Heaven is a Place

This 17-minute collaborative dance film, made with the Plymouth LGBT community, was created as an integral part of the EU-funded cultural project entitled, ‘Heaven on Earth?’, whose overarching purpose was to creatively interrogate the contemporary legacy and relevance of writer, film-maker and activist, Jean Genet.

Heaven is a Place applies film-making research to examine and make explicit identity, memory and place through an entwined process of film and choreography, based on site-responsive physical improvisation and the development of scenarios and movement scores that reflect the personal memories and queer histories of specific locations.

The concept was integral to the EU funding application and was tested through further applications for UK funding. A Genet study day in Plymouth and a symposium in Athens strengthened critical examination and scholarship of the film’s premise during the production process. It adopted Canadian geographer Edward Relph’s research methodology, ‘a phenomenology of place’, to inform the approach to working in ‘queer spaces’ identified by the community. Each location revealed itself over a series of visits, improvisations, the filming and subsequent ‘revisiting’ during postproduction. Genet’s poetic metaphors were integrated to create an interpretive film vocabulary and evoke the oppositional interplay resonating in his work. The research is contextualised and disseminated in a chapter in Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practice and Places (Mock, Parker, and Way, 2017: 191-209).

By focusing on movement-based performance for and through film, Heaven is a Place exemplifies how triangulation of thinking bodies, sexual subjectivities and emplacement can enable and celebrate the acknowledgement, consolidation and reimagination of a community that has been erased in dominant, heteronormative accounts of its city. The film’s public premiere in Plymouth was part of the project design, with subsequent screenings during Plymouth’s first Pride parade and the Brighton Pride community exhibition, and at international film festivals.

'Heaven is a Place' is the title of the dance film directed by Kayla Parker, created for the Plymouth strand of the Heaven on Earth? project that took place from September 2013 to July 2014. Funded by a EU Culture Programme grant, the Heaven On Earth? project involves cultural organisations and artists from Greece, Spain, Turkey, France, and Italy, as well as Plymouth. Heaven on Earth? focuses on human relationships in dock/port cities, in order to promote trans-European understanding, diversity and research and skills development in the performing arts. The Heaven on Earth? project is co-organised by Roberta Mock, Kayla Parker and Ruth Way, and administered by World-Cef Inc. (Greece), with the principal organiser Odysseia theatre company in Greece, LaMov theatre company in Spain, and Symia dance company in Turkey. Associate artists and companies from France and Italy were also involved.

The film 'Heaven is a Place' was made in 2014 with the LGBT community in Plymouth. The film reflects the growing confidence of our LGBT community, which has become more visible in recent years, and now presents an annual Pride in Plymouth event to celebrate queer identity and culture in a city on the far southwest coast of Britain.

[Single channel HD video with stereo sound, 16min 30sec]