'Shut up and Dance'

Hastings, Tom (2023) 'Shut up and Dance'. Performance Research, 27 (3-4). pp. 81-89. ISSN 1352-8165

Text (This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research on 28 April 2023, available online https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2155403. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.) THastings Shut Up and Dance.docx - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (66kB)

Abstract

Ashley Banjo drops to a prone position, fists joined in a handcuffed lock. As the close-up withdraws, neck–knee–police officer come into view: a public lynching amid a didactic sequence of steps. Banjo’s gaze meets the imagined Saturday night audience of Britain’s Got Talent, fixed in a look of televisual pain. Five members of dance troupe Diversity circle him with smart phones drawn, representing Darnella Frazier, the Minneapolis teenager who documented George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer on 25 May 2020. The camera pans, cueing Banjo to join Diversity downstage-centre where the group he heads slowly takes the knee in unison, the voiceover locking this section of the performance: ‘As the world watched on, another Black life gone, leaving what we thought we knew in tatters / What we thought we knew some clearly didn’t, Black lives matter’ (Foolery 2020).

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Part of the journal issue 'On protest'.
Keywords:	protest, performance, Stuart Hall, Black Lives Matter, Britain's Got talent, television,
Depositing User:	Karen Smith
Date Deposited:	01 Jul 2026 13:30
Last Modified:	03 Jul 2026 13:46
URI:	https://theplace.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/6

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