e: merlevents@reading.ac.uk
http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl

Szuper Gallery's new video performance and installation engages with recent histories of rural filmmaking, linking everyday farming movements with the aesthetics of dance. Starting point for this new work is a series of archival films from the collection of the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), which provide warnings of contagion and nuclear catastrophe, describing procedure and instruction in the case of emergency. These films present a unique vision of rural labour and collective staged action, where extras, rural background actors, are performing 'normality' prior to potential disruption of an imminent crisis. Szuper Gallery's video deconstructs the movements of extras in these rural propaganda films. It features a large cast of dancers and non-dancers in a spectacular rural setting performing a new choreography to a dramatic sound score. The installation also showcases a series of original propaganda films.

This project also features a new collaboration with Canadian actor and director Michele Sereda.

For further information, please contact Alison Hilton, marketing officer, on 0118 378 8660. Visit http://www.szuper.org for more details on Szuper Gallery.

MERL is designated as an archive of national importance and records the history of English ruralism over the last 200 years, comprising artefacts, books, archives, photographs, film and sound recordings. It has pioneered innovative ethnographic methodologies for social history. The informational films in this collection originate from different 20th century sources (e.g. the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, ICI, or Film Ford Unit) using documentary as propaganda, cultural history and cultural geography. They were made for dissemination of 'best practice' for local distribution to farmers' organisations, providing a unique record of rural labour, technology and social organisation.


Ballet has been supported by the Arts Council of England, by the University of Reading and by Curtain Razors

Timothy Long, Head Curator, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada:

"Current anxieties about food production have resulted in a growing social phenomenon: urban twenty-somethings, with no ties to the land, who are obsessed with threats to the integrity of our food supply (GMOs, pesticides, etc.). For these young urbanites, hypervigilant consumption has become a popular lifestyle choice. It is against this backdrop that the drama of Ballet unfolds. Here, the threat of nuclear war stands in
as the symbol for all other contaminations, a catastrophe lived out by Szuper Gallery in post-Chernobyl Ukraine. Through a blended choreography of farm labour and dance movement, the separation of rural and urban is registered on a number of levels: in the young actors’ soft urban bodies, in their awkward imitation of everyday agricultural chores, in the eruption of dance movements culled from music halls and the avant-garde. In the past, the court derived their dances from the peasants; now the sources of new movement are all urban, a reminder that
the separation of the two realities is more or less complete.

However, as the mushroom cloud at the end of the video reminds us, catastrophes, nuclear or otherwise, threaten to disrupt our neat separation of rural and urban—the 'ballet' on which the world food system depends. The genius of Ballet is to make manifest through an apocalyptic 'dance of the dead' the underlying threat to a fundamental aspect of our global
social organization."