working at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 12, 1979, the night of the notorious “Disco Demolition” – an event in the middle of a White Sox doubleheader in which tens of thousands of white kids, encouraged by a Chicago DJ, brought their disco records to the musical equivalent of a book burning.