Synopsis

Combining poetry, dance, music, and archival audio, "Danse Macabre" paints a portrait of the human psyche, drawing on the work of Dr Carl Jung. The film explores the different aspects of the conscious and unconscious minds which are represented through character performances from dancers, singers, unseen voices, and musicians. Underscoring the film is the wisdom of ancestral memory, depicted via the embodied knowledge of the Yoruba Egúngún masquerade. The work is an inquiry into the human condition, exploring the parallels between modern psychology, aspects of Yoruba culture, and east Asian understandings around life force and energy. The work is a play on performance, synthesising styles from a range of geographies, including references of Yoruba dance, songs and proverbs; contemporary electronic music; Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”; Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”; and the work of Marina Abramovic. Supported by Film London (FLAMIN), Artsplit, Legacy Arts Foundation, and Dr. Nadine Siegert.

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Screenings

Cast and crew

About the director(s):
Tobi Onabolu:
Born in London, Tobi Onabolu is an artist-filmmaker and writer, who lives nomadically with a base in Grand Popo, Benin Republic.

Interrogating the process of inner child reconnection, Tobi uses his body and lived experience as a conceptual point of departure, centring an interrogation on intuition. His practice is concerned with expanding consciousness through space and across time, as an avenue through which to explore the embodied behavioural changes that necessitate and are necessitated by personal and collective healing.

Playing with breathwork, movement, and dance, his work is a meditation on the ethereal, considering humans beyond their physical form. His practice of existing beyond borders proffers a contemporary re-imagination of the commonalities found in indigenous philosophies across the globe, ultimately probing a more intimate connection with our physical, collective, planetary and astral bodies.

Considerations around the divine and the supernatural feature recurrently in his cinematic dreamscapes and meditative soundscapes, which invite reflections on modern psychology, east Asian practices, and west African wisdoms, which are equally platformed alongside one another. He holds an MA in African Studies from SOAS, with a thesis on his great uncle, artist Chief Aina Onabolu, the founding father of modernism in Nigeria.


He was a Film London (FLAMIN) Fellow (2022-23); a G.A.S. Foundation Fellow (2023); an Artistic Advisory board member for Culturescapes Biennale, Basel (2022 - 23), and a guest curator at ART X Lagos (2022).

Gallery