A solo dance performance by Zinzi Minott exploring Queerness, Blackness, and the body as an archive.  

Black on Black is set within a multi-screen audio-visual installation of archive footage and material from Minott’s personal and collaborative image collection. The work is accompanied by a specially commissioned score by Gaika. 

The work explores dance as a form of labour and tests the limits of the body through repetition, across duration, to exhaustion. The movement phrases within the solo have been donated to Minott by an extended network of Black dancers and artists. “If you could imagine a physical archive of dance”, asked Minott, “what nugget or phrase would you donate?”. 

As Minott performs this solo the movement phrases are altered, eroded by exhaustion, commenting on the erasure of Black dance histories and Queer cultural practice, highlighting the vulnerable existence of Black and Queer lives. Black on Black aims to spark a nuanced discussion that attends to the lived and embodied intersections of race, class, and gender in the aftermath of British colonialism. This is the first living archive of Black dance in the UK and Minott’s Lilian Baylis Studio debut. 

Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies, and politics, and how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender, and class. As an artist, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance, seeing her live performance, filmic explorations, prints and objects as different, but connected, manifestations of dance, and body-based outcomes and modes of inquiry. She is a Laban alumnus, the first dancer to be Artist in Residence at both Serpentine Gallery (London, UK, 2018) and Tate (London, UK, 2017). She was artist in residence at La Becque (Switzerland, 2023), Aesthetica Art Prize longlist 2023 and was shortlisted for the 9th edition of the MaxMara Art Prize for Women (2023). She was recently nominated for the Live Art Award – Shortlist LIVE! 2022 (Finland), received The Continuous Commission for 2020-2022 (UK) and The Jerwood Live Work Award in 2020 (UK), and won The Adrian Howells Award for 2019/2020 (UK). 

zinziminott.com 

Created & Performed by Zinzi Minott 

Sound Composer & Curator Gaika

Choreography Contributors Greta Mendez, Harold Offeh, Keyon Gaskin, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Onyeka Igwe, Yewande YoYo Odunubi & Rowdy SS 

Lighting Design by Pete Maxey

Produced by Zinzi Minott with Luisa Ulyett and Nephertiti Schandorf (2020)

Rehearsal Director Greta Mendez 

Moving Image Director Zinzi Minott

Moving Image Produced by Zinzi Minott and Joi Productions 

Moving Image Editors Zinzi Minott, Anita Safowaa, Annetta Laufer (2020-2021), 

Costume Designer Calli Roche (Fugitive Patterns)

Tailor Fatu Gassama 

Make-Up Zinzi Minott and Martine Lewis 

Nails Yo Kesh 

Artist Assistant Paris Cian (2019-2021) 

Commissioned by CONTINUOUS, a partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Siobhan Davies Studios, supported by an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant and generous support from the John Ellerman Foundation and made possible with additional support from the Brent Biennial 2022, ‘In the House of my Love’, produced by Metroland Cultures, London. Co-Commissioned by Sadler’s Wells. 

Header image © Kofi Paintsil