Gerard & Kelly: Saints at a Disco 

Production | Exhibition Grant

Saints at a Disco, a new film by duo Gerard & Kelly (Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly), represents the culmination of the artists’ multi-year research of and engagement with the music and legacy of Julius Eastman. A requiem for Eastman and other queer saints, the film explores the underground by imagining the disco as the liminal space of the bardo.

Shot in an abandoned disco in Italy, Saints at a Disco renders the afterlife as an ’80s zombie dance party. The film’s protagonist channels Eastman’s ghost as he wanders the bardo, which in Tibetan Buddhism is the state between death and rebirth. Guided on this journey by Joan of Arc, played by the French-Martiniquan drag performer Soa de Muse, he explores the underground—the world of electronic dance music, queerness, and the dead. Influenced by the artists’ study of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the scenario for Saints at a Disco mirrors the bardo of dharmata, a sequence of visions experienced at the moment of physical dissolution. In Saints at a Disco, Eastman’s spirit encounters a pantheon of queer saints on the rotating floor of the disco.