Horror Bodies and Dance Horrors

Bodies in states of ambiguously motivated movement are a mainstay of horror cinema. Linda Williams, in “Film Bodies,” (1991) her essay about porn, horror, and melodrama, and Noël Carroll in his Philosophy of Horror (1990), both point to the Latin root of the word horror—horrere, “to bristle”—as a reminder of horror’s intensive corporeality. In this, they develop a choreographic discourse of horror, elaborating on the same kinds of bodily experiences Chimutengwende discovered in his studio research. Carroll, for his part, lists what he terms horror’s “automatic responses”:

Williams dials these sensations into the experience of ecstasy: “the body ‘beside itself’ with […] fear and terror” (1991:4). She further socializes these impulses in the case of horror cinema and its literary progenitors as bodily compulsions overwhelmingly feminized. “Torture the women!” as Williams reminds us, “was the famous advice given by Alfred Hitchcock,” such that “the bodies of women have tended to function” in the horror genre “as both the moved and the moving” (1991: 4–5). The language of the kinetic here invokes the there/not-there qualities Chimutengwende attributes to dance itself. Horror cinema’s bodies, its off-screen audiences and especially its on-screen women, are those whose very presence is haunted by external motivating forces both absent and deeply corporeally felt. And it is these ambiguous bodily states, too—the body as mediator for things not there—that call into question exactly who or what is controlling the movement when someone moves in horror.

If horror’s sensorial regime amounts in this way to a kind of ambivalently authored, automated physical agitation, it is then no surprise that its cinema has so frequently turned to the worlds of dancers. From the nervous ballerinas of The Red Shoes, Suspiria, and Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010), to the gruesome contemporary dance ensembles of the remade Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018) and Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018), horror cinema shows the dance world automating and taking possession of the bodies, souls, and psyches of people who dance for a living. Dance itself, of course, affords horror a rich gymnastic terrain for depictions of malevolent entities, supernatural forces, and physical-psychical traumas. Dance can show bodies contorted and twisted, humans doing things so extreme there must be something else at play, people taken over by ecstatic throes of movement, or conversely in disturbing command of their limbs.

It is dance institutions and dance industries themselves, though, that horrify in cinema’s dance horrors. Agents of authority and abuse, dance establishments control the movements of dancer- protagonists in these films; social, supernatural, or otherwise ecstatic forces destroy or place dancers’ bodies “beside themselves” such that the very figment of the self is disintegrated. Through the figure of the dancer, in other words, cinematic horrors deliver ecstasy as a threat to the integrity of individual embodiment. And where these imperiled dancers are white women, as they so often are in this tradition of narrative cinema, whiteness itself is then also staged as an imperiled phenomenon that is innocent of the horrifying histories, racializing terrors, and material dispossessions securing these dance establishments themselves. For, through ecstatic dismemberments of white femininized bodies, cinematic dance-horrors call up enduring anxieties concerning bodily self-possession: a hallmark of white subjecthood produced from the same projects of colonial-capitalist conquest operating through McKittrick’s “multiscalar discourses of ownership” and pivotal to liberalism’s past and present.Footnote ⁵

There are commonalities among but also disjunctions between horror cinema’s obsessive return to the worlds of dancers, and Chimutengwende and collaborators’ dance-theatrical investigation of the horror genre, which together motivate a rethinking of bodily “possession” as a figure in theatrical and cinematic fantasies of racial and bodily integrity. Tracking first through horror cinema’s fascination with the deadly techniques and industries of ballet in The Red Shoes and Argento’s Suspiria before then reflecting on It begins in darkness as an example of a horror turn in recent experiments in contemporary dance, I explore how dance horrors can contest liberal ideas about dance’s very potential for terror and transformation.

There are plenty of screen horrors where dancing figures prominently, but of specific interest here are films depicting horrifying dance establishments. Warranting attention in this respect also are films exploring dance as a death-trap in contemporary and popular idioms, including notably Guadagnino’s Suspiria and Noé’s Climax, showing dance workers confronting the death-dealing historical and socially reproductive conditions of their own dance enterprises.Footnote ⁶ The dance films in question here though, are those that take ballet as an exceptional site of concern for the perils of white embodiment. In so doing, these films by Powell and Pressburger and by Argento cause trouble for bodily self-possession as the guarantor of a properly realized liberal subjecthood.Footnote ⁷ Likewise, It begins in darkness is by no means alone as a contemporary dance work oriented towards horror tropes and atmospheres.Footnote ⁸ Of particular importance here is a number of theatre dances of the past decade staging horror and horror-adjacent genre experiments, or explorations of haunting or ecstatic experience, by black dance-makers in African, Caribbean, European, and North American contexts.Footnote ⁹ These are varied works deserving nuanced attention tuned especially to what scholars Rizvana Bradley (Reference Bradley2017:154n3), Adesola Akinleye (Reference Akinleye and Akinleye2018a), and Tia-Monique Uzor (Reference Uzor and Akinleye2018:38–39) have underlined as the geopolitical and cultural contingencies of blackness across global dance fields.Footnote ¹⁰ A compelling entry point into such an exploration, though, resonant with ideas and methods in Chimutengwende’s work, is represented in Mlondolozi Zondi’s essay “An Impossible Form: The Absence That Keeps on Giving” (2024).

