Last words with Rosemary Lee on how dance helps us to understand better who we are...

I suppose the way that I think about who we are at the moment, our psyche, our being – is that we are many things. Many different parts, perhaps conflicting. Maybe what we are trying to do throughout our lives, if we have the luxury to do so is to find bridges between all those things. I think what dance can do is say this is part of you , you can experience this, feel this. There are lots of different things that dance can give you – one of them is how you can be with eachother. How tolerant you can be...How you can give up your ego, or not.

For example, if you’re in one of my pieces, you have to give up your ego. That’s why it can be therapeutic experience because I think the best way to live is fairly humbly. It’s hard I think because what bombards us is presenting yourself and being extrovert, more is better, have confidence, write persuasively, not creatively, persuasively! And nobody seems to question that…

The dance that you and I are involved in...what is it? Is it somatic? We used to call it new dance but we don’t really know how to talk about it. I don’t quite know how to even put it!

Of course it’s a utopian ideal - we all have egos and can’t tolerate things we should but I’m very interested in giving people a taste f this this very equal inclusive approach where everybody is respected fully and the same and everybody is looked after. Just to see if that could then change the way we are, the way we  live with eachother. I really believe in order to dance well, you have to be tolerant.

All those things affect how we live as a community. And then the more individual thing about knowing yourself, I think, for me it’s about a poetic state. It’s a difficult one because I think we are struggling with the borders of what this world of dance is. I really felt that when I was trying to talk about Gill, and thinking about sharing what she did. It’s really quite a small bit of the dance world we are talking about.I don’ know how to explain it. It’s creative, it tries to allow people to express themselves through improvisation… there’s lots of different things in there. I think if were talking about that world, you can learn about yourself through surprising yourself, discovering other places in yourself, its something more subtle than that.

One of the reasons I stay in the dance world is because, I love words, but, as soon as it comes out in words, it writes it in stone. But dance doesn’t quite do that, that’s why I stutter over even trying to answer you. Gill always talked like that in her reflections, keeping things unsettled, questioning. It’s hard though because then people can’t quite grasp it. What I’m trying to do it be clear about what I do but I’m hoping that that doesn’t destroy what I’m really doing which is almost unsayable. That can be seen as a cop out, academically. The closest thing for me, is poetry. It’s a word form. Something about keeping words so open that it unlocks something much bigger than itself. To feel your feet on the ground, is not just to feel your legs dropping, feel yourself being in an alignment but its also about feeling yourself as a single individual standing on the earth for the first time again. To feel connection with the ground. To feel it rather than to know it. All those things are massive and fundamental to our well being, Scary too, because it can leave you in a lonelier place somehow.

 I think they are a resource. When things go wrong, maybe knowing what it feels like to stand on the earth, just for a moment, might get you through. With people I work with, and this goes beyond dance, is that I am hoping I am developing their observation skills. To be more observant in all their senses of the world around them. If you have that, and can keep that open, then there is more potential to finding solutions and the good in something. A mindful state. So knowing yourself, is not only knowing yourself, but knowing everything around you. Dance for me, is part of that practice. How does a technique class link into that? I don’t know. Is it about finding the logic in that, finding the logic in the dance? A lot of it I’m not sure about, but they are good questions to ask, but not to get hung up on them – there’s no definite answer. For years I thought there were these definite truths I thought you’d find. 

Feeling peaceful is important though, in a world which is often not peaceful. We are lucky to have those moments.

Rosemary Lee - Part 3: Have there been any moments of revelation for you in your career?

The piece I always come back to, is when I was asked to make a work in Barking and Dagenham which, I had assumptions about. I thought it was a working class area which probably had a history of racism, I knew there was a trial coming up there for someone who’d had racist treatment. I knew it was also somewhere where the women of Dagenham factory had made a stand, early in the feminist movement. So there was a history of working people, but really struggling I think.

I came and found what else they were struggling with. I was very worried about me as a middle class, white woman coming in and making a work for that community and then buggering off. It didn’t feel right.

I thought, if I’m going to make a public work of art, what can I make which is going to give something to the people, which isn’t just plonked on them, that isn’t just seen as an eye-sore and waste of public money. I also didn’t want to make a live work, I felt it was too risky, too fleeting somehow. So I looked for a space that could house something for an installation that was free.

