Zooming in on dance
I was all set up to do a week of research in June in preparation for my next project. The six dancers and studio had been booked when Covid19 struck. I decided not to cancel or postpone but rather to do it via zoom, skype, facetime and anything else on offer. I felt that we all needed to exercise our creative muscles because they too like other muscles lose tone if left unused.
The dancers probably were a bit surprised when I rang to ask them who they were living with and whether they had bikes. As I suspected some of them shared a house with dancers who might be persuaded to do some partnering? We used parks, back gardens, bedrooms and kitchens and any partners available, to generate and study movement. Although I probably would have got further in a studio in terms of my research most of my aims for an R&D were met . However the most enduring aspect was that we became a family like unit since together we had to find solutions and build our own infrastructure – provide our own studios, film ourselves and find seemingly remote ways of being surprisingly intimate.
Performance arts needs an audience to complete it. Covid19 with its closure of all venues brought a sudden invisibility. I decided to look at our archives and wondered if we could keep dance alive virtually. With universal screen fatigue in mind I decided to create a series of short films drawn from our stage productions. Social media platforms are refreshingly free of the cost and hierarchy of theatres and so it was possible to show as well curate the seemingly opaque grammar of contemporary dance sitting on my stairs at home!
I mostly choreograph freelance dancers whose working life is patterned by short term contracts. It’s a life style choice that needs resilience, optimism, ingenuity and amazing self management.Life in the arts (specially in contemporary dance) had always felt like swimming upstream against the current. So in some ways when the whole country had to adapt to a lack of security in March this year life seemed suddenly more equitable.
The photos show two dancers in rehearsal and my home studio
