Posted: July 30th, 2021 | Author:Nicholas Minns | Filed under:Interview | Tags:Mikki Kunttu, Tero Saarinen, Tero Saarinen Company, TSC | Comments Off on Choreographer and Lighting Designer: The association between Tero Saarinen and Mikki KunttuTero Saarinen in Breath (2018), choreography Tero Saarinen, lighting Mikki Kunttu (photo: Mikki Kunttu)
The choreographer, Tero Saarinen, trained as a dancer in the rigorous Vaganova system and joined the Finnish National Ballet. He started to create choreographic solos and duets through spending time by himself in the studio listening to ‘other voices’ in his head and giving them shape. Only when Ohad Naharin saw one of his early works in 1994 and invited him to create on Batsheva Dance Company did the notion of becoming a choreographer begin to materialize. Before that, however, Saarinen had decided to pull up his career as a dancer and to put down choreographic roots, setting out for Japan whose culture and dance traditions had always attracted him. Finding much in common between the mental landscapes of Japan and Finland, in particular the cultivation of a minimal, almost frugal way of living, it is perhaps unsurprising that Saarinen was drawn to the dance form of Butoh. For a year he studied under the guidance of its co-founder, Kazuo Ohno — then in his eighties — and his son, Yoshito, as well as in workshops with Akiko Motofuji, the widow of Butoh’s co-founder, Tatsumi Hijikata. Saarinen seems to have found in Butoh a freedom of expression that derives from turning oneself inside out. Considering Ohno’s performances were, in his son’s words, ‘an occasion on which those ghosts dormant in him come to life’, Saarinen’s search for a choreographic form for his ‘other voices’ had providentially found a kindred spirit. It was as if the edges of Saarinen’s identity both as a Finn and as a classical dancer dissolved in the creative chemistry of Ohno’s workshops. The experience, he recalls, ‘completely changed my understanding of what dance can be and what can be achieved through it…how movement can be used to express the hidden, forgotten or repressed peripheries of humanity.’ He also shared with Ohno his empathy for the natural environment; Ohno once remarked in a workshop, ‘Make your dance more lifelike. You can grasp what life is all about by simply studying how a tree grows.’ For Saarinen the comingling of the spirit of Butoh with his Finnish roots created a choreographic amalgam that continues to transcend cultural barriers, revealing contrasting sensitivities and awakening new understandings. In formulating his aesthetic approach to dance making, Saarinen has remarked that “the dominance of words numbs us from a more sensory-rich experience of reality. By investing more in sensing, we could eventually experience each other, nature and life in a more holistic way.”
The lighting designer, Mikki Kunttu, started out as a guitarist in a rock band and decided to study sound production at the Tampere School of Arts and Communication. Having started the course, however, he discovered it was concentrated solely on television and radio so he decided to change to the study of light, where he felt immediately at home with both his fellow students and his teacher. Kunttu recalls that his course was heavily weighted on the technical aspect; the creative side revealed itself to him only very gradually. “Later on, I understood that if you want to create and understand your own style or even aim to look for it, you’ll have to do this in-depth work on your own…The connection to your own artistic expression is a very personal thing and requires a level of solitude.”
Having developed along similar introspective paths towards discovering their own artistic expression, Kunttu and Saarinen seemed destined to work together. When Saarinen returned from Japan in 1993, he was commissioned by Dance Theatre MD in Tampere to create his first evening of work and was assigned as his lighting designer a student in his first year of study. “My first lighting design project for the school was for contemporary dance”, Kunttu recalls. “Tero happened to be the choreographer. It was the very first time I had come across contemporary dance at all. I think we really hit it off from the get-go.” Saarinen’s recollection was less sanguine: “Mikki reminded me that at the premiere I was so nervous I stayed behind the lighting board with him and kept asking how it was going.” The evening evidently went well enough for the two to continue working together on projects over the next couple of years and when Saarinen created Westward Ho! in 1996 their collaboration was sealed, marking the official beginning of Tero Saarinen Company (TSC).
What these two artists with their contrasting sensitivities had in common was that they were open to dialogue. “We never wanted to stick to something that ‘seemed to work in the past’”, recalls Kunttu. “There’s always been this strong will to create and to explore together. It’s always been very important for me to have a free hand in terms of the design. I believe over the years we have really built a concrete base of confidence between us. The creative process is always very fragile and if this sort of confidence and trust is achieved and cultivated, it is really the best grounds for creative work. It’s not often with other choreographers that lighting would inspire concrete changes of choreography on stage or even help create something completely new. Tero is very aware of the light and the space and that way of working is a big inspiration for me.” He readily acknowledges, however, that “the main obstacle is approaching visuality too much from the technical perspective, thus letting the tech overshadow the creative inspiration…I consider the tech as being the brush you paint with; it’s no use focusing on the brush when you’re painting.” For Saarinen, Kunttu “not only illuminates the action on stage, but also creates architectural and emotional spaces. He is innovative, constantly updating his skills and looking for new ways to implement the art of lighting design, both in the theatre and in other kinds of spaces. All of this is fascinating and inspiring.”