Focusing on the work of Faustin Linyekula and Germaine Acogny, Zondi draws on ideas developed by Fred Moten (Reference Moten2003) and Bradley (Reference Bradley2017) to formulate “‘anarrangement’ as a black aesthetic operation” in contemporary dance (Zondi Reference Zondi2024:24). Zondi expands on Moten’s “anarrangement” and Bradley’s “antichoreography” in theorizing an approach to black dance that is: “not about re-furbishing mastery but rather the total destruction of mastery and the forms that sustain it” (2024:24). Zondi proceeds to offer a powerful theorization of the ordering impulses of choreography and colonialism, and of “black dance” as a possible antichoreographic “attunement to the forgotten and effaced shadows and ghosts appearing only as unreliable flickers in the moment of performance” (40).Footnote ¹¹ Zondi’s mobilization of anarrangement for dance chimes closely with the ghostly movements of Chimutengwende’s improvisation-based practice, engaged as it is with its own “unreliable flickers” of colonial hauntings. It begins in darkness does anarranging work with the figure of the haunted house, specifically the colonial possession of the stately home and its petrification of plantation economies.

Figure 2.

Rhys Dennis rehearsing It Begins in Darkness at Newstead Abbey, August 2021. (Photo by Ben Harriott and Amanda Russell)

Across all three of my dance-horror examples occur scenes of improbable movement, where dancers are seemingly possessed by or taking possession of a force external to themselves, suspended in a tussle for bodily autonomy. Despite a shared choreographics of possession, though, these are disjunctive examples of moving in horror: one concerned with the perils of white disembodiment onscreen, the other with black togetherness in theatrical space. McKittrick’s reflections on bell hooks’s ideas about race and terror (hooks 1992) illuminate this disjunction. “Black geographic togetherness,” writes McKittrick, represents “the sociocultural pull away from what bell hooks describes as terrifying and deathly representations of whiteness, or, the sociocultural pull into black spaces” (2006:13). Through the lens of these theorizations of racialized terror and survival, common questions emerge between the ballet-horror films and It begins in darkness about the ways dance can shore up or conversely derange regimes of racial terror. Attending to such questions, I trace the dance-horror conjunction through two parts, reflecting along the way on my own racialized personal encounters with these instances of moving in horror. First, I explore the ballet films about white women in peril, films that address me directly as a white woman trained in and maintaining a fairly horrified relationship to ballet. Then I think in conversation with ideas offered by Chimutengwende and cocreators Ming, Ogunnaike, and Ouro-Gnao about It begins in darkness, via their experiences of making it and mine of watching it. This dance finally emerges as a choreographic exorcism of the sites in which it was made, sites standing more broadly for what Chimutengwende has termed “the world or civilization as haunted house” (2024).

“ballet’s going to kill you”

I have always felt personally drawn to horror films set inside ballet institutions where dancers meet grisly ends. Far from recoiling from such images (as Carroll might imagine of horror audiences) I enjoy watching these films and feel at home with them. This is surely in part due to an instinct to work through my experiences of training in a professional ballet school in London during my late teens. The uncommon and at times punishing physical, psychological, and social discipline, but also the audacious camaraderie built among students in the face of our disciplinary ballet authority figures—a camaraderie rarely acknowledged but that chips away at the competitive sociality expected of and imagined for ballet dancers—all find their way into the onscreen worlds of The Red Shoes and Suspiria, where the ballet establishment engenders existential threat, bodily dismemberment, fear, gore, and, ultimately (in some cases) feminized survival.

One need not have been a ballet dancer, though, to know that ballet is horrifying. Ballet is a horror subject quite exceptionally because of all of the ways it makes bodies available for possession by something beyond the self: the supernatural characters and evil doubles appearing throughout the classical canon; the hollowing-out of the self of the dancer through ecstatic experiences and the (reputed) transference of agency to teacher, choreographer, or impresario; the loss of bodily autonomy through the automating nature of technique and regimented corps de ballet; bodily splintering or modification through injury, extreme dieting, and the daily gruesomeness of the practice (peeling skin, bleeding toes, cramping muscles—a horrifying experience indeed where someone else seems to be making your muscles move); the apparently superhuman skill through which, in virtuosic moments, dancers acquire special powers; the cultures of control and harm in punishing studio practices and abusive professional relationalities; the ballerina herself, devoured by her own ambition.Footnote ¹² All these modes of professionally sanctioned self-disintegration are summoned in what I think of as the “ballet’s going to kill you” cinematic tradition, exemplified prototypically in the works of Powell and Pressburger and of Argento. These films dramatize the ballerina in peril, distilling ballet’s taxonomy of horrors into brief dancing scenes where the dancer’s body seems to move impossibly because of or in struggle against some kind of external force. By distilling ballet’s horrors through the specter of possession as a risk taken on by (invariably) white ballerinas, these scenes also ground their horror in anxieties about another horrifying tradition in ballet’s discourse: a concern for the integrity of white embodiment.

In The Red Shoes—a kind of ur-text of the cinematic ballet-horror—the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen is transported to the world of professional ballet and a company more than slightly resembling the Ballets Russes. In this consumed-by-ballet story, the actions of the young British dancer Victoria “Vicky” Page (played by Royal Ballet star Moira Shearer) are not only controlled by those around her, not least the impresario Lermontov, but also seemingly determined by a force bent on the destruction of her very self, ambiguously possessed as she is either by “some foreign spirit,” a suicidal intent, or the red shoes themselves when she throws herself under a train in the film’s final passage (Schofield Reference Schofield2018:492).Footnote ¹³ It is a memorable scene inside the film’s extended ballet sequence, though, that most intensely locates the control of Vicky’s body outside herself and prefaces her inevitable dance-or-death (or dance-to-the-death) demise.

