Zinzi Minott Explores Queerness, Blackness, and The Body As An Archive in BLACK ON BLACK

Zinzi Minott makes her Lilian Baylis Studio debut this September with Black on Black, a solo dance performance exploring Queerness, Blackness and the body as an archive.
 
Set within a multi-screen visual installation of archive footage and material from Minott's personal image collection, Black on Black explores dance as a form of labour, testing the limits of the body through repetition, across duration, to exhaustion. Minott asked an extended network of Black dancers and artists to donate movement phrases to this “physical archive of dance”. As Minott performs, these phrases are altered, eroded by exhaustion, commenting on the erasure of Black dance histories and Queer cultural practice and highlighting the vulnerable existence of Black and Queer lives. The production aims to archive Black dance live with the body, making it one of the first performative archives of its kind.

Black on Black is accompanied by a specially commissioned score by the acclaimed experimental rapper, producer, visual and performance artist, Gaika. 

Zinzi Minott's work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics, and explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class. She is specifically interested in the place of Black women's bodies within the form. As a dancer and filmmaker, Minott seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance seeing her live performance, filmic explorations and objects as different, but connected manifestations of dance.

Minott is interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage, and how the use of the glitch can help us to consider notions of racism one experiences through the span of a Black life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories and highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation.

 

Zinzi Minott said: “Black on Black is quite stirring, quite moving, quite impactful and challenging. It challenges what dance can be and what dancers can do in a contemporary setting. The idea behind the work is thinking through theories of the living archive or the body as an archive and the necessity that that is for Black dance, which hasn't been able, allowed, or is sometimes removed from documentation and codification. A lot of Black dance has not been erased as such, but stolen and repackaged into somebody else's practice and not correctly quoted or cited. 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. Black on Black is about looking at how the bodies hold and document these dance practices because of the lack of tangible archival resources around Black and Queer dance. I always want to dance with people but there are so many structures and barriers in place for that, so I feel very honoured that people have allowed me to have worked with their material, it's amazing.”

Rob Jones, Associate Artistic Director at Sadler's Wells, said: “I am so pleased that Zinzi Minott will be bringing Black on Black to us this autumn, remounting the work for a theatrical context. She is a powerful interdisciplinary artist and, in this work, you will see her choreographic and film practices in full conversation hitting you with a sublime force that only Zinzi could conjure.”

 
Commissioned by CONTINUOUS, a partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Siobhan Davies Studios, supported by an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant and generous support from the John Ellerman Foundation and made possible with additional support from the Brent Biennial 2022, 'In the House of my Love', produced by Metroland Cultures, London. Co-commissioned by Sadler's Wells.

Zinzi Minott - Black on Black

Lilian Baylis Studio, EC1R 4TN  
Friday 29 – Saturday 30 September 2023
Tickets: £17
Ticket Office: 020 7863 8000 or www.sadlerswells.com 

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