Filmed in Nairobi, this portrait stars A.T. (Journal du Pôle), a queer Kenyan artist and pole dancer hitherto based in London.

Set to the lilting tones of Ella Filtzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s honeyed rasp, Bloom is a queer African pole dancer’s surreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, inspired by Ballet Black’s A Dream Within a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Filmed against a scene of glossy Anthuriums and fluorescent Birds of Paradise, prisms shift and a vibrant bouquet dissolves to reveal the portrait of an African body wreathed on a steel pole, in various states of limbo, an analogy for queerness itself. In a state of nature, pole dance, like queerness, is innocent. However, stigma attaches a perceived and misconceived immorality.

Through a system of prisms and mirrors, attention is first drawn to an Anthurium’s spike-shaped inflorescence, which bears small flowers with perfect male and female parts. Focus then shifts to a pole in perspective, superimposed against the lingering red silhouette of an Anthurium’s queer premise, with subversive effect.

Credits

Directed, Choreographed, Performed & Filmed by A.T.
Summertime performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong © 1958 UMG Recordings, Inc.
Film editing by Tao-Anas Le Thanh
Captions by Sarya Wu
Produced by Fringe of Colour for the Fringe of Colour Films online arts festival.

Screened at Sheffield Doc Fest 2021