Donald Shek: Dance With Me at Paradise Works

Dance is a ‘human universal’ – anthropologists have yet to find a society without it. A new, immersive exhibition by British Chinese artist Donald Shek, commissioned by Paradise Works, explores this phenomenon, with a particular interest in the connective power of dance: its ability to speak across cultures and generations in a way that is beyond words.

Rooted in British Chinese experience, Dance With Me moves between the dance halls of first-generation migrants and the underground club culture experienced by subsequent generations. On the face of it, these are different worlds: one dressed up, the other dressed down; one about knowing the steps, the other about letting go. But running through both, the exhibition argues, is the same lifeblood.

Shaped through workshops with British East and Southeast Asian communities in Manchester and London, the show brings together moving image, animation, sound, drawing, print and sculptural interventions within a dreamlike environment where memory, nostalgia and the present overlap.

You’ll arrive in a vestibule, where an arcade claw machine is stocked with fictional pill packets adorned in the graphic language of 1990s and 2000s UK rave. On a phone there plays a video of a solitary figure living life on autopilot, waking, commuting, working and returning home. All beneath a neon sign inviting you to leave your fear behind…

A curtain leads you to the main event: a two-channel installation described as “a shifting digital tapestry”. Across two screens, memories of the dance hall meet the euphoria of the club, as digital bodies move through changing environments, sometimes separated and sometimes drawn towards one another.

Shek, who’s also an architect, has long made work about spaces where several histories exist at once (see 2019’s Augmented Chinatown, which used augmented reality to layer hidden stories onto London’s Chinatown), but this marks a new process: the movements of the animated 3D figures you’ll see on the screens were captured from real performers in motion-capture labs, turning the body itself into data.

The installation is scored with original compositions by An-Ting Chang and Liam Spillane (aka Index|106), moving between euphoria and something more haunting. Sharing the room, photopolymer etchings freeze-frame single moments from the animation, translating the digital image into something physical, slower, more intimate. The ideas spill beyond the exhibition too, through a public programme that includes Dance Box, a DJ-led gathering with live performance, and Lunch Box, an intergenerational food and storytelling event, alongside an artist talk and a drypoint etching workshop.

Paradise Works, home to more than 40 artists and a culture of mutual support, has always been good at bringing people together. This show is about dance’s power to do the same.