To the sounds of a shifting collage of pop music, three dancing queer bodies move around sparsely lit spaces where fragile walls are falling apart. The transience of the walls, the vanity of the dancers, the chiaroscuro-lit images, and the title of the film take us back to the 17th century and Baroque painting, where the concept of vanitas was used for still lifes that referred to the vanity of life through elements such as fruits and flowers. ‘Vanitas’ is a musical dance work in a decaying, dreamlike world full of fragility and uncertain intimacy, in a constant alternation between being alone and being part of something.
