Find Your Eyes
- Robert Beale
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Benji Reid
The Production Family
Aviva Studios, Manchester
May 25-30, 2025: 1 hr 40 mins
They say one picture is worth a thousand words: with Benji Reid, self-avowed “choreo-photolist”, you get a lot of words as well as the pictures.
Find Your Eyes was one of the hits of the Manchester International Festival of 2023 and has since been performed around the world. Now it’s back on home turf, and though I didn’t see it first time round, it seems it’s essentially the same show. (The production pictures provided for reviewers are all dated 2023, anyway).
Benji Reid has done something new in this work. He’s a photographer at heart, but combines a projected sequence of his work (on two large screens filling most of the sides of the Aviva Warehouse performance area, which is set up as a conventional theatre) with a kind of slow-mo choreography, as we see him working with three dancers, adjusting their props, positions and movement – turning the practice of a photoshoot into a kind of performance art. You hear his instructions to the dancers, Salome Pressac, Zuzanna Kijanowska and Slate Hemedi, given sotto voce as he picks his angles and adjusts the images to make them into his own creation.
There are title slides for the 10 or so sequences of images (and a demarcation into three “Acts”) and some significant quotations of wise sayings, but most of the explanations come from a voice-over, often telling us in some detail about his approach to his work, his life experiences and his inspirations.
Throughout the whole, there’s accompanying music from “DJs” on side-stage, with wisps from incense sticks wafting over the audience (or at least the front few rows). So it’s a multi-faceted experience, and the credits include dramaturgy by Keisha Thompson, lighting design by Tupac Martir, set design by Ti Green and sound design by Andrew Wong (who is also a creative associate).
Throughout the show, we follow, in real time, the relationship of the giant still images to the much smaller humans moving at the centre. There’s a downside to the visual aspect, as the assistant managers need to position reflectors, set up light boxes, supply props and sometimes hold the lamps, and this can all get in the way of our view of those performers – or at least, it did from the seat I was in.
Yes, but what does it all mean? I hear you say. Benji Reid states at the outset that he’s into “conflict photography” – and the publicity blurb says there’s attention to the Black British experience, Black masculinity and mental health – and you hear him speak about his children, aborted and born, the “cloud of invisibility” over Black people, and his mother in her old age and her dying. It’s a personal unveiling, almost a confession, of who he is, how he is, and how he feels.
The concept, ground-breaking though it was and is, may be difficult to take any further, though. The camera, we all know, is not a disinterested observer: it tells us stories and creates its world. Far from never lying, it can lie all the time, depending on the hand that operates the lens. One interesting sequence has Reid put his camera down and join the human action: no more a viewer and manipulator, but a participant. But that is forgotten in the set of highlights shots that ends the performance.
Reid comes across as a warm and humble personality (and like all photographers, anxious about his copyrights: there’s a final plea from the stage for audience members not to put surreptitious footage on social media). Maybe the live interaction of concept and reality could lead him further.
More info and tickets here