Towards the beginning of the centerpiece ballet, the ballet’s protagonist (played by the Vicky character) is tempted by “the shoemaker” (played by the company’s Ballet Master Grischa Ljubov, portrayed by Léonide Massine) not so much to put on as to jump into a pair of red pointe shoes. Shot low, from the shoes’ height such that Vicky’s head and eventually full body are sliced off as she moves forward, the scene has Vicky approach the red shoes through a flighty allegro sequence, arms and face primed as if about to dive into water, before jumping up and directly down into the shoes awaiting her as they stand seemingly of their own volition already en pointe. What makes this a magical-seeming movement where the shoes pull an automated Vicky into them is not only the impossible high-pointe landing (metatarsals would fracture) but also the post-production trick where the shoes’ red ribbons tie themselves up at high speed, tying Vicky in, without her assistance. Here, the dancerly ritual of tying one’s own ribbons, a self-readying action automated over years of practice, is overridden such that the shoes join the cast of characters to whose interests Vicky’s own are subordinated. Merging at this moment with the character she plays in this ballet-within-the-film (the enchanted dancing girl), Vicky’s desire for and by the shoes is voracious and sets the terrain for her final self-annihilating leap onto the train tracks. Ballet here kills its ballerina by becoming, when she is inside the metonymic ballet shoes, a self-consuming vocation.

Figure 3.

Pointe shoes scene (with Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, Robert Helpmann as Ivan Boleslawsky, and Léonide Massine as Grischa Ljubov), dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes, 1948. (Film stills courtesy of Arabella Stanger)

Pointe shoes also feature in a typically fantastical ballet scene in Suspiria, a hyperstylized supernatural horror with a shocking palette (drawn from another fairy-tale source—Disney’s 1937 Snow White), about the investigatory and survival efforts of the young American ballerina Suzy Banyon (played by Jessica Harper) who has unwittingly joined a ballet academy, sited deep in Germany’s Black Forest, run by a coven of witches.Footnote ¹⁴ In this scene, Suzy has just been stunned by a shard of light piercing her eyes via a triangular mirror manipulated in the corridor by two of the academy’s residents. She arrives entirely unsettled, trancelike, at her first rehearsal with the intimidating Miss Tanner. After some hushed solidarity from her friend Sara, who notices that Suzy is perhaps not herself, the dancers take to the floor at Miss Tanner’s instruction to perform some high-energy “exercises.” The dancing here is improbable not only because Tanner’s previously initiated “warm up” lasted all of 10 seconds and involved no movement whatsoever; but also because everyone commences the various elaborate enchaînements automatically, with no instruction. Suzy requests a moment’s rest, at which point Tanner commands her to dance. The scene then unfolds as a staging of ballet’s pedagogical sadism: Suzy is unstable, clearly not “inside” her movements but stumbling through the sequence compelled by Tanner’s voice or, indeed, some other force.

Towards the end of the scene the camera pulls up, revealing Suzy alone now bathed in red light, having risen onto and tottering en pointe (the last place one would elect to be when feeling faint) before collapsing unconscious, blood oozing from her nose and mouth. The high camera angle prompts Charlotte Gough to read the scene “as though Suzy’s soul had left her body,” the process initiated by the bewitching light complete now that the dancer’s body is no longer her own (2018:62). The violence of the scene is first embodied in the ballet pedagogy/sadism alignment perfected in Alida Valli’s performance as Miss Tanner; Valli was a favorite actress of Mussolini’s and so is just one of Argento’s nods to a deeper sociopolitical terror in the echoes of fascism haunting the film (Howard and Murphet Reference Howard and Murphet2022:65n2). But the violence is also embodied in Suzy the moment she leaves her body, which prefaces by inversion her later choreographic survival technique. As Gough observes, Suzy is able to locate and ultimately dominate the witches’ secret lair by “covertly counting out” and then retracing her teachers’ steps towards it, taking possession of others’ movements as a remedy for, or reproduction of, the institutional violence meted out by the academy on its students (2018:63).

Figure 4.

Dance rehearsal scene (with Jessica Harper as Suzy Banyon), dir. Dario Argento, Suspiria, 1977. (Film stills courtesy of Arabella Stanger)

In both these scenes the self-possession of the highly trained dancer gives way to her control by something else, ballet compelling the loss of bodily sovereignty. The scenes then invoke plentiful discourses surrounding the physical, psychological, and social risks the practice and industry of ballet itself poses to the health of women and girls who dance it. Indeed, there is a culture of recoil from the violence of ballet centered in concerns particularly about women dancers’ well-being. In her study of the “ballerina body-horror,” Gough offers a summary of such discourse by explaining that “the ideological sphere within which the ballerina exists […] renounces female physical presence,” expanding this point about the detachment of the dancer from her own body through Susan Bordo’s work on anorexia nervosa (1993) and feminized practices of “distance and disdain for the body” (Gough Reference Gough2018:55). Through the lens of this concerned discourse, and at the surface of things, what is so horrifying about ballet is the threat it poses to the ballet girl’s agential embodiment: her possession of her corporeal, spiritual, and social self. But what is also horrifying, in light of McKittrick’s reminder that “violence operates across gender, sexuality, and race through multiscalar discourses of ownership,” is that the prospect of a white woman or girl no longer in possession of herself is itself such a widespread cause of horror. Indeed, to be horrified at the nonsovereignty of white feminized bodies is to participate in a culture of concern for the social reproduction of whiteness itself.

