Shuffle

Public Artwork by Pilar Mata Dupont

Panoramic video for LED screen available in three-channel projection, 2018

The original form of this work was commissioned by Transport for New South Wales and produced by Cultural Capital for Wynscreen, Sydney, Australia.

Shuffle is a surreal drama of the appropriation, conflation, and international movement of art forms, and their places within colonial histories.

The history of tap dancing lies in North American colonial history. There are many accounts of how West African enslaved people were brought up from ship holds and forced to dance on deck. Tap, born with this burden of humiliation and grief, was developed further through a melding with Irish step dancing and jigs, English clogging, and later growing through the development of jazz music. Whitewashed and built upon through ballet in Broadway shows and Hollywood films, it traveled internationally.

The character of the Dancer navigates through this historically layered dance and arrives at a clinically white museum under bright lights. Sculptures made from sallow porcelain, also a material with a complicated history of violence and appropriation, sit on red earth, compacted to hold the shape of museum plinths. The porcelain pieces sit, pale pink burnt as if exposed to a blazing sun, salt encrusted, peeling, grazed, flaking and bruised, wilted and precariously perched on their unstable hosts. The Dancer, wearing black tails encrusted with shells, salt, lace, and pearls, and donning a laced mask over their face, pirouettes through the unfamiliar space.

The film hinges on the tension created between the porcelain pieces, earth plinths, and Dancer; the precarious balance between the percussion of the tap steps and the tenuous structures. The dance begins cautiously, but becomes confident and dangerous in the Dancer’s efforts to engage with the structures - the objects move and shake, and the earth plinths begin to crumble.

When they collapse, ceramics shatter, and together they create a new landscape, seemingly broken, but in fact a new arrangement made from the same material, suggesting a resilience. Through the Dancer’s vain attempts to destabilise and destroy within this museum-like context, they have only co-opted the materials for their own creation.

Written and Directed by
Pilar Mata Dupont

Cast
Claudia Alessi

Awards

Mahmudul Raz, cinematographer on Shuffle, won the 2017 Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS) WA Gold Award for best experimental cinematography with this work.