Revisiting ‘Dancing With Myself’

Through Motion is a series of propositions—including film, writing, collaboration and documentation—of moving bodies negotiating charged time and space. Research for this strand within the MAP archive led us to Debi’s 2012 project ‘Dancing with Myself” which looked at films that record people moving to music in domestic and outdoor environments.

There is no visible audience but they capture the movement of mostly untrained dancers performing to camera. They share those private moments where self-consciousness momentarily disappears and interior spaces and public squares are transformed into your very own stage.

DB: Returning to this programme after 8 years I realise that the preoccupation with bodies moving to music or more specifically an embodied expression of self has been a constant presence in the work I have made since then.

Debi Banerjee, Alison, Rosie

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Texts which accompanied the three films can be found in the MAP archive:

1 ‘Human Radio’ by Miranda Pennell (A clip of the film is available here)

2 ‘Dance (All Night, Paris)’ by Melanie Manchot

3 ‘The Animated’ by Darren Banks (Still available to watch at MAP)

‘This selection, played out on MAP over the coming months, will capture people, most of them untrained, dancing in their own environments to music. All the works are inextricably linked to an expression of the body in space, its response to sound and a love of dance.

Moving to music is an instinctive impulse, a pre-language form of expression. Our infant bodies respond to music, but typically in adolescence take a different, newly self-conscious stance. As adults we are often resourceful and dance when we can—at a class, a party, or in the kitchen, when our home is temporarily transformed into our very own stage, ballroom or nightclub. Whether partnered or alone, the instance of being in our own domestic space, without the judgement of an audience, allows us an impulsive freedom; to improvise, fantasise, and to be ourselves.’

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Debi Banerjee is an artist and researcher based in Edinburgh. She has worked as a curator at Stills and in education roles at Collective Gallery and the Edinburgh International Festival, she is currently the Curator for Learning at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and teaches a post-graduate elective at Glasgow School of Art. Debi often works collaboratively with performance, selected projects include: Massive Thanks with Aniela Piasecka (2019), Paleo Futurists with Daniel Brown and Jenny Hogarth various projects (2016-2018), Unknown Outcomes with Kirsty Hendry (2016), Impressing the Czar (2014). Her research interests include workshops, participatory practice and archives, she has published journal articles in Visual Culture in Britain (2020) and Studies in Material Thinking (2017).