Horror cinema’s preference for white endangered ballerinas is no coincidence. This is not only because of the heightened complex of ethereal racecraft afforded the cinematic image by the figure of the white ballerina.Footnote ¹⁵ That complex is identified convincingly by Richard Dyer when he writes that “the Romantic ballet constructed a translucent, incorporeal image” of womanhood, an image recorporealized in the reproductive couple-form implied in the climactic pas de deux of so many ballets where “the white heterosexual couple [are] the bearers of the race” ([1997] 2017:131–32). Dyer’s reflections on ballet’s translucent and race-bearing dancers ring true in the case of The Red Shoes and Suspiria as each asserts the white ballerina’s encroaching incorporeality, the disintegration of her very subjecthood.Footnote ¹⁶ But, the ballerina-in-peril narrative also points to and occludes something more fundamental, to borrow a suggestive phrase from dance scholar Jasmine Johnson, about ballet as “white terror” (2020:26).

What I want to suggest, in view of the consumed, controlled, ecstatic, nervous, disintegrated ballerinas shown moving in horror in these films, is that the “ballet’s going to kill you” trope not only reproduces white femininity as ontological vulnerability, but may well also dissemble the more fundamental grounding of ballet in historical projects of racialized dispossession. To put it directly: ballet is of course less likely to kill the white women who dance it than those subject to the colonial and otherwise expansionist projects that ballet as an economic-institutional enterprise is often positioned to legitimize, idealize, or obscure. As I have argued elsewhere, ballet as a shifting field of dance aesthetics and institutions was formalized under the auspices of court cultures conducting some of the earliest projects in European territorial expansion, and thus, dissimulated in ballet’s images of all-over harmony and grace is the spatial violence and struggle subtending European imperialism’s structuring precepts of whiteness, civilization, and the human (Stanger Reference Stanger2021:16).Footnote ¹⁷ Key to these projects of racial modernity is their implied and fiercely guarded futurity, guaranteed in the figure of white-feminine reproductivity. In dramatizing the horror of ballet as grave concern for the integrity of feminized white embodiment, then, the films join broader and longstanding discourses of white survival with which ballet is historically bound, inscribing a fear of the loss of self-possession that is, perhaps counterintuitively, racially horrifying in itself.

To clarify: I remember after I left vocational ballet school at age 19 and, as my body started to change the longer I spent away from the rigors of daily training and minimized eating, people, mostly adult white women as far as I can recall, kept telling me, “you look well.” At the time, to hear those words caused me some pain because I knew what they really meant was “you no longer look thin.” Gough’s identification of ballet’s body cultures with “whiteness, lightness, and slenderness” holds fast (2018:55). I wonder now, though, whether there was something more horrifying in the injunction for my recovery from ballet thinness than my early-20s-self had perceived via her professionally cultivated fear of fatness. Might we do well to recoil not only from the “thinness” demanded of ballet girls but also from the “wellness” demanded of young adult women? This wellness attributed to me post–ballet school was a code word not just for the flesh and fat (and, crucially, not too much of it) restored to my body after I’d abandoned my artistic training, but also for the successful reestablishment of my “own” (white) corporeality. It indicated the return of my state of self-possession, and so too my bodily and social preparedness to participate fully in racially coded reproductive futures. “Wellness” enjoins the embrace of a different kind of racialized and gendered training through which women are shaped into vessels for a healthy society. Contemporary wellness industries, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop being only the most spectacularized, are in this respect not disconnected from the concern expressed for the individual dancing girl subjected to the punishing disciplines of ballet.

When Williams recalls Hitchcock’s refrain “torture the women!” (and tortured women for Hitchcock were of course blondes), and when Argento famously explained that he’d prefer to watch a beautiful woman “being murdered than an ugly girl or man,” what is being evoked is the image most commonly made to induce horror in horror cinema: idealized feminine corporeality, maimed (Argento in Heller-Nicholas Reference Heller-Nicholas2015:15). And so, when horror directors turn to the white women and girls of ballet, not only do they find bodies primed for bodily dismemberment in the most stylish or magical of kinetic ways; not only do they source narratives in which the “self” of the dancer is already under the professional command of another; but they also tap into cultural anxieties about the loss of bodily self-possession, invoking discourses of healthy feminine body-knowledge and integrity, bodily self-command and gendered utility so central to regimes of racialized social reproduction. To torture white dancing women, as do the films I’ve discussed here, is in fact to trouble the co-constitutive relationship of whiteness, social reproduction, and integrated corporeality as an organizing fantasy of racial capitalism. The alarmingly ecstatic bodies shown dancing in these films distill their horror from a mass of cultural fears concerning the protection of possessive individualism as a mode of subjecthood predicated on gendered and racialized discourses of ownership. While ballet’s relationship to histories of conquest and ownership is not explicitly staged in any of these films, the ballet horror might be understood to trouble such discourses nevertheless. Uncertainty is introduced to the figure of the self-possessed and socially reproductive subject, and so through implication to the multiscalar possessive economy this figure secures, precisely through dance’s intensive capacity to stage real-time tussles for bodily autonomy. Herein, perhaps, lies dance’s horror. If dancers are particularly adept at oscillating between supreme bodily control and ecstatic release of self, then dance might indeed create scope for discursive trouble in the face of histories of colonial possession and inheritance. An unlikely contact point then opens up between the ballet films I’ve been discussing so far and It begins in darkness, as two kinds of work bringing dance towards horror.

