Guest Blog: 'Dance is a Very Queer Space': Dancer Zinzi Minott on her New Solo Show BLACK ON BLACK at Sadler's Wells

Black on Black is my solo dance performance that explores queerness, Blackness and the body as an archive. I’ve always been interested in complicating the boundaries of dance and this show is a kind of audio-visual, sensory performance set within a multi-screen visual installation of archive footage.

The idea behind Black on Black is thinking through theories of “the living archive” or the body as an archive and the necessity that that is for Black dance. Black dance hasn’t always been, or been allowed to be, archived and has sometimes removed from documentation and codification.

A lot of Black dance hasn’t actually been erased, but stolen or repackaged into somebody else’s practice and not correctly quoted or cited. Graham, for example, is a lot of African Dance but we think of that as Graham, so we don’t talk about how African dance practices are heavily embedded in contemporary dance.

It’s similar in queer dance practice. Dance is a very queer space, the arts is a very queer space, and a lot of people who work in dance and performance in the contemporary field and visual arts more broadly are queer, and therefore contribute to the life, the technique and presentation of work. A lot of presentations of work are queer, but it’s not something we always talk about, or that choreographers talk about, that lots of their dancers are queer.

 For this show, I’ve asked an extended network of Black dancers and artists: if you could imagine a physical archive of dance, what nugget or phrase would you donate? I then perform these phrases, and they’re altered and eroded over time by repetition and exhaustion. The show interrogates dance as a form of labour and the limits of the body through the exhausting process of repetition. I’ve worked with musician Gaika for a specially commissioned score to accompany the work – the sounds is beautiful and overwhelming, in a good but challenging way.

I always want to dance with people but there are so many structures and barriers in place for that, largely if you want to pay lots of people, you need lots of money. Dance funding hasn’t really accommodated for that for independent practitioners like myself. So for me I’m always trying to create the conditions that I’ve wanted for my dance practice for some time. This has been a really amazing moment, yes, I’d really love to be physically with people but in lieu of that, this moment feels really powerful, and I feel very honoured that people have allowed me to have worked with their material, it’s amazing.

Black on Black is full on – it’s quite stirring, moving and emotional, but also challenging. It challenges what dance can be, or maybe what dancers can or can’t do in a contemporary setting. Black on Black was originally commissioned as a durational show by CONTINUOUS, a partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Siobhan Davies Studios, in Spring/Summer 2020 but was postponed due to Covid, so I’m excited to bring this version to London audiences.

Zinzi Minott’s Black on Black is in the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, on Friday 29 & Saturday 30 September 2023.

Main image credit: Kofi Paintsil