Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Hell is a City
The output was commissioned in 2010 by Cornerhouse Arts and Media Centre, Manchester, and Abandon Normal Devices, a regional festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture, forming part of WE PLAY, the north west cultural legacy programme for the 2012 Olympics. Lloyd’s re-narration of the cult British film noir Hell is a City in front of a live audience was the opening event of UnSpooling - Artist & Cinema (October 2010-January 2012)
(http//: www.cornerhouse.org/art/art-events/performance-wayne-lloyd-hell-is-a-city). Unspooling’s major themes were the resiting of the cinema event and the repurposing of the audience’s function to propose new possibilities of cinematic production, spectacle and storytelling, thereby occupying the position of Raymond Bellour’s ‘other cinema’.
Exploring the potential of entertainment-strategy performance, Lloyd employed drawing and the spoken word to replace the Manchester-set film with his own stage presence, diagrams and half-remembered, imaginary re-description of a filmic city, dislocated from geographical authenticity, thereby questioning normal expectations about the production, display and experience of cinema and playing with the issues of mobility, anxiety and the instability of the observer (http//:www.vimeo.com/15665197).
The performance was followed by a round table discussion of performance and film, supported by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and the Institute for Cultural Practices, University of Manchester, between Lloyd, fellow exhibiting artist Ming Wong (Singapore Pavilion 53rd Venice Biennale), Janet Harbord, Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London, curator Sophia Crilly and Professor Aleksandar Dunderovic, Head of Drama and Theatre Studies at University College, Cork. Video documentation and drawings both from Lloyd’s performance and his comic strip re-presentations of iconic film moments were included in Cornerhouse’s UnSpooling exhibition which was previewed in AN (10/10), Flux (10/10), the Guardian (02/10/10) and reviewed in Art Monthly (341).