It begins in darkness

In the course of our dialog about his work, Chimutengwende expressed curiosity about what might emerge in thinking—as I am aiming to do here—“about ballet and horror and then It begins in darkness” (2024).Footnote ¹⁸ We wondered how this pairing might become a proposition, to take up Chimutengwende’s phrasing, “in thinking about race in relation to [dance] form.” He explained: “It seems quite straightforward to me, even though there are black ballet companies and black ballet dancers, [that] ballet is a white art form and It begins in darkness… what is that?” (2024).Footnote ¹⁹ The “what is that?” is important. It points to the anarranging impulse in the dance more broadly. Where The Red Shoes and Suspiria ultimately bring into question the stability of self-possessed subjecthood and depend on the defiguration of ballet’s race-bearing white ballerinas to do so, It begins in darkness performs a more expansive disturbance both of colonial inheritance and of racialized claims on dance form itself. Beyond dealing thematically with apparitions of a supernatural kind, Chimutengwende’s dance moves demonically because uncertainty becomes a choreographic mode “integral to the methodology” of its own system (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006:xxiv).

Tendencies toward uncertainty with respect to race and dance form are built into the work’s very inception. As Chimutengwende explains, It begins in darkness is a work “with five black dancers,” made in collaboration with and performed by a group of UK-based artists who together hold expertise in a range of forms. It is a work inspired in part by literary and cinematic works of black horror (he mentions both Octavia Butler and Jordan Peele), dealing with hauntings of the Middle Passage, and performed to date in venues where audiences “tend to be mostly white.”Footnote ²⁰ It is made in an idiom developed from Chimutengwende’s solo improvisation practice that is “not definitely [a] black style of performance” and has “come out of a field of work”—he mentions Judson Dance Theater, US West Coast improvisation, and Deborah Hay—that is “mostly a very white tradition” encompassing “practices of undoing” (2024). In this précis of the work’s inception and situation in its field, Chimutengwende first offers an impression of some of the contested racialized topographies contouring British contemporary dance.Footnote ²¹ As Alethia Antonia, who contributed to the creation of It begins in darkness, has pointed out:

comprised primarily of white people, and thus systematically valuing white over Black aesthetics, contemporary dance spaces have been operating through practices that are embedded in colonial ideology (which include ideas of gender), and engage in “creative” appropriation of Black bodies. (Antonia Reference Antonia2024:60)

Indicating how his work scrambles such investments and impulses to appropriation in this same context, Chimutengwende’s summary of the work’s inception also crucially foregrounds It begins in darkness’s aesthetic propulsion through uncertainties. What is it? Not definitely. Undoing. It is these same qualities that disorganize and so elude capture by the contemporary dance field’s racializing apparatus with respect to the work’s content, form, and affects.

To speak personally to some of its affects in this light: I encountered the work for the first time in October 2022 when it was performed at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts at the University of Sussex. After the show, I remember reflecting with students, colleagues, and friends on the forms of uncertainty the work instilled in many of us, in the context of an audience that was, as Chimutengwende observes, mostly white, on a campus with its own entanglements with histories of empire and anticolonial struggle.Footnote ²² “What does this abstract dance have to do with histories of slavery?” (The work’s treatment of its “theme,” such that it is, is obscure, with no stable cues marking those histories.) “How should I feel about watching this?” (The work withholds narratological, moral, or otherwise interpretive parameters to guide its audiences.) “Is it okay to laugh?” (The work is incredibly funny and then turns on a dime to deadly serious.) It is through these kinds of uncertainties that I felt It begins in darkness called me to witness its workings and so too troubled any of my instincts toward liberal regimes of exculpating morality. As Chimutengwende explains: “It’s important that it doesn’t feel like it’s fully succeeding somehow, that there’s something that’s sort of not quite” (2024). This not-quite-ness, the uncertainty integral to the work’s method and conditions of presentation, prevents its audience from encountering its referent, the “histories of slavery,” with such absolute certainty or moral absolution that any of us can then, as Chimutengwende says, “file that away under things I know about”; released from curiosity or responsibility with respect to the histories’ dis/appearance in the present. Indeed, it is in the work’s insistent anarrangement of its subject that it horrifies: engendering a kind of affective and political disquiet.

The work “wrestles with uncertainty in a certain way,” as dancer Ouro-Gnao puts it (2024), by staging a journey through enigmatic scenes on a bare stage. Five dancers dressed in casually tailored silks and linens engage in a series of actions together. Some of these actions involve exploration and description: eyes closed, tracing out invisible architectures with hands and voices. Some involve summoning and releasing: hands on each other’s bodies, laughing-wailing towards somewhere transcendent. Some actions involve play and games: galloping and growling at one another in a ring-around-the-stage. And many are undertaken with the feel of the provisional, a kind of communal testing-out: bumping into vanished things, performing little solos for one another, comedic, light, and tentative.

Figure 5.

From left: Adrienne Ming, Mayowa Ogunnaike, Natifah White, Rhys Dennis, and Rose Sall Sao perform It Begins in Darkness at The Place, London, October 2022. (Photo by Jemima Yong)

The disquiet of these scenes is carried in the nervy sounds permeating the space: slapping, thudding, brushing made by feet on a miked floor; humming, breathing, snickering, shrieking, weeping, and whispering by the dancers and echoed in Aisha Orazbayeva’s score for violin and double bass.Footnote ²³ In these not-quite rituals, Francesca Matthys has perceived scenarios where “the performers are spirits trapped in this house, indefinitely tracing through their yesterdays” or else “in purgatory where they must try to change the configuration of their current circumstances” (2023). Matthys’s impressions call to scenarios Chimutengwende had in mind: one “sort of like a Scooby-Doo” set-up where a group of young people explore a haunted house and try to exorcise it, another where “these are a group of friends who have just died and this is what happens before you can rest” (2024).

