An annual event for the graduating students of Salford University's Contemporary Performance Practice course has, this year, gone online. Being shown over two days, some of the pieces were at specific times and needed to be booked in advance, however, those whose productions were available for the whole festival were the ones we chose to take a look at here. These are the shows from day 1 of the 2-day festival.
1. AFRO-ISH
A piece by Amanda McCambley which looks at the ideas and preconceptions of 'blackness' through her hair. McCambley is a black African performer and has stereotypical long black braided hair. Her videos aim to explore more closely the relationship between social constructs and stereotyping through the person's hair.
To do this there are a few photos of her before she starts the videos, and at the end a few of her as she is after she has filmed the videos. In the videos we are taken on a personal journey, as she touches, manipulates, and then cuts and restyles her hair. All the while asking questions, perhaps more to herself than her perceived audience, such as "Why am I black?" / "What makes me black?" / "Am I black because of my hair?" / and later on after she has attacked her locks with scissors, "Am I more black now?" / "Do I feel more black now?"
I was able to supply her with answers to her two final questions though. These were:
"Is this who I should be?" - answer: If it is what you want to be, yes.
"Am I black enough now?" - answer: black enough for who? for what?
2. ISO. LATE
A physical theatre / dance video from the choreography and direction of Aislinn Stanway (with the collaboration and performance skills of Orla Collier and Adam Sherrard).
This is a Work-in-Progress video of a film that she is working on which aims to explore the movement of the everyday. In this first draft video we see three people going through their morning quotidian routines from waking up in bed to pottering around the house and garden. The movements are repetitive and exaggerated, and the shots move very quickly from one contrasting image to another and back again with alarming regularity, rather dizzingly and therefore lacking focus or a focal point upon which we can hang our understanding of the film.
3. LOCKDOWN PRAYER
Owen Davey's experimental film which is, in his own describing, "a film with songs and a cat", has tried to produce a music video which is neither a film score nor a conventional music video.
The piece he presents explains in detail, with short video examples, his creative process which all lead up to his final video, the magum opus. The explanations are good and clear and at times even quite poetic, and although technically you shouldn't need any of this before watching he final product, without it, the final product fails to make sense. It's a broadly abstract and esoteric work, and yet it is the build-up, the explanations which are actually far more interesting than the finished article.
The vocals on the end video were muffled and indistinct, and the film's meaning completely lost. In fact for the full 13 minutes of the final video, it was indeed a video of a cat (in strange angled close-ups) with background songs.
Reviewer - Chris Benchley
on - 3/9/20
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