Playing in the Light: black dance film tour
"Reappropriating the body is not merely a question of choreography, of which dance represents the maximum resistance, but also a question of sociography, of relating to others and to the world. Otherwise it's madness."
Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst
The marriage of dance, performance and film creates a very particular dynamic. The negotiation of the live performer with the mechanics of filmmaking makes for a naturally questioning form. The fusion, at its best, asks important questions about the nature of the body on the screen, how movement should be framed, what gesture can mean, how rhythm is exploited. How much can be said by not speaking, by asking us to look?
Playing in the Light is a tour of films all about the way we see. The tour's focus on ideas of race and identity asks essential questions about the way the modern world is framed. In cinema stripped back to gesture, rhythm and motion, the weight of black culture, history, identity and politics are illuminated by the lightness and possibility of performance and dance.
Playing in the Light, a specially selected sequence of artists' film, brings together some of the very best artists, choreographers, dancers and musicians working in this collaborative field of filmmaking.
Playing in the Light is an ICO touring project supported by the Arts Council as part of bfi's Black World initiative.
Programme 1: Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing concentrates on the way we look. Displaced, in the first instance, by the separate call between what we see and what we hear in Rosalind Nashashibi's States of Things, we are freed to look in close up at the poise of Vicki Amedume, to look past role in Linda Martina Young's interpretation of Nina Simone's Four Women and to see the expression of the world framed by love and desire in Untitled, Delilah and Three. This is cinema at its best: film that reinvents the landscape of the familiar.
Programme 2: Playing a Part
Playing a Part concentrates on performance: on the roles we are asked to play. From the marching bands of colonialism to the glitz of Hollywood via contemporary urban experience, these films find new ways to ask questions of
origin and identity.
Programme 1: Ways of Seeing
The States of Things
Rosalind Nashashibi | UK | 2000 | 4 mins
A jumble sale set to an Egyptian classic love song from the 1920s.
Strong Women
Jayne Parker | UK | 2000 | 15 mins
Strength displayed and strength employed: a portrait of trapeze artist
Vicki Amedume.
Four Women
Julie Dash | US | 1977 | 8 mins
An experimental dance film that employs the use of stylised movements and dress to express the spirit of black womanhood from an embryonic stage in Africa, through a struggle she wages to survive in America.
Untitled
John Sanborn, Mary Perillo, Bill T Jones | US | 1989 | 10 mins
A tribute to the life and work of the dancer and choreographer Arnie Zane, who died of AIDS in 1988.
Delilah
Tanya Syed | UK | 1995 | 11 mins
Located in the darkness, a place of no boundaries, Delilah is a "meditation on violence", love and survival.
Three
Isaac Julien | UK | 1999 | 15 mins
Produced in collaboration with and featuring choreographers Bebe Miller and Ralph Lemon along with British actress Cleo Sylvestre, Three explores aspects of desire through dance movements and symbolically weighted images.
Programme 2: Playing a Part
Dansons
Zoulikha Bouabdellah | France | 2003 | 6 mins
The dancer puts on cloths in the colour of the French flag and belly-dances to the French national anthem.
Aeroplane Man
Alison Murray | UK | 2000 | 6 mins
Rapper Jonzi D sets out on a quest, leaving his birthplace of London for
Grenada, Jamaica, America and Africa.
Extract from Me 37
Ghazel | France | 2001 | 15 mins
When she received an expulsion notice from the French government in 1997, a victim of the European 'green card', Iranian artist Ghazel decided to post 'marriage-wanted' signs on the walls of Paris to procure a passport by marriage-of-convenience.
Cut Out and Keep
David McCormick, Benedict Johnson | UK | 2004 | 12 mins
A reflection on the lives and times of Britain's first-generation Afro-Caribbean communities.
Haroldinho
Harold Offeh | UK/Brazil | 2005 | 10 mins
An embodiment of the vibrancy and energy of Brazilian culture, which also reflects Brazil's status as a newly developing nation that is dependent on a low-waged, low-skilled labour force.
Lip
Tracey Moffatt, Gary Hillberg | US | 1999 | 10 mins
Moffatt and Hillberg¹s rough, no-budget assembly effectively highlights with familiarity and humour the disturbing realisation of how black characters and white characters still interact on screen, under Hollywood¹s eternally
backward eye.
