Tha-at’s right [2018]
16mm film
Commissioned by An Assembly for a UK in 2018 alongside pieces by composers Louis D’Heudieres and Charlie Usher.
16mm film
Commissioned by An Assembly for a UK in 2018 alongside pieces by composers Louis D’Heudieres and Charlie Usher.
Tha-at's right is a film in which three dancers and a small crew attempt to choreograph a dance from a dance review, written in 1957 by critic and poet Edwin Denby titled Three Sides of Agon. Denby’s review articulates Stravinsky’s final ballet Agon via an idiosyncratic stream of metaphors. Tha-at's right takes Denby at his word, translating his imagery back into the language of dance.
George Balanchine choreographed Agon from images taken from a manual of French mid-17th-Century society dances, interpreting them without provision for narrative, scenery or ‘context’. Rather than the interior world of ‘characters’, he was interested in the energies of forms and surfaces in and of themselves. Via Denby, Tha-at’s right attempts to raise questions about translation, the role of criticism and the living body as a perpetual signifier — ‘an image as an expression’ as filmmaker Harun Farocki calls it in his film The Expression of Hands.
Watch the trailer below and the full video here.
George Balanchine choreographed Agon from images taken from a manual of French mid-17th-Century society dances, interpreting them without provision for narrative, scenery or ‘context’. Rather than the interior world of ‘characters’, he was interested in the energies of forms and surfaces in and of themselves. Via Denby, Tha-at’s right attempts to raise questions about translation, the role of criticism and the living body as a perpetual signifier — ‘an image as an expression’ as filmmaker Harun Farocki calls it in his film The Expression of Hands.
Watch the trailer below and the full video here.
‘...a seemingly disconnected parade of musical and choreographic gestures that swing - like Denby’s prose - between baroque grace and withering bathos. It’s funny - but more than that, it raises questions about translation, the fitness of words to sounds or movements, the role of criticism, and the authority of the score.’
- The Wire, December 2018
‘There’s a sly humour throughout the piece, made all the more subversive by never letting the audience relax into certainty over what, or who, is being made fun of from one moment to the next...The dancers bring a discipline and dignity to the ridiculousness. Like in a Robert Ashley piece, only with movement instead of words, the music does its work while the audience is distracted, a deadpan “No comment” while slipping a diffuse, brittle collage of chamber music past our ears.’
- Boring Like a Drill, October 2018
- The Wire, December 2018
‘There’s a sly humour throughout the piece, made all the more subversive by never letting the audience relax into certainty over what, or who, is being made fun of from one moment to the next...The dancers bring a discipline and dignity to the ridiculousness. Like in a Robert Ashley piece, only with movement instead of words, the music does its work while the audience is distracted, a deadpan “No comment” while slipping a diffuse, brittle collage of chamber music past our ears.’
- Boring Like a Drill, October 2018
Screenings and exhibitions:
2022 UK New Artists - Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester
2021 No-body’s room x LUX - The Room Projects, Paris
2020 Correspondance / Correspondence - Videographé, Montreal
2020 Visions in the Nunnery - Bow Arts, London
2020 Hold On - The Koppel Project, London
2019 Fracto Film Encounter - ACUD, Berlin
2019 6X6 Project - artist moving image online streaming platform
2019 Bankley Open Call - Bankley Gallery, Manchester
2019 neo:art prize exhibition - Bolton Museum and Art Gallery
2018 An assembly - 3 part UK film screening









dancers
Svenja Bühl
Regina Laasmäe
Danielle Summers
choreography
Rowland Hill
Svenja Bühl
Regina Laasmäe
Danielle Summers
![]()
Svenja Bühl
Regina Laasmäe
Danielle Summers
choreography
Rowland Hill
Svenja Bühl
Regina Laasmäe
Danielle Summers

director
Rowland Hill
producer
Scout Stuart
cinematographer
Paul Daly
editor
Rowland Hill
![]()
Rowland Hill
producer
Scout Stuart
cinematographer
Paul Daly
editor
Rowland Hill

music
Rowland Hill
with Jack Sheen
colourist
Paul Daly
additional editing
Ralph Pritchard![]()
Rowland Hill
with Jack Sheen
colourist
Paul Daly
additional editing
Ralph Pritchard
