Tha-at’s right (2018)
16mm film

Commissioned by An Assembly for a UK tour 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.

 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

‘I like how [the] film had a lot of respect for the art of ballet, but it broke the myth of it. We see...dancers failing or trying movements, we see the process of working it all out. They go from poised to slouching. It's playful and fun...truly modern.’
- Audience feedback

‘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

‘“Desire is deferral,” Rowland once said to me. To sustain the pleasure of desire, you have to delay the consequence. Perhaps rehearsal is a kind of defferal, a kind of desire...With its fickle cut, drifts and parodies, Rowland’s film indulges in the textures of rehearsal, while the finality of performance is only a flirtation.’
 - Bryony Dawson, Motor Dance Journal, 2023

Screenings, exhibitions and features:

2024  54 Programme, New Cross, Manchester
2023  Motor Dance Journal feature by Bryony Dawson
2023  SET Film Festival - SET Space, Peckham
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
2019   A5 magazine, February 2019 Issue
2018   An assembly - 3 part UK tour with live accompaniment  

Motor Dance Journal, Duets and Dialogues edited by Isabelle Bucklow & Hannah Woods. Design by Audrey Solomon