Join us at Centrala for the final Digbeth First Friday of the year, featuring a special screening of SWANBACK, a powerful film by Marija Nemčenko that merges fiction and documentary. SWANBACK explores the role of the swan—symbolising purity and aristocracy—in reinforcing power and control within British and Russian imperial histories. Played by former ballet dancer Oliver Connew, the film follows a fictional migrant character, inspired by Lithuanian workers in the UK, who reflects on identity and cultural stereotypes while reinterpreting the iconic ballet Swan Lake.
Adding to the atmosphere, SWANBACK composers Shakeeb Abu Hamdan and Sholto Dobie will perform a live set, using the same experimental processes that they use within the film.
The night will conclude with an afterparty hosted by the Midlands Metro Alliance, filling the space with a dynamic mix of underground music. man_e_faces will kick things off with an energetic live set, followed by LUCA with a breakcore mix, leading into a headlining performance by Tanooki Suit that promises an eclectic range of sounds. Mr Flumpy will close the night with his distinctive beats, creating a vibrant ending to an evening of art, reflection, and community.
This event is open to everyone, so come along to experience a unique mix of film, live music, and celebration as we wrap up the year at Centrala!
Order of events:
Film screening: 6pm/6.30pm/7pm/7.30pm
Live music performance: 8pm
After party: 9pm – late (free entry before 9PM)
About the the film
SWANBACK (2023) 14 min 30 s
SWANBACK is a hybrid film that blends fictional and documentary narratives exploring how within both British and Russian imperialisms the symbol of the swan – associated with truth, purity and aristocracy – has been used to strengthen the structures of oppression in people’s lives and upon their bodies.
The film portrays a fictional character, played by former classical ballet dancer Oliver Connew, partially based on interviews with members of the Lithuanian community, who illegally migrated to work in the UK before Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004. The film also responds to an infamous article printed in The Sun newspaper in 2003 about Eastern European migrants entitled, ‘Swan Bake: Asylum seekers steal the Queen’s birds for barbecues’.
SWANBACK’s diaristic narrative retells homo-sovieticus’ – to paraphrase writer Svetlana Alexievich’s pejorative term for an average conformist person in the Soviet Union – journey as an illegal economic migrant to the UK where he gets accused of killing and eating the royal swans.
The camera follows Connew in the dance studio as he attempts to learn from the 1963 video recording of ‘Prince’s solo. Act I’ from Swan Lake (1875-76) by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with the highly acclaimed dancer Rudolph Nureyev as Prince Siegfried. A production of Swan Lake was repeatedly shown on TV during the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev during the fall of the Soviet Union, forever connecting the ballet to political upheaval.
Last year, after being forced to shut down by Russian officials due to its opposition to the war in Ukraine, Russia’s last remaining independent broadcaster Dozhd TV recalled the historical event by screening the same production of Swan Lake on a loop during its final broadcasting hours.
In SWANBACK the tale of the illegal immigrant merges with Connew’s journey from ballet to semantic dance while overcoming the violence of the imperially constructed art of ballet instilled within his body. Instead of choosing to respond to the violence of ballet altering his body with the violence of amnesia altering his memory, he decides to accept the scars that ballet left upon him.
About the Musicians:
Shakeeb Abu Hamdan and Sholto Dobie, together and apart, unveil a remote sonic partition between their respective abodes in Lebanon and Lithuania. Letting a melange of new and archival material wind around each other, swell back and forth and coalesce into a nebulous mass, they tease the temporality of real time improvisation, opting instead for a near mythical, ghost-like exchange.
Sholto’s self-built organ breathes deep sighs and hisses, meeting Shakeeb’s undulating electronics and ricocheting rhythmics in a series of harmonic, tumbling gestures. Like Limpe Fuchs’ work with Anima, there is space given for elements to clatter and scatter, but also bring towards circling motifs. Organ dirges & patterned drums emerge out of the misty plains, raising themselves skywards.
Sholto and Shakeeb’s own locality might or might not have contributed to their ventures, but we can’t help but feel an imprint embossed in its genetic make-up. Listen closely and one can hear the spectres of regional folk music, ceremonies, lonely streets, day-to-day banality… Together they let their complex inner & outer worlds meet and dance in a sonic apparition.
Shakeeb Abu Hamdan: drums, amplified drums and electronics
Sholto Dobie: self-built organ