You may be forgiven for anticipating that an exhibition displaying elderly couples ballroom dancing at an East Sussex seaside resort would be less than exciting. But it is precisely this element of simplicity and banality that makes Ian Breakwell’s multi-faceted exhibition, combining a double-screen video installation with postcard-picturesque photographs and memoirs, so enthralling.
Set in the sleepy seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea, Breakwell’s nostalgic montage was commissioned
during his year-long residency at the De la Warr Pavilion – the imposing centrepiece of Modernist
architecture in the town that features as the main protagonist of his film.
There is something simultaneously tasteless and unfitting, yet resonant and pertinent, about
Breakwell’s overtly self-conscious use of the Pavilion as his narrative showpiece. It carries a sense
of mystery and sentimentality that only closely avoids succumbing to cliché, and eventually begins
to befit the tone of Breakwell’s exhibition. As the audience starts to realise that the sun is slowly
setting on the evening, on the town, on the couples and, inevitably, on the viewer, the Pavilion’s
dramatic panoramic windows, looking out onto the washed up shore and the sunlit sky, express a
much more peculiar tone.
The Art Deco severity of the building combined with the cosy stereotypes
of a seaside town, from seagulls to sea shores, starkly exposes the mortality and melancholy of the
people and the places that Breakwell depicts. The permanent, subtle contentment of the dancers
only adds to the prominence of the Pavilion, creating another dimension of stuffy anonymity and
human transience.
Museums Sheffield carefully adds to the airless and inescapable atmosphere of the film by gently
leading its visitors into the dark and over-sized room where it is playing, which suddenly seems
jauntily fixed on at the end of the large exhibition space. The gentle rhythm of Franz Schubert’s
slowed down Nocturne in E-flat Minor glides us into the main room, creating a relaxed sense of
security that dissolves with the development of the film.As you begin to reach the end of the
sequence, transfixed by the combined ease of the lingering music, dancing and sunset, and the
sequence begins to start again with the same mesmerising allure, the endless loop of time, energy
and eventual demise becomes the ultimate metaphor for human existence. Despite the deception
of a disastrous end, as the film plunges into an abrupt darkness to the sounds of breaking glass,
crashing waves, and squealing seagulls, the start of another sequence and the audience’s desire for
its continuance always remains.
Despite its melancholic overtone, The Other Side still retains an endearing and infectious
romanticism that makes it a timeless and age-transcendent piece. As the Tate opens its Tacita Dean
exhibition this week, celebrating film as an art form and the increasing demise of so many mediums
we have grown to use and love, The Other Side tells a tale that is both trapped within its medium
and circumstance, yet ultimately universal and unbound.