Dancing Is The Best Revenge, 2021

Single channel video, aspect ratio 16:9, 10 min 50 sec, HD, stereo sound

Dancing is the best revenge plays with – and against – ubiquitous notions of public behaviour, how we are codified to act within urban landscapes. Architectures delineate movements, designating spaces open for interpretation through bodies.

This video is the third in a loose series of performances and dance videos that began in Paris (2012), moved to London (2017) and progressed to Biel (2020). A fourth work was made in Leeds in 2024. In each of these projects, up to ten groups of dancers, each performing one specific style, coalesce in streets and congregate in a square in an entanglement of movements. In Dancing is the best revenge, dance is filmed in bird’s eye view, a seemingly incongruous mode to depict choreographed movement as gestures are abstracted.

Filmed just before the pandemic and completed in 2020, the work is prescient on how we may occupy our cities as embodied selves, and how we may interact to create collective experiences. This is a commons made from being the same and being different, from both congruence and dissonance.