Holly Blakey: Some Greater Class

Holly Blakey, Some Greater Class, Hales Gallery, August 21

Holly Blakey’s Some Greater Class at Hales Gallery (photo © Hales Gallery London)

The convergence of art gallery and dance performance is an interesting one, especially when the dance is presented as an exhibit. At the invitation of Hales Gallery, choreographer and director Holly Blakey brings her experience of performance art and music videos to the gallery space in the form of Some Greater Class. Dance in this kind of setting is not new but Blakey’s presence here goes beyond the performance itself. One of the preoccupations of Some Greater Class focuses on the relationship between High Art and pop culture, or rather on the perceived value systems and expectations of the two. By transposing on to a formal gallery setting a popular commercial dance form based on the pop music video and with DJs Gwilym Gold and Darkstar on hand to provide the music, Blakey invites our attention to shift from subjective association to objective appreciation.

Against a wall of Hales Gallery the narrow temporary stage with potted plants at either end acts as a frame for the dance, more like the frame of a painting than a theatrical proscenium. Blakey’s dance is contained mostly within the frame using the columns of the gallery as additional props. She nevertheless plays with this formal display, having one of the dancers step off the stage at one point to continue his dance among the galleried throng and occasionally sitting her dancers on the front of the stage, observing members of the audience observing them. The fourth wall is thus perforated but not entirely removed; the onlooker, by close proximity to the action, also participates. The audience is seated close to the stage as at a fashion show and the six dancers (Luke Crook, Chester Hayes, Grace Jabbari, Naomi Weijand, Busola Peters and Ted Rogers) take their places at the beginning like models on a catwalk. The costumes by Blakey and Hannah Hopkins are a layered patchwork of skin-coloured trappings over bare skin or body tights, a commercially sensual image that hides as much as it purports to reveal.

Blakey’s mediation between pop culture and High Art is a provocative blurring of the edges of both art form and perception but it comes with its own artistic risk. Some Greater Class does not simply place a pop music video in a highbrow establishment to test perceptions; Blakey has distilled elements of commercial dance into an expressive choreographic form that points to but does not mimic the original. It is as if she has gone some way to bridging the perceived gap in values before presenting her thesis. But on reflection it is the interplay of ideas that comes across more compellingly than the performance. Some Greater Class delivers a quality of movement that is intimate bordering on narcissistic with a heady mixture of gestures from bodybuilding, martial arts, yoga as well as stylized sexual play. At the end the six characters take stock of their exertions with a blank stare that speaks of euphoria or exhaustion or both; Some Greater Class functions according to its own hedonistic rules and fades out, presumably to start again at the next opportunity. In bringing the characters and the movement (and the DJs) to a gallery, Blakey succeeds in framing Some Greater Class as an artifact but does not translate it fully to the stage; it thus sits ambivalently between the two. It reminds me of the ubiquitous selfie: a camera (and a universe) turned on itself in which the viewer and the viewed are one and the same. It is a picture with significance for the participants and for those related to them but it lacks the detachment that marks a work of art.