Three is a creative collaboration between British filmmaker Isaac Julien and American post-modern choreographers Ralph Lemon and Bebe Miller; the draft title was Conservator’s Dream. The film includes performances by the choreographers and British actress Cleo Sylvester exploring the individuals’ characters and their complex relationships to one another. It plays with themes of intimacy, the gaze and inside and outside spaces, problematising genders and ethnicity.

This film represents a convergence of various paths of artistic exploration—into formal structure, character and identity, narrative and text, political statement. Working in a collaborative dialogue with Julien's cinematic sense, Lemon and Miller have been able to develop the heart of the work without the conventional problem-solving techniques that are part of building a dance work.

From Bebe:

Ten years or so after Ralph and I created Two (1986) we decided to begin again; working toward something choreographic felt timely, somehow. We started by improvising. Ralph brought in some text he’d worked on; Carla Peterson, then the managing director of Dance Theater Workshop, asked to videotape our rehearsals. We were making a container for our interests, using available time and space, and getting to know each other a little better as well. When I watch videos from those early days I’m moved by our intimacy; it feels like a performance of a kind of truth we’re not certain of. We “audition” a writer then decide, no.

Isaac Julien, a filmmaker and installation artist from London, agrees to take us on as a follow-up to his film The Conservator; we begin as The Conservator’s Dream, then bring in actress Cleo Sylvestre, and we are Three. I feel the process torque and shift. Whatever I retain from our dance process encounters a perspective I’d not anticipated. A filmic point of view crafts time cellular event by cellular event, and sequence is out of the range of my own physicality. I remember feeling relief in not having to keep track of all the things, though I missed tracking all those things. The host of producers, friends, artists, filmmakers and technicians encountered to bring the film to completion feels remarkable and of a completely different rhythm than dance making. They kept my feet on unfamiliar ground, and I remain grateful for that.