Black on BlackZinzi Minott

The work interrogates dance as a form of labour and the limits of the body through repetition, duration and  exhaustion, both a materials and references to a Black Queer life which Minott returns to frequently. The performance has been created from movement phrases donated to Minott by an extended network of Black dancers and artists. “If you could imagine a physical archive of dance”, asked Minott, “what nugget or phrase would you donate?”

In Black on Black, both dance, Blackness and Queerness are archived physically via a witnessing, passed from body to body to form a physical archive of Black and Queer lineage. How is movement handed on and shared across the African Diaspora? What are the embodied languages of Black lives across generations and geolocations? Perhaps the body itself, and a shared physical vocabulary, is the most tangible archive for remembering Black life and histories. Dance’s ephemerality is a tactic of resistance, and not an archival problem to be solved. 

Phrases are altered, eroded by exhaustion, mirroring the ever-changing and always vulnerable existence of the archive and of Black and Queer life. The work makes plain the fallible nature of the body, of the archive, of performance and of Blackness, all subject to forces of erasure and destruction.

Amidst a multi-screen audio-visual installation consisting of archival footage and other accompanying material from Minott’s personal image collection, and a newly commissioned score created and curated by Gaika.

2023 Touring dates coming soon!