Output details

Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up)

The film ‘Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up)’ questions issues of class systems and labour in the post-industrial landscape of Stoke on Trent, and takes the disused Spode factory as its critical prompt. Notions of the industrial ruin in combination with the city’s prominence in the history of the Northern Soul movement are explored through the filmed staging of a Northern Soul event in the Board Room at the factory directly relating to connections between Stoke and Detroit (from where the music largely originates). The work builds on output 3 and articulates contemporary questions of site, dance, and music as a way of addressing emotional responses to particular places, in reference to Jacques Derrida’s ideas of hauntology, Phil Collins’ ‘They Shoot Horses’ (2004), Ian Breakwell’s ‘The Other Side’ (2002), and the project by electronic musician The Caretaker (James Kirby) inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’, 1980.

The research has been developed through participation in the international research initiative, ‘’Topographies of the Obsolete’. Key collaborators: Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway (KHiB), the British Ceramics Biennial and researchers from art academies from Norway, Denmark, Germany, USA and UK. Brown’s film was shown at the British Ceramics Biennial, in an exhibition entitled ‘Topographies of the Obsolete: The Vociferous Void’, and featured in the accompanying peer-reviewed publication. Previous exhibitions include: ‘Resurrecting the Obsolete’, Rom 8, KHiB, 2012, and ‘The Site is the Question’, AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, 2013. Future iterations will be disseminated at collaborating institutions throughout 2013-2015.

This area of Brown’s research has arisen from two earlier projects in 2011. ‘Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy’, a publication and symposium, featured Brown’s drawing, ‘The Extinction Archive’. The film ‘Rec 16’ and watercolour studies ‘Vanishing Points’ were made in response to Isola di San Michele, Venice.