That any of these motivating or received scenarios is barely discernible, barely there, is vital to the work’s demonic qualities. There are two meanings of the demonic in McKittrick’s writing where, aside from referring to “spirits […] capable of possessing a human being,” the term connotes “a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable, outcome” (2006:xxiv). Chimutengwende’s piece brings together these two scales of disorganizing impulse. Through its uncertain scenes It begins in darkness shows people suspended in a world of spirits capable of possessing them or else as spirits ready to possess; but also ensures that the perspectives and even political critique this world might be expected to deliver cannot quite be located, even by those who make it. As both Ming and Ouro-Gnao emphasized during our conversations, their own delicate senses of the work’s scenarios and meanings, whether or not it summons histories or ghosts, were precisely that: their own, not necessarily shared with anyone else inside the work, always on the move and categorically not (to be) determined. It is a cruel and funny scene towards the end of the production that haunts me in this same way with the work’s central question: “What is that?”

Around two thirds of the way into the work, the dancers emerge from a darting-around moment where they seem to have encountered creepy interiors: racing through dark corridors, surprised by hiding objects, covered in cobwebs. One by one they leave their individual worlds and walk to join a line at the front of the stage, before then taking on the physical form of that which might have just horrified them. From stillness faces start twisting. Teeth push outwards; cheeks scrunch up; tongues protrude; jaws drop impossibly low and faces stretch down (the cartoon fright of Scooby-Doo ever-present); eyeballs pop out; eyes disappear behind skin; drool drips down as the poses are held for an impossibly long time. As Mayowa Ogunnaike recalls of performing this scene: “It’s hard to hold that” (2023:21). But then the dancers drop their poses and casually walk to another part of the stage, now reconfiguring themselves into various uncommon full-body tableaux vivants: bodies crumpled, hyperextended, or inverted (upside-down faces becoming strange new upright faces, the proportionality of features all off). The pose is then dropped again, walked away from, and another one picked up: a cycle of noncommittal twisted statues.

This ghoulish but also ridiculous scene gives life to the corporealities of demonic possession as McKittrick describes them: “the human or the object through which the spirit makes itself known” is engaged in “unusual, frenzied, fierce, cruel human behaviors” (2006:xxiv). But something else is happening here, revealed to me by Ouro-Gnao. “We are impersonating gargoyles,” he explained; “I’m not trying to be scary. I’m doing an impersonation—and that’s where the horror and the humor slips in” (2023). The first thing to say about Ouro-Gnao’s illumination of the scene’s matter and affect is that it is indeed both horrifying and funny. Each time I have watched the work, this scene draws the most laughs but it is also the one that petrifies. Petrification, not so much in the sense of cognitive fear but of the extraction of movement from organic bodies, is what I witness onstage—the dancers, as gargoyles, turn to stone—and also describes my own sensory experience of watching. During one performance I was seated directly in front of Ouro-Gnao. As the scene unfolded I wasn’t sure if we were making eye contact through the darkness, although it seemed that way, but I felt frozen to the spot nevertheless, somehow unable (unwilling?) to move while someone became a gargoyle before me. An all-round stillness descends on the room at this point; it is as if by becoming statues onstage the dancers cast their audience as statues in the auditorium, passing in the process the weight of the work back to those who witness it.

Through my own frozen corporeality as I’ve watched this scene and especially as I watch from a position of racialized whiteness, my own and that more institutionally of the auditoria from which I’ve encountered this work, I understand this moment as a kind of redistribution of the work’s thematic and historical burden.Footnote ²⁴ That burden, corporealized in each pose, is not only alleviated repeatedly as the dancers drop their poses and move on; a broader compositional trope of dropping things, or “detachment,” as Ouro-Gnao describes it, appears through the work. But also Ogunnaike’s experience—“it’s hard to hold that”—travels from the stage around a room transfixed, a kind of redistributive choreographics of terror. And this redistributive choreography lives, crucially, in a kind of experiential awkwardness. Ouro-Gnao expanded on this idea when I shared my experience of sitting face-to-face with him during that one performance. He confirmed: he could not see me. But this was because he does not wear his glasses or contact lenses when performing this work, a decision he has embraced so that his performance works on those watching: turning his fuzzy vision into a device through which to stare at an unformed face (holding the eyes of an unidentified beholder) without himself experiencing the awkwardness that can arise from unremittingly seeing another person seeing you.

Ouro-Gnao explained that this back-to-you engagement with the audience—set up choreographically and let loose in his blurred-vision performance mode—is for him part of the disorientating work the dance does with race and dance form, short-circuiting the kinds of racialized expectation imposed on black dancers and so heightened in a work “about” slavery presented in white-majority spaces. As he explained these dynamics:

I’m just going to hold this [stare] as long as possible, and make you feel awkward, because what you do with that awkwardness will help you understand why this work was made in the first place.

He continues, echoing Ogunnaike’s “it’s hard to hold”:

It’s an awkward position to be in, to be expected to make “black work” that is of a certain pedigree; it is an awkward thing we [the dancers] all carry. (2024)

The work’s impact then becomes how the audience “holds that awkwardness” themselves.

