Daniel Eatock - Alarm Dance
I have been enjoying Eatock’s Alarm Dance series quite a bit today. It is a set of films and a form of public art performance that makes me laugh out loud every time, in a good way. Car alarms are a sound we often hear on the city streets, contributing to the overall noise of the traffic and congestion of city life. Eatock engages with that sound with an uninhibited physical performance. He looks like he’s having so much fun, letting loose… something about turning something so inhuman and mechanical - an alarm warning that a car might be stolen - into something so human and joyful.
Check out the series of four quicktime videos: Alarm Dance, Alarm Dance 2, 3, and 4.
Here’s an interesting quotation you will find on the site under the first video:
At the start of the 90s/end of the 80s the underground rave scene reached a peak. As the last excesses of an increasingly totalitarian Thatcherite government intensified, the criminal justice act was passed in parliament. This prohibited ‘gatherings’, as I remember it, of more than four individuals in venues where repetitive beats could be heard.
To an increasingly pilled up and blissed out group of hardcore ravers, this was seen as a fundamental invasion of human rights, quite rightly. There were many acts of defiance, including, when warehouse parties were raided by the police, evicted ravers dancing to the ‘repetitive beats’ of squad car and riot van sirens pulled up outside the venue.
To this day, my friend Will and I, despite the fact that we are now in our mid thirties and attempting to hold down senior management positions, will wave our hands in the air like idiots if we hear police sirens.
Those were the days
Bill Griffin
via: vvork.
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