Madonna dancers reunite in 'Strike a Pose' documentary

Freep Film Festival will feature nearly 20 regional and world premieres over four nights starting March 30 to April 2, 2017.

In 1990, seven young male dancers joined Madonna on her most controversial Blond Ambition Tour. On stage and in the iconic film Truth or Dare they showed the world how to express yourself. 25 years later, they reveal the truth about life during and after the tour in the documentary Strike a Pose. The film is a dramatic tale about overcoming shame and finding the courage to be who you are.(Photo: Strike a Pose)

They are the simplest of documentary conceits: Where are they now? What happened to them then? These are the two questions that "Strike a Pose," a documentary that focuses on Madonna's 1990 "Blond Ambition World Tour" dancers, spends 83 minutes answering.

We know what happened to Madonna, who never left the limelight. But her coterie of male dancers — who worked so closely with her that the then-childless Madonna was like a mother to them — seemingly disappeared into the wind after a brief flurry of fame. The film is a role reversal, with six of the seven dancers (the last is shown through archival footage and family interviews) front and center on screen, while the Material Girl is a ghostly presence, seen in some clips but no recent footage. That was a conscious choice on the part of co-directors Reijer Zwaan and Ester Gould.

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"We realized that whatever she would say, or if she would even appear, even if we wouldn't want to, the film would shift towards her. Because she's an attention-grabber. We didn't want that to happen. It would be so much different," says Zwaan. "There wouldn't be this freedom and there wouldn't be this space for them to connect with each other, because they would connect to her."

Instead, Zwaan and Gould focused on recruiting the dancers who brought the underground dance art of vogue to the MTV-watching masses and a provided a groundbreaking example for the gay rights movement.

"We wrote them all carefully written letters in which we explained what we set out to do. That we wanted to make a film about them and their lives and their experiences, and that this wouldn't be a film about Madonna, but a film about what that special period of time had meant to them but also to a lot of other people. And also because of the AIDS epidemic in the early '90s, it was just a moment in time where it all happened together, and they became such an iconic group of people," says Zwaan.

Most of the dancers came on board right away, but a few were skeptical of the Dutch filmmakers' intentions. In the aftermath of "Madonna: Truth or Dare," the 1991 black-and-white documentary that followed them on the "Blonde Ambition" tour, several of the dancers sued Madonna over invasion of privacy; others didn't want to be the subject of a modern gossip flick. But Zwaan and Gould won them over, and always had in mind a film that focused more broadly on contextualizing the men within the times.

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Madonna with her dancers in Truth or Dare (Photo: Detroit Free Press archives)

"We're both not sort of Madonna fans. We're 'Truth or Dare' fans and 'Blond Ambition' fans, but we also really love that whole early '90s time, because so many things came together. The fall of the Berlin Wall and that sense of freedom, but at the same time, this looming danger of HIV and AIDS and what it did to the gay community. We learned a lot about that when we started researching, but we had initial interest in that from (the) first moment," says Zwaan.

"And then when we got to know them, we started to connect the dots even more. What changed was that obviously, they are dancers, but dance is now a very important part of the film. That was not something we knew from the very beginning, but we realized at some point that dance is actually maybe their best spoken language, and it's so much about expressing yourself and at the same time, we had to tell this story of 25 years."

If Zwaan and Gould had any concerns about whether the six — Luis Camacho, Oliver S. Crumes III, Salim Gauwloos, Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza, Kevin Stea and Carlton Wilborn — would comfortably connect with one another after a quarter-century, those fears were allayed the moment the group reunited for a potentially awkward dinner.

"In the beginning, I was very hesitant (to do the film) just because of the fact that so much had happened, you know, and we were all so young, and so many things I didn't get to say to them that I should have said maybe, and vice versa. But I'm glad that I did it. I'm so happy that I decided to do it and got to reunite with them," says Xtravaganza.

"It was like nothing changed. Once I was there I was like, 'What was I so worried about?' It was like we never left each other, I mean, we just laughed and we looked at each other, and it was just great and we hugged. It was like we never left. It really was. The beauty of it, it's like, 'Damn, why did we let so much time go by?' It's like life happened, good things happened, bad things happened to some of us, but now that we're back together, we promised to just keep each other in each other's lives."

Zwaan says the directors sort see it as "a coming-of-age movie, too, because when you're 18 or 19, like they were when they were on tour, people feel like they can rule the world and think everything is possible. And then, obviously, then comes life and you have to deal with stuff, and you have to get back up on your feet."

He continues: "These guys had the same thing, but in a larger-than-life setting, both when they were 19 or 20 but also their problems or their issues are bigger or heavier than for a lot of people. Again, in that paradox, in that contradiction, we see a very interesting and important message about self-expression and not feeling ashamed of who you are, but also the dark side — that it's not that easy.

"I do believe in the end, it's an uplifting story. There were many lows, but if you see them at the end of the film, you feel that they're coming together as something hopeful in itself, because they get back together as a family after that long, but also in their lives. they really all have taken the turn for the better."

'Strike a Pose'

7:30 p.m. Sat., Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Buy.

4 p.m. Sun., Emagine Royal Oak. Buy.

$10.

Not rated; some adult situations and language

After the films: On Saturday, Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza talks to the Free Press' Ashley Woods, and demonstrates voguing. On Sunday, he chats with Free Press style columnist Georgea Kovanis.

Voguing Workshop With Jose Xtravaganza

1 p.m. Sun.

Boll YMCA, 1401 Broadway St., Detroit.

$25. Buy.

Says Extravaganza about the workshop: "Know that there's no experience necessary. We're going to find your inner performance artist. Everyone has one. You don't need a technique because voguing is a feeling. It's not something where you need to study 12 years of professional ballet or anything. It was created out of emotion and out of movement and out of feeling, and we all have that."