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.
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