These redistributive dynamics, where racially determined burdens are passed over, passed back, and passed around, in turn enact Chimutengwende’s hope that the work wouldn’t release its audience from histories haunting the stage (the point is not to “file it away under things I know about”) and equally well wouldn’t ask the dancers “to drag everything out of their souls for the sake of an audience” (Chimutengwende Reference Chimutengwende2023b:19). “There’s something really important about that for me,” Chimutengwende has explained, “especially with the subject matter and the racial dynamics, that I just didn’t want to go there” (19). As my own exchanges with Ouro-Gnao suggest, the first one in the theatre when I froze and then in our mutually reflective conversation about that very moment, this same commitment is brought forth when white audience members (in my case at least) are brought into the visceral awkwardness of taking on, rather than simply gazing upon, the physical experience of a position hard to hold, modelled by black dancers who pass it on and pass through it.

The second thing to say, though, about Ouro-Gnao’s description of what he is doing during this scene is that the dancers are indeed impersonating gargoyles, embodying a second form of demonic impulse in the work. The scene emerged in rehearsal from the group’s attempt to embody an image Chimutengwende had created in a textual score. This was the image of “a great house […] a property full of painful stories,” from which “gargoyles [peer] out between gothic arches” (Chimutengwende Reference Chimutengwende2023a:13).Footnote ²⁵ Working from pictures of gargoyles and studying their anatomical form, the dancers devised their own impersonations, bringing these semihuman protuberances of gothic architecture into flesh and movement. The compositional process with gargoyles is suggestive especially when thought alongside the residency the group undertook in Newstead Abbey in August 2021.Footnote ²⁶ Taking over Newstead’s rooms and gardens with dancing, the dancers’ residency brings forward another question at the heart of this work: How do you dance in relation to colonial possessions? Chimutengwende offers a simple answer: “the show is a kind of exorcism” (2024). Assigning the status of theatrical exorcism to It begins in darkness prompts the question of how this piece anarranges empire’s architectural inheritance.

Ming was one of the dancers participating in the residency and shared with me some experiences of working at that site, reflecting on her interaction with the space when visitors were not present (as was the case on the first day) and then on the peculiar behavior of this tourist attraction’s visitors when encountering a group of black dancers making their work in the Abbey’s rooms. In both cases, Ming’s experience was one of observing, being held to but also transgressing the spatial and kinetic codes through which heritage sites manage—seal and conceal—their histories. Ming explained that one of the most exciting parts of the residency was being able to take up space in rooms, and zones within rooms, that were usually prohibited. As she recalled: “we are black bodies that get to be behind the line—the ‘do not cross’ line.” And while finding hidden spots to explore and work, “we were everywhere” (2024). Ming’s reflections suggest that for her and her collaborators to “cross the line” and to be “everywhere” was in effect to move beyond spatial codes governing spatial unfreedom as a curatorial measure and practice of antiblack deprivation. Their crossing of those lines activated a principle McKittrick locates at the heart of black feminist geographic practice: “the alterability of ‘the ground beneath our feet’” (2006:146).

Figure 6.

From left: Seke Chimutengwende, Natifah White, Alethia Antonia, Rhys Dennis, and Rose Sall Sao rehearse at Newstead Abbey, August 2021. (Photo by Ben Harriott and Amanda Russell)

The impact of that spatial alterability was felt as visitors arrived at the building during subsequent days of the residency. Ming shared her reflection on the various behaviors she observed on these days, and through which she and her collaborators were positioned into horror-type roles. The dancers were treated like ghosts: “we’re rehearsing in the gallery, moving and speaking, and volunteers were giving tours that were so loud, as if we weren’t there; it was like, we’re invisible.” They were apprehended as apparitions: “people saw us performing and rushed out of the room, to not see us; and we thought this is wild, because how could you not stop and see?” (2024). In both cases, the existence of this group of dancers dancing in the rooms disturbs the site’s tourism culture to the point that their very presence must be sonically or visually denied. Could this be another instance of experiential horror arising through awkward confrontation? Confronted here were those violent histories of wealth acquisition concretized in the stately property itself, histories whose concealment, whose stability, is altered by the dancers’ practice on this ground beneath their feet. As Ming recalled of the group’s communal reflections on these occurrences: “I think there’s an understanding that that space wasn’t made for us to be there and so maybe our bodies were forcing visitors to confront the realities of that room.” She explains: “our work was making visible and exposing” (2024). Ming’s analysis suggests how the presence of the dancers’ work at Newstead exposed the co-constitutive apparatus of whiteness and wealth consecrated at that site while also altering the cultures of spatial availability through which that same apparatus is naturalized. What Ming’s reflections show, in other words, is that the residency was a process of giving range to black dancers’ navigation, and giving prominence to their embodied investigation, of the architecture itself. I remember during my conversation with Ming that her practiced insight into the work’s process led me closer also to understanding Chimutengwende’s elliptical suggestion that the show was a kind of exorcism.

It begins in darkness stages a dancerly exorcism of the multiscalar spaces in which it was made: the grounds, building, and interiors of Newstead Abbey; the broader figure of the stately home invoked inside the work; the British theatre venues where the show is staged; the professional dance field those buildings coordinate; the “world or civilization as haunted house.” It calls up from these sites the terrifying and deathly economic and racial histories on which they are built and disturbs these spaces with ghosts in the summoning. The mode of exorcism, though, is not of course ecclesiastical in nature but rather one of making uncertain these sites themselves by anarranging them through movement. The residency at Newstead Abbey set the terrain for a choreography of spatial alterability with respect to colonial properties; not a reclaiming so much as a derangement of that site. The gargoyle scene, also, deranges colonial architectures. The dancers disturb the racializing logic of distribution with respect to the representation of slavery’s histories, bringing horror and humor into their bodily positions and then, vitally, dropping them, moving on and redistributing the burden, so “hard to hold,” among their audience. By becoming and then unbecoming gargoyles, the dancers also animate and defigure the material forms of stately homes, expanding to the stage the architectural alteration initiated in their haunted-house residency and undoing the stately home’s petrification of colonial histories. The dancers here do not so much repossess colonial properties as render the architectural and economic matter of colonial possessions deeply uncertain, drawing out of this matter the “unreliable flickers” of human histories so often encased, stilled, in the certainty of monumental form (Zondi Reference Zondi2024:40). It begins in darkness ultimately unsettles discourses of ownership dissembled inside the sites of its production, exorcising its subject through a complex of dancerly disturbances: altering spaces, dropping things, redistributing burdens, placing buildings in a state of antipetrification.