 So I made a piece with Nic Sandiland. Something that was built for the central library in Dagenham. It wasn’t as widely used as the shopping street but I draw the line at commerce. I won’t make work where people are going shopping! So that was the closest I could get to a public space. I was really pleased with what we made. I felt I was going onto unchartered territory, so I wanted to work with children because I know I can relate to children of a certain age 8-10year olds, wherever they’re from. I worked for a year in a very forgotten little school. They’d never had artists in. They had a huge asylum seeker population. That was really interesting to work with young children who were trying to get a grip on where they lived, where home was. I found it really sad and upsetting, but also really amazing because the kids were just incredibly resilient to find their way. But dance for them, I felt, did bridge the language gap found a primary school. There were kids in the class who were really struggling, but weren’t doing so after the project. It re-affirmed my beliefs that imagination, and drawing on children’s imagination into their own bodies, to actually transform themselves in their bodies is very empowering. Which is probably why sport is so good for kids in those kinds of areas. I saw these boys transformed when I told them they were ‘weathergods’  - they could bring the rain in or stop the sun shining just with very slow gestures of the arms. A few of the boys, who really didn’t speak much English, really did look like gods, and they knew it. There was something about empowering them in a different way to fighting and aggression. Interestingly aswell, their favourite bit was the relaxation. I would put this music on and a lot of them would fall asleep! So that was a revelation for me. When they taste this more gentle approach they like it.

 It doesn’t work so well now, kids are even more difficult to teach – that’s another thing I’ve really noticed. Their energy is really different. I taught in a school in Hammersmith and thinking I’m going to have to stop because all I can do is shout and I know that’s not what I want to do. They were literally climbing the walls. I’m quite experienced but there was something I was up against which felt impossible, it was really depressing.

Square Dances too were a revelation for me because there were certain things I hadn’t known would happen. I was confident that the pieces would work. What I didn’t expect was that the audience would become communities in themselves, in particular the women’s piece made them feel like you. A flock of people. I saw them walking the streets together, talking, one of my friends made a friend on a bench and they travelled around the rest of the pieces together – like youth hosteling! Maybe something about a journey which they wanted to share. I had not thought of what it might be like to be one of the community of watchers. That was a lovely thing to discover, that they were glad to have the time to walk the streets together and find these pieces. I’m trying to find a way in which the audience feel really safe and therefore open up a bit more. I’m trying to make sure they don’t feel excluded from the dance. Make sure they know it’s for them – that’s very important to me actually.

Rosemary Lee, Part 2 of 3. Q. Who do you make work for?

A.

My response could be my audience or could be my participants. Like I said for the Square Dances, I wanted to make it for the women, give them a sort of gift. Though I feel like that piece is a gift for the women as much as it is a gift for those who see it. I would say the same for Common Dance – I am trying to give something to the participants which I think is a little bit different to when you work professionally, although I try to do that for any dancer I work with, professional or not. But you could argue there are some subtle differences there. It is about the kind of experience you want to give them, I really believe that. Having been a dancer myself and dancing for someone like Sue MacClennan, it is such a gift to be in someone else’s piece, to interpret that work, to discover it and to find a way to let that work come through you. I loved that opportunity, so I try to give all the dancers I work with and chance to find themselves in the work but to also find the work in them.

Equally, for the audience… I think it would be naive of me to say it’s for ‘everyone’. It is for anyone who finds it. Which is why when I work outside or for films on BBC I have no idea who turned the telly on then and caught it! I like that side of it. Having said that, there are audience I wouldn’t go out and make work for because I don’t feel I would get through in the same way. I don’t think my work is perfect for a teenage audience in a very deprived area. I don’t know whether I can speak to them, I think I’m too far removed. Having said that I’d love it if they were in the audience!

Who’s it for? It’s a very good question. It sort of depends on each commission, so Square Dances felt very much like it was for Londoners, for people who’d made the journey. I wanted to give them something in the heart of London. Something like The Suchness of Eddy and Henny I knew was going to go to more dance festivals, so I knew I was going to be playing to dance audiences in a sense. So that was made with that thought. I’ve got to make a work of art, as to whether people are trained or not. I don’t know whether I’ve quite answered that! Good question.

Interview with choreographer Rosemary Lee - part 1 of 3

You’ve worked with a lot of people of different ages and abilities, and in large scale sight specific settings. I am interested in what it is in particular about that sort of work, that sort of making which interests  you?

So, what attracts me? Well let’s break it down – there’s the different ages, there’s the size of the cast, there’s the site specificity and there’s the untrained and trained dancers - and there are different reasons for each of them.

If I start on the site-specific , there are many reasons why I use that – one, is because I get a different audience, and that’s regardless of whether I am working indoors or outdoors. If the site is not a theatre, you’re going to get a different audience. And that interests me because I’ve always felt, ever since the time I was a student, and I think I still feel this – that although I love going to the theatre there is a certain person who is going to be at the Theatre and that’s to do with their income and their background. Now, I still think I’m basically making work for a middle class audience, even when I’m outdoors, but with something like Square Dances you’re also going to get the odd passer by, particularly in rehearsals. You’re still exposing people who would have never expected to come and see something like this; you’re giving them something. 

