Turning

British artist-musician Antony Hegarty, better know simply as Antony, and American video-artist Charles Atlas began collaborating in 2006 on a live music and visual art project titled Turning, which a review in French newspaper ‘Le Monde’ described as a transsexual concert-manifesto. The film follows the collaboration’s performance shows on a European tour. It is a testament to the penetrating, haunting qualities of Antony’s compositions as well as Atlas’ own visionary stage creations, accompanied by interviews with other participating artists, each of whom recounts a dramatic or pivotal moment in their life. But their stories remain unfinished. Instead of words, it is Antony’s music that functions as the lyrical climax and denouement of their intimate personal stories. Antony’s aural creations are saturated throughout by discordance – with society, with the physical body, with assigned gender. Turning is all about exploring these themes and asking questions about sexual identity, femininity, androgyny, loss of innocence and the search for one’s own place in the world, somewhere beyond the oversimplified, binary opposition of male and female.