Janine Antoni

Around the World, Around, 1996

Single channel video

Duration: 3:07 minutes

Around the World, Around is a song taught to Antoni by the Shakers during a month-long residency at Sabbathday Lake, Maine—the last active Shaker community in the world. Antoni borrowed these words as the title for her video. The Shakers, so named for their practice of ecstatic dancing that included shaking and spinning during worship, inspired this work.

Filmed in the Shaker meeting house, Antoni held the camera up to her face and began to spin. She starts slowly, but gradually gains momentum until the scene becomes a swirling blur of warm browns and blues. Throughout the video, Antoni's center of balance begins to topple, her feet hitting the ground again and again as she catches herself before falling. Eventually, she can no longer sustain the twirling and collapses to the floor. The camera focuses on a crack in the floor, and the scene fades into silence, broken only by her panting breath. It ends with the distant sound of a passing car.