Director: Sharine Rijsenburg
Running time: 19mins
Over the years, we’ve seen some remarkable documentary filmmaking from Rotterdam. Films like Rotterdam, verlaat ons niet and So Loud the Sky Can Hear Us zero in on a unique aspect of the port city’s historic, overlapping culture, to make a point about the changing face of the city – and the ways that its current quest for ‘modernity’ risks alienating the people who made it such a special place to live in the first place.
Bubbling Baby no doubt has earned its own place in that grand tradition – delivering an insightful and enjoyable portrait of Rotterdam’s thriving Caribbean community, through an exploration of its night culture and its music scene. As tends to be the case across Europe, that is a community which has faced significant abuse over the centuries – and Bubbling (described in the film’s submission notes as a “propulsive and highly danceable music” crafted by the Caribbean diaspora of the Netherlands) has provided a space for it to gather and be heard.
But Sharine Rijsenburg’s short also makes a critical point in its conclusion, that “Not everything Black people do is resistance. It’s also joy. It’s also healing.” It’s an interesting moment that will cause some audience members to have an unexpected moment of introspection: documentaries about music from non-white ethnic communities usually present us with some kind of anthropological angle to justify what they are doing. But while space should be made to tell that kind of story, it shouldn’t be necessary to give music and dance like Rotterdam’s Bubbling scene a platform.
It’s popular and important enough to people that it shouldn’t take an appeal to chin-stroking academics or performative allies, to warrant talking about this musical genre, or to introduce it to new audiences. This art form has its own merits, whether or not it is tied to some great historical struggle. So, while on one level, I might have liked to hear more about the origins of Bubbling – and its evolution from the analogue Caribbean origins the talking heads in Rijsenburg’s film touch upon, to its current form, hybridised with the electronic music of the Netherlands – it doesn’t really matter what I want more of.
What is just as compelling, instead of that information, is the testimony of people from multiple generations, who have grown up Bubbling, and gone on to find new ways to adapt the music and dance to provide them with a fresh voice. In particular, Rijsenburg’s camera takes an interest in Raziyah Heath (DJ Chinnamasta) and Daphne Agyepong (DJ Rockafellababe) who are challenging long-held gender roles within Bubbling music.
While both men and women have helped to shape the genre, those spinning the records have predominantly been men, and those dancing have predominantly been women. And while several male DJs consulted here still credit the women dancing as “taste-setters” for the music, because a DJ who can’t make them “go wild” will have to quickly get his act together, DJ Chinnamasta and DJ Rockafellababe are set on making that a much more literal experience.
Drawing on the experiences of the kind of rhythms they would want to dance to themselves, the pair describe the way they have developed sets they know front-to-back, and how during male-dominated DJ line-ups, they have witnessed those tracks bring “women who had been at the back of the room” to the front of the revelry. It’s a wonderful glimpse into a living, breathing culture, which is continuing to find ways to become more inclusive, and more relevant to its constituents – something that cannot be said of many other musical genres, which are beset by gatekeepers, doggedly insisting on there being a ‘right way’ of doing things.
Rijsenburg, cinematographer Sami El Hassani and editor Festus Toll also deserve credit for their own DJing. Delving into extensive archival footage, from more traditional gatherings in the Caribbean, to the feverish Dutch nightclubs of the 1990s, the team weave in vibrant and explosive images of dancers of all ages in the modern era – giving a layered, visual representation of a form of music which is evolving before our ears and eyes. While I might have complained about not getting that narrative walkthrough of Bubbling’s history, maybe this is just as good.
Short and sweet, Bubbling Baby is a well-constructed cultural snapshot, which does enough to introduce new audiences to a culture they might not be acquainted with – but rightly focuses on presenting a recognisable picture of the Bubbling scene to those already engaged with it. Sometimes, we should be able to enjoy spaces for “joy and healing”, without needing to grandstand around wider political or historical points.