Although TSC has a strong Finnish identity, Saarinen believes in collaboration and cultural exchange programs — in the 25 years of the company’s life, he has worked with artists from Kenya, Australia, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway and the US — as key elements in constructing all the company’s activities on fundamental humanist values — equal rights and respect for all individuals — as well as on education. The basis for this was laid during his stay in Japan where he was able to attend private Nihon buyohclasses led by Yoko Fujima to understand and learn the basics of traditional Japanese dances. “A huge amount of detail and internal information is passed down from generation to generation. The fact that I, a complete outsider, was able to be part of this chain for a while…made me reflect on the importance of active, constructive and respectful intergenerational dialogue and transmission of knowledge…I believe the only way to really learn and make our lives better is through communication and transmission between nations, generations and traditions. All these elements, experiences, and tastes have shaped my choreographic thinking and are reflected in both my creations and teaching.” Saarinen has developed what he calls the Tero Technique, an approach to movement that focuses on awakening all the senses and activating every cell and nerve ending (it has also been called ‘butoh with wings’). “Technically, we pay a lot of attention to the feet, fingers, eyes and skin. The goal, both in the class and during the creative process, is to create an environment where the participant feels safe to take risks and develop. When dancers are 360 degrees aware and 100% present, they become authentic, vibrant and also more diverse. All of this leads to a dance that is constantly morphing and surprising, like flora and fauna.”
This simile of natural regeneration is one that pervades Saarinen’s thinking. He remains passionate about creating and while he feels some of his works can stand the test of time, he doesn’t want his company to become ‘a museum’. “We want to serve as a springboard for those interested in exploring and developing their own choreographic movement language and this art form. Our common dream is to provide opportunities, mentor and promote the next generation of dance makers, sound designers, lighting designers etc. I think the idea of total artwork needs constant updating and it feels great to be helping future generations on this path of development.”
Two years before the Covid-19 pandemic, Kunttu had moved with his two teenage sons to Montreal to work with the Cirque du Soleil, where he was able to continue to push the boundaries of his art. “Lighting designers have always introduced new ways of visual storytelling and I see them as the bold risk-takers always willing to make another leap into the unknown…They have pushed the envelope of stage performance more than any other profession in the field.” But as soon as the effects of the first lockdown took hold and it became clear that Cirque du Soleil would close, Kunttu brought his family back to Finland where he has managed to set up a new studio. He has ongoing projects — he is the production designer for the Finnish National Opera’s upcoming Wagner Ring cycle — but most have had their realizations postponed. Although he is happy to have made the decision to return to Finland, it’s been very difficult to keep afloat in an artistic discipline that has suffered inordinately from the disruption of the pandemic.
For Saarinen, the pandemic coincided with the 25th anniversary of his company but despite the restrictions TSC managed to celebrate the opening of its new office and studio space in Helsinki’s Cable Factory, to maintain its network of staff and to initiate two residencies. However, all its plans for artistic collaborations and exchanges had to be put on hold. With live performances curtailed, one project Saarinen was able to undertake with filmmaker Thomas Freundlich (who made a wonderful documentary on Saarinen in 2018 called Rooted With Wings) is a multi-camera filmed re-enactment of his Third Practice that had premiered for the Monteverdi Festival in 2019. With a return to live performance for the Helsinki Festival, TSC is planning to present the Finnish première of Transit on August 19-21 in the new studio space, a work that had its world première last October at Malmö Opera as a co-production with Skånes Dansteater. In line with one of Saarinen’s all-consuming themes, Transit ‘examines our relationship with nature’ as a ‘frantically performed ritual, a fight for survival and change’ that adds his eloquent choreography to the multiplicity of artistic voices expressing concern about the current environmental crisis.
In the Spring of 2022, the new Tanssin Talo, or Dance House, will open in Helsinki and TSC is a key partner in establishing its path into the future. It will be a culmination of many years of dance advocacy in Finland by Saarinen, his colleagues and supporters, and he is naturally enthusiastic: “The new house will serve as a unifying address and event platform for the presentation of a wide range of dance truths and as a stage for international guest performances. It will also be our home stage so we will perform more in Finland. In addition to our home performances, we will also co-produce guest performances with Tanssin Talo.”
