Pink Palace presents an incredible work from 1986 filmed locally at the Chisenhale Dance Space in Victoria Park and on location in and around Hackney Wick by avant garde film maker Charles Atlas.

Throughout his career, Atlas has collaborated with key figures from a range of disciplines, expanding the relationships between dance, music, theatre, video, fashion, and television.

Atlas’s experimental works from the 1980s integrate fiction and documentary in uniquely stylized portraits of urban subcultures. His video Hail the New Puritan depicts a fictionalized day in the life of the Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark as he and his company prepare for a performance of his 1984 work New Puritans. Atlas uses the inherently theatrical nature of dance as the departure point for an exploration of the unstable boundary between fantasy and reality, a boundary further tested by the work’s inclusion in a regular program of dance documentaries on British public television in 1986. 

“Combining mock interviews with footage of the company’s surreal productions, Hail the New Puritan is a vivid time capsule of Clark’s milieu at a moment when London’s fashion, clubbing, and art scenes intersected and reverberated throughout popular culture. With production design by Leigh Bowery—and a soundtrack by The Fall, Glenn Branca, Bruce Gilbert and Jeffery Hinton, it emphasizes the creative cross-fertilization that is at the core of both Atlas’s and Clark’s work.” MOMA

Programmer – seeing this late night on C4 in 1986 I was mesmerised by the talent and hotness of Michael Clark, and transfixed by the larger than life persona of Leigh Bowery, in 86 the film was inspirational, now it serves as a document to the avant garde Hackney art scene.

Please note there are NO ads or trailers, we start on time!

Pink Palace is a super low fi highly relaxed event that takes place in the basement bar, its a safe queer space so come along and catch some queer film and pop culture history, each week the film is introduced by curator Andrew Woodyatt, and feel free to stay and chat afterwards, participation is encouraged!