The Symphony Of Dance Team On Hayley Erbert & Derek Hough Tribeca Doc

They say that dance can be healing. But, when pro dancer Hayley Erbert underwent an emergency craniectomy to treat a life-threatening brain bleed in December 2023, the last thing anyone expected was for her to return to the stage four months later. And yet, that’s exactly what she did.

“Honestly, it just strengthened my relationship with dance and made me fall in love with dance again,” Erbert tells Deadline of the recovery process.

Her journey back to the Symphony of Dance Tour with her husband Derek Hough is chronicled in Jason Bergh’s documentary of the same name, which made its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival over the weekend. While the film ends with Erbert’s first post-op performance in Melbourne, Florida, in April 2024, that moment wasn’t guaranteed when the cameras began rolling.

Hough remembers running into Bergh at an event not long after Erbert’s surgery, where he says the director “just came up to me with tears in his eyes” and asked for an update. After Bergh found out that Erbert was going to ease back into rehearsals the following week, they all decided that milestone might be one worth documenting, regardless of what might come of it.

“He’s like, ‘You think can I come? And maybe I’ll film a little bit?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, of course, that’d be really cool to see [and] to document,’” Hough said. “It just turned into that rehearsal, then it turned into another rehearsal, then it turned into just like, ‘We should show this process.’”

As he continued to watch Erbert progress in her rehearsals, Bergh recalls feeling like “there’s something different happening here than normal,” agreeing with Hough that from that experience emerged an organic desire to share the story with a much larger audience.

“We didn’t set out to make a documentary. So it became this thing where she kept progressing and she kept going, and all of these like things were happening that I was just like, ‘We just have to shoot this. We just have to continue going — no distributor, backing, no nothing,” he said. “I just felt so passionate about telling the story…she kept progressing to a point where doctors were saying, ‘You are .0001%. I wish we had more stories like you. So, for me, it was almost like you just have no choice. You just have to follow the story and follow what’s happening. It all just came very natural.”

Of course, there’s a very big difference between documenting the road to recovery for their own personal archives and choosing to share that vulnerable process with the world. Doing so required Erbert and Hough to relive one of the most terrifying and difficult moments of their lives.

Erbert, who is a self-described “private person living a public life,” admits she had reservations about the film. For a while, the answer was no. As they continued to share their story with Bergh, still not quite sure where it might go, Erbert says she began to see how impactful it could be to allow others in to this journey.

“If I can help just one person, whether they went through the exact same thing as me or they’ve just gone through another health scare, I’m like, ‘Absolutely, I’ll do it. I’ll do it just for that one person, if I can help,’” she said.

The documentary not only follows Erbert’s physical recovery but both she and Hough’s emotional and mental recoveries after such a traumatic experience. Erbert has no recollection of what happened to her after she collapsed until she woke up from surgery, but Hough remembers everything. The difference in their experiences, naturally, has led to different healing processes, which they both discuss in the film.

For Erbert, dance has always been a healing part of her life and, even though her health crisis occurred while doing the sport she loves, she knew very quickly that she also wanted it to be part of her recovery.

“I immediately fell back in love with it, because when you almost lose something that you love, it’s really terrifying. I’ve danced my entire life, and I was like, ‘I can’t not have dance in my life,’” she said. “I had a clear goal of getting on stage, and I was like, ‘I’m going to keep pushing for this.’ Honestly, I think it helped my recovery so much more, too.”

Hough, on the other hand, would be lying if he didn’t admit he still has “major PTSD” from the experience. The film follows Hough as he works through some of the resentment and trepidation he developed around dance after finding his wife seizing backstage on tour and rushing with her to the hospital for emergency brain surgery.

“Even now, years later, I’m a little bit on edge,” he admits. “I think being a partner, especially a dance partner, my job is to spotlight and to help my partner shine and to lift them up, but also to keep them safe and to make them feel secure, and the fact that it happened while I was dancing with her, I think that just lingers with me a little bit.”

The tricky thing about dance is that, as with all art, is that there will always come a time where the best thing to do is let the raw emotion take over. Letting go has been one of the hardest parts for Hough to grapple with, he says.

“I can’t be overly protective, because then — there’s a good expression, where your focus goes, your energy flows. So from focusing on what’s bad, then you know bad things [are] going to happen, essentially,” he added. “So it’s like this weird thing where I have to let go of things and try a lot of trust, a lot of faith.”

At the end of the documentary, Erbert takes the stage on the Symphony of Dance tour once again and performs nearly every routine in the show. The team had prepared with a swing for any routines that Erbert didn’t feel up to performing. The intention was to take it slow and listen to her body, which she says is exactly what she did. Turns out, her body keeps surprising her.

“I think the second I stepped out on the stage was the moment…I was like, ‘Yeah, this is where I meant to be. I’ve got this. I can do this,’” she said. “So, honestly, the fear all kind of melted away the second I was out there, and truly the second I felt the audience, I was like, ‘Oh, I have so much love and support around me that it’s no question that I can do this.’”