PLANK Magazine and Join Custody Present: 

Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (1985-86) and Matt Price, Support Beam (2025)

To celebrate PLANK Issue 2: Dance, PLANK Magazine and Join Custody present a double feature of films by contributors to the issue. From timing and tempo to the right way to die on stage, the issue explores dance as a shared language across skating and performance, showing how style, timing, and bodily intelligence shape how we move through the world. A reception will follow in the Sun Cinema bar. Magazines and shirts will be available for purchase.

Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (1985-86), 84:47 minutes
Exuberant and witty, Hail the New Puritan is a simulated day-in-the-life “docufantasy” starring the British dance celebrity Michael Clark. Atlas’ fictive portrait of the charismatic choreographer serves as a vivid invocation of the studied decadence of the 1980s post-punk London subculture. Contriving a faux cinéma-vérité format in which to stage his stylized fiction, Atlas seamlessly integrates Clark’s extraordinary dance performances into the docu-narrative flow. Focusing on Clark’s flamboyantly postured eroticism and the artifice of his provocative balletic performances, Atlas posits the dance as a physical manifestation of Clark’s psychology. From the surreal opening dream sequence to the final solo dance, Clark’s milieu of fashion, clubs and music signifies for Atlas “a time capsule of a certain period and context in London that’s now gone.”

Filmed on Super 8 over the course of a single afternoon, Support Beam pairs photographer Matt Price with pro skater Brad Cromer in a quiet homage to 1970s dance photography. The film explores how skaters locate themselves in space, as Cromer hones his characteristically effortless flatground skating. Equisite skateboarding observed as choreography.