Projects
In the Cheesegrater
In the Cheesegrater
Into the Cheesegrater invites audiences to step inside the shiny chrome wind tunnels that populated Black music videos of the 1990s/2000s. It brings together immersive technologies, cutting edge choreography and Selina Thompson’s unique combination of politics and irreverence.
What can we learn by stepping into how we used to imagine the future? What is the offer that celebrities make to us through the music video, and what happens when we accept it? What is the future of the body in a world where the headset might make everything that we thought immutable, transient?
Experiment
£5,000
Aims of the project
Enter the Cheesegrater makes a simple offer: live inside the glamour and the power of those iconic fish eye moments and bask in a moment of pure charismatic power. But what happens when we stay too long? How do we consume that art now we know how toxic the environment in which much of these illusions were created in was?
Exploring the cult of celebrity, the joy of Black dance and the risks of wearing somebody else’s skin, Enter the Cheesegrater takes us further and darker than we’ve ever known before.
An immersive piece made for one individual at a time, the piece is part of a wider body of work planned to complement a jukebox musical using the Missy Elliott back-catologue.
This is our first active R+D into the project and will see us developing a immersive technology script, learning more about immersive technologies available to help us search out the best to transport our audiences into the cheesegrater!
Meet the artists
Selina Thompson
Lead Artist (Artistic Director / CEO of STL)
she / they
Selina Thompson Limited are a Birmingham-based company who make passionate, rigorous, political work, full of joy, but with a clear focus on those excluded by society at large, and how the politics of identity define our bodies, lives and environments.We have made theatre shows, installations, workshop plans and radio work for pubs, clubs, shopping centres and performance spaces across the UK and the world.
‘A force of nature’ (The Stage)
‘An inspiration’ (The Independent)
Our acclaimed theatre show Salt documenting Selina’s experience of retracing a route of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle by Cargo ship has toured to four continents and won The Stage Edinburgh Award; The Total Theatre Award for Experimentation, Innovation and Playing with Form; and The Filipa Brangaca Award for Best FemaleSolo Performance. Listed 4th in BBC Front Row’s The 10 Biggest Risks in 21st CenturyArt (February 2020), salt has since been made into a major award-winningcommission for BBC (first broadcast October 2021). In 2021 we made salt: dispersed a film adaptation of the stage show which continues to be screened nationally and internationally.
Race Cards is our constantly growing installation and archive, a room containing 1000questions about race. Audiences are invited to read them all: on the condition thatyou answer one of them. Updated every 9 months, the work has toured since 2015across the UK, Canada, Ireland, USA and Germany and continues to tour.
Most recently we have premiered the stage show Twine (The Yard and Fierce Festival2024), part of wider project Canopy, Our ongoing, artist driven research-led, co-designed and multi-stranded exploration of adoption narratives across the world.
Pippa Frith
Executive Producer at STL
she / they
Toni-Dee Paul
Associate Director at STL
