Review: Benji Reid: Find Your Eyes at Manchester International Festival
14.07.2023 - 10:49
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
If you’re going to introduce an audience to an entirely new medium of performance art, you better be able to bring the goods.
Fortunately, the man at the helm of ‘Find Your Eyes’, showing as part of this year’s Manchester International Festival, is more than capable of delivering.
Last night, Benji Reid, a pioneer of hip hop turned award-winning photographer, invited the audience behind the curtain to witness his creative process as he created live photography that explored vulnerability, tragedy and triumph.
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In recent years, Reid has become known for his defiantly original and unapologetically raw images - one of him as an astronaut defying gravity and drifting towards a window, tethered only by an image of his daughter below won him the Wellcome Photography Prize in 2020. But his career has spanned several disciplines - all of which intersect in his latest piece of work.
He began as a popping dancer for Broken Glass, one of the UK’s pre-eminent breakdown crews, before going on world tour with Soul II Soul. From here he created his own Hip Hop Theatre Company Breaking Cycles, before immersing himself in his latest work as a Choreo-Photolist - someone who combines photography, choreography and theatre.
We may be sitting in Manchester Academy, but we are transported into Benji’s home studio as he creates striking and surreal images of three dancers in real time as their bodies bend, flex and contort in front of the camera. Every shot is projected onto the screens surrounding the stage - and quickly replaced by the next.
Most of the images which flash up in front of us would not make the final cut of a photographer’s