Lightning Dance

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
6:03 minutes

Lightning Dance by Cecilia Bengolea is a black and white video that considers the relationship between extreme weather and the body. Alongside the artist, the work features Craig Black Eagle, Oshane Overload-Skankaz, and their dance teams, performing solo and group routines. Dancing on the side of a busy road, their choreography is inspired by popular Jamaican dancehall, a sexualized style of dance that the artist believes to have restorative properties. The thunderstorm offers a natural rhythm for their movements—while rain pours and lightning strikes the dancers’ bodies sync with the low-frequency base of dancehall music, and echo the repetition of windshield wipers on passing cars. Bodies multiply as daylight fades and the scene gets darker, while the performers synchronize in a collective dance. The result is a mesmerizing choreography in which the improvised and dynamic gestures of the performers embrace the unpredictability of the tumultuous weather. In this work, Bengolea puts forward what she sees as the healing powers of empathic and spontaneous everyday rituals.

Trained as an art historian and a choreographer, Cecilia Bengolea works with performance, video, and sculpture, using her own and other people’s bodies as animated sculptures. For Bengolea, movement, dance, and performance stand as mediums for radical empathy and emotional exchange. Making dance a collaborative, liberating practice, the artist considers moving the body to be an inventive act and a means of exorcizing violence and trauma from the body’s memory, in both personal and collective dimensions. For the past ten years, Bengolea has extensively worked in Jamaica, collaborating with the local dancehall scene. She not only explores the role of social street dance and popular culture, but also the relationship of individual and collective bodies with nature. Bengolea seeks to create what she calls “harmonic communication highways” in order to synchronize the self with the surrounding environment, landscape, and wildlife that play leading roles in her videos and sculptures.