Ent’racte

(2023)

11:20 minute single channel video

To request access to view Entr’acte, email: hayleymillarbaker@gmail.com

Sitting between silent moving-image portraiture and performance, Entr’acte channels the sudden internal feelings of rage and its transformation into grief, rippling through the body and permeating all levels of the self. Taking its title from the French word ‘Entr’acte’ – referring to an interlude performed between two acts of a play – Entr’acte centres on a female protagonist cast as a vessel symbolising ‘woman’, holding the inequitable weight women are forced to carry and contend with daily, across the multitude of experiences, identities, and roles they play. Entr’acte simultaneously embraces notions of intimacy and intensity to convey women's monumental focus, determination, and power, capturing the moment after an emotional shattering, before a reaction, or external rupture. Neither documentary nor fiction Entr’acte raises a pertinent social commentary about the expectations forced on women – mourning the loss of free expression in a world of social and cultural inequity.

“Women are taught to reserve our emotions, be strong, and carry on because, ultimately, the world doesn’t hold room or reason for us like it does the man. So how do we do that in a world that dictates our bodies, rapes us, murders us, and makes every attempt to control us? Women calculate reactions after an event of grief and rage-inducing distress - we do it so quickly. Do we riot, or do we compose ourselves to be strategic? The issue is in the first instance that we even have to calculate our reactions based on the expectations of us. But here, in Entr’acte, you’ll never know the reaction chosen because witnessing feminine rage is not a privilege I’ve granted you.” - Hayley Millar Baker on Entr’acte.

‘The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.’ – Leslie Jamison, 2014, ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’.