Not Running, the new film by Rebecca Salvadori commissioned by adidas, is out. I composed the original music and was on set throughout the shoot as musical director and performer.
Not Running was conceived as a laboratory of experiences between running and music. Rather than staging a performance to be filmed, Rebecca set up the conditions for something to happen, and then watched it unfold. After searching for the right place across several countries, she found it at London’s Lee Valley Athletics Centre, where she spent days observing the athletes and their routines before a single frame was shot.
The film was shot live over an entire night, structured as a sequence of exercises: runners following or resisting light and sound, while each part of the team (camera, light, music, movement) made its own decisions within a shared framework. It unfolded like an event without an audience. The film itself was then built in the edit, which for Rebecca is where a work finally decides what it is: a film that, in her words, keeps searching for itself after it has happened.
What the film reflects is the relationship between running, music and light. On the 200-metre indoor track, Charlie Hope’s rotating lighthouse sculpture sweeps its beam while the runners try to follow it or outrun it. A ring of twelve speakers and strobe light turns the building into a single sound instrument, and the sprint track, by contrast, is left almost bare.
The music
The score was written specifically for the film and its spaces. It works with repetition, duration and spatial rhythm, moving in dialogue with the turning light and the runners’ choreographed actions, so that the perception of time is shaped from inside the running itself. On the sprint track the music shrinks to a series of short, sharp sonic cues that punctuate each start and burst of speed: rhythm no longer as an environment, but as something exposed and immediate.
For the film I also wrote an original vocal piece, Each Breath Takes Me Home, on a poem by Olivia Salvadori, performed as a duo by Olivia Salvadori and Coby Sey (two-thirds of GAISTER). The film also features a new collaboration between Charlie Hope and Akihide Monna (Bo Ningen) under the name EhV.
Screenings
Not Running premiered on 26 March 2026 at The Feuerle Collection in Berlin, with live performances, and had its London screening at Ormside Projects on 18 June 2026, with a live set by Charlie Hope and Akihide Monna and a set by Coby Sey. It is now available online, featured by Visionnaire.
Rebecca and I have worked together for many years. We co-founded the collective Tutto Questo Sentire, and we have made several films and live works together, in which her images and my music grow side by side rather than one serving the other. Not Running is the latest chapter of that long collaboration.
Credits
Not Running — a film by Rebecca Salvadori
Commissioned by adidas
Light Artist — Charlie Hope
Music — Sandro Mussida
Contributing Runners: Anna-Luisa Ruther, James Pancaldi, Korede Awe, Michael Afilaka (sprint coach)
Contributing Artists: Akihide Monna, Coby Sey, Olivia Salvadori, Sandro Mussida, Charlie Hope
Producer — Rosie Woods
Cinematographer — Toby Leary
Video Artist — Mark Prendergast
Movement Director — Courtney Deyn
Stylist — Levi Holm Petersen
Sound Recordist — Olly Jennings
Photographer — Fran Gomez de Villaboa
Production Manager — Indy Calland
Management / Assistant — Sanne Huijsmans
Production Assistant — Callum Anderson
Sound Technical Director — Lex Blondin
Sound Technician — Nathan Fustec
Reggae Stack Technicians — Oli Barton-Wood, George Haskell
Lighting Technicians — James Hind, Stanislav Lordanov
Technical Assistant — Jacques Baumgartner
Focus Puller — Kiki Ivanova
Clapper / Loader — Malena Manobens Rodriguez
B Camera — Jude O’Connor
Drone Operator — Barney Clark
Drone Assistant — Ashraf Roustomi
Styling Assistant — Carla Garratt
Colour — Andi Chu at Electric Theatre Collective
Sound Mix — OPM
Edit Assistant & Online — Morgan Perry
Graphic Design — Joe Gilmore
Watch → vimeo.com/1180464546
On Visionnaire → visionnaire.tv
Press
- CLOT Magazine, Maya Elimelech, ‘Not Running’ by Rebecca Salvadori, the beauty of light, sound & existence → clotmag.com