Mitch Kalisa's Play It Safe is showing exclusively on MUBI starting October 26, 2021 in the Brief Encounters series.
A RECOLLECTION
It was a weekend drama class where I first participated in an animal movement exercise. I was about 15. The weekend was held at a prestigious drama school and I was taught by some of the MA students.
Animals allocated at random, they encouraged us to explore the intricacies of movement. We had to think about how the specific animals could inspire and define characters we’d been working on. The workshop culminated in a performance, each person was to take the stage and perform for a given time.
This final presentation was the most nerve-wracking of all the performances we all had to do while at the school. However, it was at that moment I was reminded that my portrayal was more loaded than those of my classmates. The room took on a distinctly different tone when I, a Black man, amongst an almost all white class started performing as my chosen animal.
Fast forward to my adult career, I’ve landed working in a mostly white advertising industry and at certain moments, I have been struck with that same ambiguous feeling once again. I wanted to make a film that reminds me of that. I hope Play It Safe can at the very least be a discussion that I wish I could have had back then, but nice to see we’re clearly having now.
Even though creative communities are considered “safe” spaces, I’ve found that sometimes this can be just a shiny overcoat and that at the core, can still harbor an implicit but equally damaging type of racism.
Thinking back to those classes, I found myself having uncomfortably awkward, apologetic conversations from my classmates and teachers after the fact. Although there was nothing overtly addressed in these exchanges, the tone and memory remains sharply in my mind.