A solo dance performance by Zinzi Minott exploring Queerness, Blackness and the body as an archive.

Black on Black is set within a multi-screen audio-visual installation of archive footage and material from Minott’s personal and collaborative image collection. The work is accompanied by a specially commissioned score by Gaika.

The work explores dance as a form of labour and tests the limits of the body through repetition, across duration, to exhaustion. The movement phrases within the solo have been donated to Minott by an extended network of Black dancers and artists. “If you could imagine a physical archive of dance”, asked Minott, “what nugget or phrase would you donate?”.

As Minott performs this solo the movement phrases are altered, eroded by exhaustion, commenting on the erasure of Black dance histories and Queer cultural practice, highlighting the vulnerable existence of Black and Queer lives.

Black on Black aims to archive Black dance live with the body, making it one of the first performative archives of its kind.

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Commissioned by CONTINUOUS, a partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Siobhan Davies Studios, supported by an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant and generous support from the John Ellerman Foundation and made possible with additional support from the Brent Biennial 2022, ‘In the House of my Love’, produced by Metroland Cultures, London. Co-Commissioned by Sadler’s Wells.

Image description: Zinzi Minott, a Black woman, is pictured with bright pink eyeshadow in the corners of her eyes, dark painted lips and sharply defined eyebrows. She wears black contact lenses, has a gold septum piercing on her nose, and a gold hoop through a black ear stretcher in her ear lobe. Her black, curly hair is pulled back neatly from her face and held at the side with a single gold hair slide. She wears a black vinyl coat with the collar turned up and is pictured again a black curtain backdrop.

Header image © Kofi Paintsil