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.
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
