Peter Reder

This was a site-specific video installation at Toynbee Hall, London.

 

Both my parents grew up in East London, and Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel was a place they both went to for evening classes and companionship in the 1940s.  My dad did a psychology course and my mum did musical appreciation.  I filmed them returning to Toynbee Hall for the first time in fifty years.  The highlight was my mum walking onto the stage of the theatre and giving an impromptu demonstration of the Margaret Morris dance movements she learned as a girl.  I projected these beautiful images directly onto the red velvet curtain of the theatre, giving them a striated, ghostly texture which fitted the film perfectly.

 

The piece was a tribute not only to my parent’s personal experience, but to the notion of education and self-improvement for the people that Toynbee Hall seemed to represent.