It's Stonewall in My Navel
The impulse to daydream (causing impatience or disassociation in 1st part of video) is met with a forbidding twitch towards darkness that denies the benefit of getting lost in your mind. In the video, the navel-gazing subject travels inside and outside her body, where her navel plays host to revelers at Stonehenge and Stonewall. Uncertain histories, monumental status and ritual are teased and morphed between the two sites.
The Stonewall Inn, site of the liminal 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, was a dance bar. Such places concretize dreams and consequences of queer-dom in the 20th century and beyond (see Pulse slaughter, 2016). Stonewall itself is modeled here based on first person accounts of the iconic bar, where against the full-moon early morning hours of June 28, 1969, queers raged against oppression. They threw pennies, bricks, beer bottles, a trash-can, and a parking meter. In the video they, we, and those tools of rebellion dance, affirming that celebration and protest are not mutually exclusive.
It's Stonewall in My Navel is indebted to:
Shirley Bassey, 1968, "This Is My Life (La vita)", written by Bruno Canfora, Antonio Amurri, Norman Newell; The Friends of Distinction, 1969, "Grazing in the Grass", written by Philemon Hou (both songs were on the June 1969 Stonewall back-room jukebox); Bob Fosse, director, and all the dancers in "Sweet Charity", 1969 film; and Elizabeth Folk, Kate Sorensen, and the Stonewall Veterans' Association.