Shaun Gladwell: Broken Dance(Beatboxed)

Overview

Two videos. On one screen, a beatboxer is in a studio. On the other, a break dancer, surrounded by concrete and graffiti. She’s responding to the sounds of the beatboxer. It starts slowly with a stretch of the neck and a flick of the foot. Gradually, out of the beatboxer’s scattered clicks, a full rhythm emerges, and suddenly they’re both going nuts, the dancer falling upwards and sliding across cardboard, in a performance that is disconnected by space and time, but united by music and movement.

This is video artist Shaun Gladwell’s latest piece for the Art Gallery of NSW, and it’s called Broken Dance (Beatboxed). The artist is known for his videos of the body in motion in vast urban spaces. Here, by showing two videos simultaneously, the artist synchronises two disparate times and places. The videos play opposite each other — you can only watch them both peripherally, which emphasises the disconnect. The result is a work that is much more than the sum of its parts.

It's a flat-out great piece of conceptual art. Simple but not simplistic, with enough layers of complexity to save it from gimmickry. The slow moments of quiet, where the beatboxer is swilling water and the dancer is pacing, make the hectic ones so much sweeter — you're just hanging out for these amazing performers to really crank it out. Perhaps the best thing about this work is people’s response to it — I saw people smiling to themselves in the big dark room, really engaging with it. Make sure you stick around; there are multiple videos to immerse yourself in, as well as a talk by the artist on Saturday, September 1 at 1pm.