Lockhart spent an extended residency in the Tokyo suburb of Goshogaoka, closely observing and getting to know the local girls basketball team that is the subject of her structurally complex study of ritualized motion, collectivity and cultural difference. The uncanny presence of a curtained stage within the high school gymnasium, and at the background of the static long takes that structure the film, lends a theatrical weight to the team’s rhythmic practice and the exercises carefully choreographed by Lockhart in close collaboration with the girls. Matching the intensity of the girls’ practiced drills is Lockhart’s immobile framing, which gives almost Olympian gravity and beauty to the young athletes while also hinting ironically at the inherent heroization of subject cast by the predominately Western ethnographic gaze.

Teatro Amazonas reverses Goshogaoka’s frontal tableau by placing a static camera on the stage of the eponymous opera house, a beautiful architectural folly built in Manuas, in the heart of the Brazilian jungle at the height of the rubber boom. Lockhart’s film stages a brilliant conceptual gambit that bridges geographic and cultural distance to bring two disparate audiences face to face, the cinematic audience meeting the eyes of Manaus locals who were each individually interviewed and invited by Lockhart to hear a minimalist choral work specially commissioned from American composer Becky Allen. Deflecting the traditional perspective of ethnographic cinema Teatro Amazonas celebrates the artifice and absurdities of ritualized culture and engenders a mode of heightened visual spectatorship.