“Adding to Me”

If dance’s horror lies in its scope for staging real-time tussles for bodily autonomy, then the works I have explored here channel that horror by troubling “possession” as a multiscalar phenomenon securing colonial inheritance. By introducing uncertainty or disintegrity to locations of such inheritance, be it to the figure of the self-possessed subject (as do The Red Shoes and Suspiria), or to the architectural matter of colonial possessions (as does It begins in darkness), these works declare the creepiness but also the critical potential of dance’s ephemerality: an ambiguous motivating force hovering between there and not there, as Chimutengwende observed of movement and ghosts. But there is one final kind of choreography through which these works show the critical potential of movement for disturbing that which is handed down or else absented in history. To return to McKittrick’s reading of hooks’s thoughts on racial terror: if “black geographic togetherness” enacts “the sociocultural pull away from […] terrifying and deathly representations of whiteness,” then it is surely important whether or not dancers in these dance horrors dance together.

The ecstatic, disintegrating, and race-bearing white ballerinas of the ballet-horrors are in one way or another soloists. Even while conspiring to resist with their peers (as we see especially in Suspiria’s corridor and bedroom scenes), these ballerinas are at their most vulnerable and at their most invested with demonic power when they are dancing alone. Their aloneness not only evokes ballet’s cult-like pyramid structure, where in repertoire and company culture the most important dancers dance alone, but it is also significant that in these “terrifying and deathly representations of whiteness” fear is figured through ballerinas’ exposure to possession as individuals; the disturbance of self-determining subjecthood is why these films horrify. Indeed, it was ultimately my own feeling that I was being asked to dance apart from, to be in competition with, my peers in the ballet studio, even when we were learning our corps de ballet uniformity, that drove me, somewhat horrified, out of ballet school. It begins in darkness, conversely, cannot but be danced together. Although starting as a solo exploration, as is common in Chimutengwende’s improvisation practice, it found its form as an ensemble work: a danced expression of black geographic togetherness.

Figure 7.

From left: Rose Sall Sao, Natifah White, Rhys Dennis, Adrienne Ming, and Mayowa Ogunnaike perform It Begins in Darkness at The Mount Without, Bristol, September 2022. (Photo by John Morgan)

In a panel conversation about dancing at Newstead Abbey, artist and writer Season Butler posed a question about “dance as a practice that can bring embodiment, liveness to contexts that can feel closed, historicised, ‘over,’ and now the property of those privileged to write our histories” (Dancing Museums Reference Museums2021). I hear this question echoed in dance scholar Tia-Monique Uzor’s reflections on black practices of archiving through approaches of liminality, care, and defiance: “we write ourselves into our archives, into what has been made invisible by redaction but is protected and alive in the embodied realm” (2022). In both reflections, not only are practices of solo academic writing by white scholars like me put under pressure as potential sites of historical seizure or closure, but also the plural formulations—“our histories,” “we write ourselves”—are resonant as dimensions of a more radical historicity enacted in black collective praxis. It begins in darkness, too, unfolds through a plural formulation of (haunted) histories and one of joy in the plural.

After watching the show in Brighton in 2022, I remember talking with some of the dancers in the foyer as people were trickling out of the theatre. Ming explained to me then: “there was so much joy in the making of this work.” Both Ouro-Gnao and Chimutengwende expressed this too: the enjoyment that came from the work’s emphasis on making and dancing together. As Chimutengwende explains:

Through these communal reflections, an alternative route then opens up to thinking about moving in horror as the tussle for bodily autonomy. This tussle need not be overcome through the pursuit of individual sovereignty, where self-determination relies on self-possession, but rather implies Vo’s “loosening” through “an acceptance of the body’s nonsovereignty”: a more collective kinetic grammar realized through a release of self via the enjoinment to, and enjoyment of, dancing (and thinking, and writing) in relation. What if the experience of laughing a lot while making a work like It begins in darkness, inside spaces like Newstead Abbey and British theatre venues, articulates a “claim to place,” as McKittrick writes, marked not by “material ownership and black repossession but rather by a grammar of liberation” (2006:xxiii)? The work brings relational liveness and collective buoyancy to what is considered “over” or weighted in painful stories: the stately home, its violent histories encased in stone. The work also makes archives of black togetherness come alive in the embodied realm, surely an instance of Uzor’s defiant liminality. It begins in darkness ultimately alters the spaces of its production by divesting dance of its self-possessive, self-securing, and self-autonomizing properties. Loosening self-determination instead into the collective endeavor of relational enjoyment, of joy in the plural, the work, for all its choreographic uncertainties, enacts in its opening to communal possession a derangement of imperial inheritance. This idea, finally, is conveyed in Ming’s personal understanding of the workings of possession itself. For Ming, possession in this dance was an experience of the nonsovereignty of the individual, of what she describes as “adding to me”: