Output details

Beach Party Animal: a screen dance film

Aggiss’ research for ‘Beach Party Animal’ is an anthropological investigation of human behaviour that considers the zoomorphic qualities innate in human movement. Animated through interdisciplinary practice, it also questions the form, length and process conventions in the choreography and production of screen dance.

Drawing its language from a combination of documentary, choreography and film, and employing cinematic techniques, Aggiss rejected predetermined choreographic structures, music, sites and ‘short-form’ four-to-eight-minute traditional ‘screen dance’ structures. Instead she created a 20-minute film, choreographed post production, examining the life of Brighton Beach over a 24-hour period, as a means to develop new pathways for advancing screen dance. The length of the film has challenged screen dance communities where it has been shown, but opened up new audiences to conceptions of dance and screen through international outdoor and festival screenings.

Aggiss describes the resulting form as a ‘choreo-mentary’. Through intensive and systematic periods of observation she returns to questioning and blurring the boundaries between: fact and fiction; between portraiture, documentary and dance; and between selective views and landscapes. She disrupts boundaries shaped by the immediacy of performative action, choreographed ‘plants’ and guerilla dance tactics, examining how these disrupt and normalise the performative life of the beach over a 24-hour period.

Aggiss uses cinematography and distanced observation through a telephoto lens to achieve a low-profile presence through which to inhabit and observe beach life. The beach becomes ‘a stage’, and the performers, some knowing and others unknowing, perform their ‘beach party’ dances. Aggiss choreographs these mute within the ‘edit-suite’ and without a guiding soundtrack, drawing together the observed with tactical interventions post production.

‘Beach Party Animal’ was commissioned by South East Dance, supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn (£13,000), Arts Council (£4,970), and University of Brighton (£4,125). SEE DIGITAL OUTPUT.