With Find Your Eyes, Benji Reid (right) has made a performance that is unlike any you will have seen. Other artists have approached the creative process itself as performance; but no one else has combined photography, choreography and theatre to make such striking, often surreal images to tell an emotional rollercoaster of a story.
Reid himself has coined the phrase ‘‘choreo-photolist’ to describe his approach. Certainly he could be pioneering a new art form, a 3D version of photo-realism that draws on just about every possible performance medium (the music and lighting, for instance, are also key to the event).
Find Your Eyes draws on Benji Reid’s work both as an award-winning photographer and a pioneer of hip hop theatre to create images in real time in front of the audience. He sits at the centre of the stage, his ‘studio’, with three dancers posing for the camera; as he shoots his models, the iamges appear on large screens. The performance priogresses with the photoshoot becoming more and more elaborate, interwoven with episodes of Reid’s own life …
“This performance is a meditation on tragedy and immense joy,” says Reid. “It serves as a conversation with myself to unearth where I’ve been all these years – a dialogue about struggling with alcohol, grappling with the immense pain of my mother’s stroke, and contending with the depths of mental health struggles, shame, and guilt. However, this work is also a celebration of evolution, a journey of moving forward, finding breath, discovering love, and embracing life’s beautiful imperfections.”
Reid’s background is quite unusual. He studied dance, choreography, and lighting design at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance; later he became chief dancer and co-choreographer for Soul II Soul and toured as part of the group. He had a year of physical theatre with the David Glass Ensemble, worked with director Denise Wong and Black Mime Theatre, and eventually set up his own company to develop a hip hop musical style to much acclaim. Reid later founded Process 06 to explore the edicational possibilities of hip hop theatre.
A funding crisis in 2011 meant Reid turned to photography, particularly from a highly personal angle – for Reid photography represents a possibility to celebrate love and fragility, while challenging stereotypes of Black masculinity. It was also something of a statement: “taking pictures became an act of revolution for me. It was an act of defiance that I was still going to continue making work without getting funded.”
Reid returned to theatre with Find Your Eyes, which was commissioned for the Manchester Inetrnational Festival in 2023. It has been seen in several places around the world – Amsterdam and the Venice Biennale in 2024, a Manchester reprise and Sadler’s Wells East earlier this year. The reviews are unifromly impressive: “Reid has taken his vulnerabilities and transmuted them into art. The metamorphosis is overwhelmingly moving said the Observer; the Guardian called it “a powerful show, filled with devastating honesty and wonder”.
The Arab World premiere of Find Your Eyes is presented with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels in the Red Theater at the NYUAD Arts Center on Friday 19 September and Saturday 20 September, both at 7.30m. Tickets are AED 105 and available here.
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