REEL (2005) is a short, alternating audio and video loop based on footage in the Central ITV news collection held at the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), developed in tandem with the artist book, NEWS. The piece explores the tele-visual representation and rhetoric of dance as a means of ‘cultural display’, and its repetitions and variations in constructions of ‘identity’ as ‘local’, ‘regional’ or ‘foreign’. Sound and video are separated and looped, accentuating yet resisting the mutual dependence of audio and visual cultural cues in the evocation of an ‘other’ time and place. Audio clips are re-arranged to offer a compressed, chronological, cultural soundtrack, while shots are re-edited to focus on moments of anticipation and distraction, synchronicity and absorption: looks, glances, poses, gestures, leaps and turns that prescribe the spaces and boundaries of ‘cultural performance’ and consumption. Layered upon the archived gazes of filmed audiences and performers are those coming to the archive, belonging to voyeurs of the seemingly archaic, whose easy nostalgia is disrupted by uneasy juxtapositions.