Shaun Glad­well
Bro­ken Dance (Beat­boxed)

Shaun Glad­well is renowned for his mes­meris­ing stud­ies of the body in motion, set against the back­drop of grit­ty urban envi­ron­ments or remote land­scapes. The dual-chan­nel video instal­la­tion Bro­ken Dance (Beat­boxed) con­tin­ues his engage­ment with the nexus between embod­ied expres­sion and urban sub­cul­tures. One chan­nel of the video depicts the vocal per­cus­sions of a beat­box­er; the oth­er focus­es on ges­ture, trac­ing the ​‘freestyle’ motions of dancers who merge the gen­res of break­danc­ing, krump­ing and whacking.

Although the per­for­mances occurred at dif­fer­ent times and loca­tions, Glad­well’s syn­chro­nis­ing of the two video chan­nels con­structs a dia­logue between them, as though the sound in one is catalysing the move­ment in the oth­er. While this aspect of Bro­ken Dance (Beat­boxed) high­lights the arti­fice of video instal­la­tion, the action unusu­al­ly plays out in ​‘real-time’. In con­trast to many of Gladwell’s ear­li­er videos, which are slowed to dis­tort the effects of speed and grav­i­ty, here the empha­sis is on the unmedi­at­ed vir­tu­os­i­ty of the per­form­ers and the pow­er­ful uncon­scious effect of sound on the body.

The con­texts for the per­for­mances are also sig­nif­i­cant. The dancers exe­cute their moves against the back­drop of graf­fi­ti cov­ered urban spaces, invok­ing the notion of sub­cul­tur­al activ­i­ty as a mode of resis­tance and recla­ma­tion with­in pub­lic zones where behav­iour is now obses­sive­ly sur­veyed and over-pre­scribed. On the oth­er hand, the vocal­ists are sit­u­at­ed in a stu­dio con­text, per­haps a sig­nal toward how such cul­tures of resis­tance are even­tu­al­ly com­mod­i­fied and ​‘main­streamed’ by the relent­less thrust of consumerism.