Lily Gladstone on how the ‘Fancy Dance’ powwow captures spirit of film

Lily Gladstone has been dancing long before her feet ever touched the ground.

Just across the way from her childhood home on the Blackfoot Reservation in Browning, Mont., sat the campground for North American Indian Days, a celebration of Indigenous history and culture held every second week of July. A few weeks before Gladstone was born on that first week of August 1986, her mother hit up the powwow; when Grand Entry commenced “and that heartbeat drum started up,” Gladstone recalls to Entertainment Weekly, “she said I started kicking to it in her belly.”

Powwows are the beating heart of Fancy Dance, an illuminating directorial feature debut from Erica Tremblay (Reservation Dogs, Dark Winds). Gladstone plays Jax, an Indigenous woman scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma to care for her niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) in the wake of her sister Tawi’s disappearance.

Roki is hopeful that her mother will reappear in time for the mother-daughter dance at the upcoming powwow, but Jax — who has been coming up empty with leads on her missing sister — isn’t as optimistic. When social workers close in and threaten to wrest them apart, Jax and Roki hit the road to find Tawi before the big powwow. 

“I wanted to tell a mother-daughter story by way of an auntie and niece, which is such a central relationship in my community,” says Tremblay, a member of Seneca-Cayuga Nation whose most vivid powwow memories involve scouring bleachers for loose change for snow cones and fry bread. In her native Cayuga tongue, she says, “The way you translate the word auntie is ‘little mother,’ so aunts are literally your mother.”

Gladstone was blown away when she first read the script but wasn’t sure if she was right for the part. “I immediately doubted that I was the right actor to carry her the way that she deserved,” she admits of Jax. “I was terrified that I was going to drop the ball. But when I heard Jax’s voice come out of my mouth in that first take, I was like, ‘Oh, there she is.’ It was one of those rare and incredible moments where the character just takes over.”

For little mother and niece, all roads lead to the powwow. In a closing sequence that lingers long after the credits roll, Jax and Roki lay their guards down following a taxing journey and lose themselves in dance to honor the lost. Poetically, the dance was choreographed by Tawi actress Hauli Sioux Gray, who only appears in the film on the missing posters and Roki’s home videos. It’s an ending that encapsulates the overall spirit of the film, says Gladstone.

“Our very first run at it, I ran straight to Isabel and we held each other and cried,” Gladstone recalls of filming. “We knew where we were at in each character’s journey. The way that choreography adapted to the scene, I felt the auntie instinct to carve out space for my niece to move as freely as she could. We started in the same step, but I found myself moving backwards and mirroring what she was doing as she was moving forward.”

“I loved that moment,” she says. “It’s like, that’s what Jax’s purpose is: holding back what’s coming toward her niece so she can be free for as long as possible.” In those final moments, she says, “It’s not about running away anymore; it’s about mourning and accepting and celebrating Tawi together.” 

Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise were working towards that closing sequence from the onset. “That sparked the whole idea for this film,” says Tremblay. “I cry every single time I see it, even if I have seen the film like 200 times at this point. I love the fact that we get to leave the film on a moment of joy, on a moment of love, on a moment of connection. I think we all know that the corrupt wheels of the American justice system will continue to turn after the credits roll, but I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about the consequences, about any of the bad decisions these two characters may have made. I just care about the love, the relationship, and the closure that these two characters get by dancing for Tawi.”

The path to get the final dance to the screen, however, had some roadblocks. In an essay published last year, Tremblay and Alise lamented the distribution disparity between Fancy Dance and Killers of the Flower Moon, which both premiered the same year and starred the same leading lady. “We were under absolutely no illusion that Fancy Dance would receive the same kind of industry support as Killers of the Flower Moon,” they wrote, “but the disparity is so great that it renders our film virtually invisible and leaves only one available perspective: the non-Native one.”

Tremblay is grateful to have witnessed Gladstone’s “beautiful journey” this past year with Killers, but she’s calling for more equity when it comes to Native voices telling their own stories. “When these large studios and companies make these speeches about diversity and inclusivity, we’re going to hold them to that,” she says.

In an industry that still feels inhospitable to inclusion, is she hopeful about the future of Indigenous storytelling? “When you’re navigating a world steeped in patriarchy and white supremacy, the only way to move forward in this deep sludge that we’re all in is to have hope,” Tremblay offers. “I look around at my family, who literally generation after generation has survived an ongoing genocide that is meant to eradicate them off the face of the earth.”

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With the release of Fancy Dance, Tremblay marvels, “Cayuga, a language that was left for dead, is going to be heard in over a hundred countries around the globe. That in and of itself is so inspiring and powerful.” So, yes, “of course I have hope,” she says. “I have so much hope.” That certainly sounds like something to dance about. 

Fancy Dance is streaming on Apple TV+.