Zinzi Minott

Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics.

Zinzi explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class. She is specifically interested in the place of Black women’s body within the form.

As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance seeing her live performance, filmic explorations and objects a different, but connected manifestations of dance and body based outcomes and enquiry.

Zinzi is interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage, and how the use of the glitch can help us to consider the notions of racism one experiences through the span of a Black life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories and highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation.

For the purpose of the Live Work Award, Zinzi is looking into what she refers to as “Access to Liveness”.

Returning to her work One Lyrical Bitch Solo, which was created in response to a racist attack on stage, looking at the cost of liveness for her as a Black, working class, dark skinned queer woman and dancer. “Access to Liveness” furthers this investigation in the context of shielding in the COVID pandemic, to consider liveness as a material, the privileges, and dangers of liveness as well as the obstacles, which prevent access itself.

Zinzi Minott

Zinzi Minott, image credit: Anne Tetzlaff