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.

Tha-at’s right is a response to a review by dance critic and poet Edwin Denby of Stravinsky’s ballet Agon, choreographed by George Balanchine. The film takes this idiosyncratic piece of criticism literally by choreographing a dance using only the descriptions Denby provides, translating his words back into movement.  

‘...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

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   Bankley Open Call - Bankley Gallery, Manchester
2019   neo:art prize exhibition - Bolton Museum and Art Gallery
2018   An assembly - 3 part UK film screening