Manchester international festival is known for commissioning cross art form collaborations, but this time they didn’t have to: Benji Reid is his own one-man cross art form collaboration. Originally a hip-hop dancer and theatre-maker, in recent years he’s taken to photography and now all the threads of his work come together as what he calls a “choreo-photolist”.
In this unique performance, the setup has Reid the photographer at the centre, a“studio” behind him where three dancers – Salomé Pressac, Slate Hemedi and Yvonne Smink – pose for the camera, and two large screens either side where Reid’s pictures appear as he takes them, extracting still moments from the moving scene in front of us. First, it’s the beautiful landscapes of their muscles, curves and skin, in black and white, and you do “find your eyes” as the title says, noticing scars, pores and wrinkles of skin you wouldn’t otherwise see. When he takes portraits, Reid tells us in voiceover, his aim is not to photograph what someone looks like, but what they’ve been through. In one arresting sequence, a couple’s playful embrace turns to a blur of struggle and control.
Woven into the narration are episodes from Reid’s own life. He calls what he does “conflict photography”, not images of the battlefield, but the ravages of everyday war, especially that of a black person in the UK. He exposes the conflicts of his own life, to distressing depths of despair: addiction, depression, racism, the social care system. But he also shows us creativity, fantasy, collaboration and imagination taking flight. He is asking us to really see him, and the world around us.
This isn’t dance, but it is full of choreography: in the models’ movement, their intertwining limbs, manipulation of fantastical props, or as setups become more elaborate, pole dancer Smink suspended in the air as a human kite. But it’s also in the way Reid directs them, live, forging the visual narrative in front of us, building something into being alongside his own story, sparsely told, but hugely impactful (he worked with dramaturg Keisha Thompson). This is a powerful show, filled with devastating honesty and wonder.
At Manchester Academy until 16 July