Although I want to reach an audience that is going to get something from my work, I’m quite curious about trying to do that with different kinds of audiences. So outdoors you get the passerby, and indoors, for instance when I did something in the Fort Dunlop tyre factory, off the M6 in Birmingham, I got a lot of the old workers coming back to see what had happened to the old building. They hadn’t really come to see the dance, they’d come to come back into the place in which they’d worked all their lives. But to just have someone like that in the audience and for them to ssee their workplace transformed, I felt quite privileged that they would come. They’re not going to go to the Hippodrome to see a dance performance, but they are going to come back to the factory they knew.

So I’m getting a different audience, and I think artistically, I really like the limitation it gives me.

There is still a limitation in a black box theatre but with site specific pieces  is that– often you’ve got daylight if its outdoors, so the magic is different. You’ve got to create a different kind of magic which is reliant on the performance quality of the participant, which I’m really interested in at the moment. You are challenged by the context, the noise, the other worlds coming in that I actually really enjoy. How can I transform this particular site at this particular time? How can I enhance it or make it something different for a few minutes of the day and then it’s gone again. I really like that challenge. Having said that, I’m very picky! If someone said so something in this quadrangle I don’t do that at all, its only sites that maje me feel I can create some other atmosphere or augment the atmosphere that I feel is there, is dormant that I want to somehow enhance.

So the site is really critical for me and the challenges are delightful. I like the compositional challenge of how to make this space work with people in it. Do I need to fill it with 100 women or will something with just one person work?

Number of people – so the large scaleness of it, I think this is an interesting one. A while back Lyn Gardner the Theatre critic wrote a review of something she saw in Brighton where she said something like ‘these big participatory dances are just a way of choreographers getting dancers for nothing’ like it’s a kind of exploitation. I think it’s a valid point and it’s a question we need to keep asking ourselves: why are we doing this? But for me the numbers… if the piece feel like it requires 100 that’s due to the sight. For the women’s Square Dances the reason I wanted to make a piece for 100 women was a) because I felt the sight was right for it but b) because I had a personal reaction to my last piece, Common Dance where I had to turn many women of your age away and I didn’t like that. There was a real awkwardness that I felt I had to take every man and turn away 100 so many women. So there was a huge desire in me to make a work, find a site where I can literally take everybody that applies. Having said that, I didn’t take everyone because of stamina or physicality that I thought didn’t quite work so I’m my own worst enemy there, but I more or less did. So there’s different reasons there for why I did that.

The large number is not that I’m necessarily interested in making work for that many people and that that’s somehow better than working with one person, it’s just different. There’s a slight problem in thinking that choreographers want more, so it’s bigger and better. I don’t think that’s the case, it actually requires a certain skill to make something work for that many people. I think when I work with big groups like that I am saying something about humanity which I can’t say with four people. The mass of people says something about the numbers of people who have passed through that space, or says something about community or society, or says something about women. So for me its about what the effect of the work on people is. Sometimes I want to work with big groups because I think I can say something different and other times I want to go down to one because I can say something with that one person.

Whenever I’m working in what I call an epic way (over 30 people say) I’m also equally trying to find an intimacy in an epic form. How can I create something intimate and delicate with such a big block of people, which you mostly think of as spectacle. I’m really fascinated by that. The other reason is that I want to give people opportunities and there are very few opportunities for people who dance and have a connection in their heart and soul with dance like I do. It’s really dormant for some people too and its an absolute privilege for me to water the garden again and let them come up for a bit and let them see the air and taste the dance.  If I’m going to make a point about humanity, I can’t make it with twenty year old women. That’s a very small area of our lives. I feel I need to show people what it is to exist as a child and as an older woman.

Walked Path

This line of walked path reminded me of Richard Long's work. This is my brother, Adam. We have walked here so many times.

First rehearsal and 'Climb Every Mountain.'

It was wonderful to meet the other walkers on Tuesday evening for our first rehearsal at the Siobhan Davies Studios. We sang, moved and tried out different game like tasks that will form a loop of people travelling in and out of the building. My favourite game was 'Top of Your Lungs' which consisted of walking out on the the fire escape from the roof studio and shouting/singing  a line from your favourite feel good song. Matthias's example was 'Climb Every Mountain' from The Sound of Music...

See 0.59 for full effect and imagine wide arms flung out!