During a fancy New Year's Eve party, two dancers will try to mock the upper class audience by changing the song of their performance.

Our Take – Small Axe Radical Short Film Reviews by Cole Diment 

Work it Class! is a rare comedy on our festival programme this year. Initially intended as a class critique of art by director Pol Diggler – the dancing protagonists wish to disrupt an elite soiree through disruptive, energetic dance – the film ends up enacting this critique in its inability to consummate its original design. A certain sense of hilarity, an absurdity, ensues here. 

This issue that Diggler faced was the copyright to the music used to structure the dance within the film. So instead of the music that the dancers performed to we have a strange and awkward dance, full of energy, vim and vigour, in almost complete silence… apart from squeaky shoes. 

This issue of copyright has an effect of bringing Diggler’s initial class critique into the very present of the film; instead of only a critique of respectability and taste culture we are also confronted with the issue of access and artistic creativity within the confines of the economic market. Work it Class!’s ability to be a fully fleshed film informed by its original premise is itself subject to classist and economic barriers. 

Diggler utilises this to further create comedy however, flipping this tumultuous decision on its head. As the elites of the film slowly rise in their appreciation of the awkward dance, they themselves begin to look utterly stupid. Their culture of taste, as they one by one stand up or applaud the dancers, beings to look like nothing more than flimsy line-towing. That they would enjoy the half crazed routine of two lower-class dancers in total silence confirms their bourgeois pretences. 

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