Amber Online

North Shields, a small town in Tyneside, with a once thriving fishing industry, now has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country. Children get asked by their teachers: “You will never work, so what will you do?” The dancing school becomes a symbol, a meeting place for dreams and aspirations, where years of intensely shared activity bond the young girls and their mothers in a tug of conflicting desires: an independent and exciting career out in the world – or marriage and happy family life in the home town? The outcome is often neither, as dreams flounder, or get shelved in the face of harsh economic reality. What does remain is the dancing itself: “It’s part of her, I think it always will be”, reflects the mother in the film, after her daughter has given up dancing lessons and left home.

Through a carefully constructed mixture of drama and documentary, Keeping Time follows a young dancer’s life from the age of seven to seventeen, and her personal story leads on to invite a wider examination of the influences which guide and control the dreams, choices and opportunities of women in our society.

While researching material for Tyne Lives (1980) Amber were introduced to the Connell-Brown dancing school in North Shields, where the group had already established roots through previous film and photographic work.

A team set out to make a straight documentary film about the dancing school, found themselves in a quandary as to what to say with the shot material, and shelved it. A photographic project and conversations with the mothers and daughters continued, and eventually formed a basis for a film script.

Incorporating the early documentary material, and with carefully constructed dramatised tableaux scenes, Keeping Time takes young Lisa from her real life in the documentary part of the film to a fictional part as “Lisa” – a composite of all the girls at the dancing school – in the dramatised scenes. Keeping Time became the first of Amber’s films which experiments with the mixing of drama and documentary to produce a continuous narrative. The method allows both the authenticity of real people in real life situations, and greater flexibility and control through the use of actors and actresses in reconstructed scenes from real life.

With the advent of Channel Four Television and a full Workshop franchise, Amber was for their first time in a position to budget a film realistically. While extremely modest by TV standards, the budget of £23,000 allowed the group to hire a house for a set, plus the use of a full crew, professional equipment etc.

• Jill Ainsley
• Art Davies
• Lisa Hynes
• Amber Styles

1983
Running time: 57 mins

Made under the auspices of the ACTT Workshop Declaration with financial assistance from Northern Arts and Channel Four Television.