A dancer, glistening with sweat, begins to spin. Slowly, at first, and as though controlled from above, suddenly increasing to ecstatic speeds before stopping. Around him, women in long skirts kick their legs high and shirtless men leap into the air, landing backwards on all fours in revival-like slow motion.
And all around: saints’ statuettes and alpha-omega Greek, the untouched garment-hems of the priestly class’s trappings, the tall candles and short benches of that peculiarly Scottish, passionate, protestantism.
In British artist Matt Stokes’ seven-minute film “Long After Tonight,” showing as part of Outer Body/Inner Experiences through Sept. 12 at the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, the frantic whirling-dervish dancers of the Northern Soul scene are set against the backdrop of religious iconography and obsessive-compulsive ritual in the beautiful Saint Salvador’s Church, Dundee, Scotland.
Stokes’ work is part of a powerful, if young, tradition in British Isles artistic practice – the reenactments and restagings made famous by artists such as Rod Dickinson, Jeremy Deller, and Gerard Byrne. His particular interest is in subcultural practice and underground music scenes – his work in Dundee included the very-Deller-like transcription of Happy Hardcore rave tunes for pipe organ, and other works include research-based pieces on the Lake District rave scene and a massive research effort on the underground music history of Austin, Texas. (I’d love to see what this resulted in, since the underground scene in Austin must already be one of the best-documented in the country.)
For “Long After Tonight,” Stokes gathered some of the Northern Soul scene’s best dancers, including some of the original folks who danced to ’60s soul records at Salvador’s function hall at the time of the Dundee soul scene’s beginnings, which occurred at this same venue. Stokes, however, gained access to the church itself, laid down a dance floor, obviously requested period “costume” for the participants (i.e. tank tops, long skirts, soul-club patches, and even the ’70s-ubiquitous beer-towel-tucked-in-belt), and set the wheels in motion for a proper reenactment of an original Northern night.
The film, however, didn’t win the Beck’s Futures award in 2006 for just shooting people dancing to Honey Townsend’s “The World Again.”
In far too many contemporary let’s-call-’em “social” artworks – forgive me; I don’t know the academic term for it – the medium of expression to an audience becomes film by default. It’s as though so much time, effort, and thought has gone into the production of the social event that the means of preserving the work and engaging an audience with its results are a brief afterthought. And that’s absolutely fine: The act itself was the artwork; the documentation merely the way of getting some notoriety and perhaps renumeration for it.
But “Long After Tonight” is, quite simply – and quite beautifully – a film. The staging of the act was merely Stokes’ way of elegantly capturing for, and transmitting to, an uninitiated audience the ecstatic feeling these dancers relate to the music and, more importantly, to the act of the dance itself.
An old soulie at a nighter in London – a denim-clad, Yorks.-accented, unreconstructed, Chelsea-loving skinhead – once told me that the entire basis for Northern Soul was “passion.” It’s what guided his every move. It’s what made him follow Chelsea through all the rough years and into the 21st century, and what made him sob like a baby at their run of Championships and Cups. It’s what guided the raising of his children, with no money or tangible objects to provide them with. And it’s what kept him up all night twice a month even in his 50s, dancing to Frank Foster’s “Harlem Rumble” and Norma Jenkins’ “Aeroplane Song.”
And it’s what guides Stokes’ film. Not just that understanding of Northern as a passion, but as a spiritual one, and as a passion that operates like a pre-industrial folk play, from a time when the seasons weren’t divided into individual years but simply cyclical. Because Northern Soul, as Stokes’ title implies, is a continuous cycle of dancers and dances, the two of which, as Yeats might point out, are hard to tell apart. Which makes his looped film perhaps the only appropriate way to convey the rising and setting suns of the continuous Northern nights.
Its “morning” is a shot of Saint Salvador’s as urban idyll, sitting next to what seems to be a block of council flats, as though upon entering one was, indeed, leaving a world of work-a-day industrial Scottish normality. Its “night” is a finishing shot of the building from a slightly different angle, with only the building itself immediately visible, as though upon leaving, the visitors have been scrubbed of their earthliness in favor of ecstasy. (I can’t imagine how Stokes got these shots, looking at Salvador’s on the map, sitting smack in the middle of Dundee’s urban center.)
Throughout the looping installation, “Long After Tonight” shows us the reveling independence of the dancers – Northern Soul dancing is a communally pursued act, but one which must ultimately be performed entirely on one’s own, not unlike philosophical christianity. With the interspersed visuals from the church itself, Stokes makes these allusions clear without clubbing us over the head with it: The careful, ritualistic preparations and movements of the dancers and their instinctively, religiously understood use of space – as an anthropological study, one might be forgiven for mistaking the dancers for participants in the iconography surrounding them.
Stokes’ film stands as one of the more triumphant moments of aesthetic artmaking through social/event-based practice, perhaps alongside Deller’s Folk Art show at the Barbican, made the same year Stokes’ created “Long After Tonight.” And as this kind of artwork becomes more and more prevalent in the UK and the States, particularly with similar successful pieces such as Phil Collins’ The World Won’t Listen series, it’s a unique opportunity to see part of an extremely important movement.
* Below are Youtube clips showing unused outtakes from Stokes’ film, one simply played at full speed. It seems unlikely that these accompanying tracks are what were actually being played at the moment, although Connie Clark, Frankie Beverly, Popcorn Wylie, most of the tracks, are an apt example. As an illustration of the kind of ritualized movement Stokes shows, these work, but are by no means a replacement for the piece itself.
100 Miles, 100 Years 