Jing-Yi Wang in Transit (2020), choreography Tero Saarinen, lighting Minna Tiikkainen(photo: Carl Thorborg)
With the backlog of interrupted engagements, and the long arc of production schedules, it will be a few years before Kunttu will be in a position to light a new work by Saarinen —there are, however, several accomplished freelance lighting designers and supervisors, in addition to Kunttu, listed on TSC’s web site (Third Practice has lighting design by Eero Auvinen, and Transit by Minna Tiikkainen). But for the opening season at Tanssin Talo Saarinen plans to stage some of his key works for which Kunttu designed the lighting (including the post-apocalyptic Breath), so there will be a chance to celebrate their long and prolific collaboration. Kunttu, who has always correlated the high energy levels of lighting with the energy of dance, has worked with many choreographers, “but a creation with Tero always feels like coming home.” It’s a neat temporal intersection that Kunttu’s fiftieth birthday should coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of TSC as it moves into its new home.
Interview with Dance Umbrella’s Artistic Director, Emma Gladstone, September 12
Emma Gladstone (photo: Hugo Glendinning)
NM I read there’s a through-line to the 2019 Dance Umbrella festival focusing on ‘the emotional, intellectual and sensual power of the body’. I wonder if this focus is the result of the works you have chosen or if it is a pre-selected theme for this year?
EG I suppose I do like works that have structural concepts within them. Lucy Guerin’s Split is an example; it’s a pure dance piece but there’s a very clear structure of space and time in it that I think is not only a fabulous invention but also a guide to our watching. I feel there is more intellectual power and association and suggestion and connection in dance than people sometimes think. That’s why we do all the debates and talks during the festival; I think choreographers are such intelligent beings and so wide in their thinking and their invention that when they do find a way of working, or a particular discovery, it’s quite different from theatre.
Lucy Guerin’s Split (photo: Gregory Lorenzutti)
NM Do you think dance has a place in intellectual and political discourse?
EG Yes, but I always think dance is not a good art form for facts, so you are always working more subtly and that includes the power of suggestion and connection for audiences while they are watching. There’s always going to be politics because of the body. But there are also many other things that can be revealed within the frame…
NM Do you think they are revealed during the performance or in discussing and thinking about it afterwards?
EG Well, if you take Jérôme Bel’s Gala, for example, it’s a hugely political work because of the journey on which it takes us, how it addresses our prejudices or assumptions and I love that evolution of our headspace while we’re watching. There’s also a big thing about difference, when international artists bring different worlds or different perceptions. In Gregory Maqoma’s CION for this year’s festival, you will hear an African choir singing Ravel’s Bolero and it makes you appreciate difference, hearing one of those rather hackneyed bits of music that are ‘owned’ in the western canon, how they can be used and treated and still be effective and moving and powerful from another world. To me difference is always part of the politics: looking at difference, understanding difference, not being afraid of difference. I think it’s something the art form as a whole can do very well. There’s something much more interesting for me about works that are full of politics through suggestion rather than flag waving.
Gregory Maqoma’s CION (photo: John Hogg)
NM Do you find this kind of content is more marked in works from outside the UK?
EG Oona Doherty is an interesting case for the questions of class and place she brings and reveals in her work (Hard To Be Soft at Southbank Centre and Hope Hunt and The Ascension Into Lazarus at The Yard Theatre). I think as an artform dance can also exist for its strength and beauty like music. There’s a wonderful American artist, Theaster Gates, who said in response to a question about the validity of art in a context of deprivations within society, “Beauty is a basic service”. I think there is a total validity in work that is for the human spirit alone. I don’t wish to negate that, but there is also the potential for insipid or empty works in the same way. I do search for complexity that includes intellectual ideas in the choreography, but there are so many different ways these can be realised.
NM What percentage of works that you see contain the ingredients you are looking for and find their way into your Dance Umbrella program?
EG I probably see about 180 works a year and there are usually 10 or 11 in a festival. But that 10 or 11 can include five or six commissions and then I don’t know what’s coming! These are artists I believe in who we’re keen to support and they’ll bring their work whatever it is, and we take that leap with them. For example, one of the works at the Linbury Theatre this year is Jacobsson and Caley’s reimagining of a Merce Cunningham piece, ForFour Walls, and there are a couple of works in Freddie Opoku-Adaie’s Mixed Bill in his Out Of The System at Bernie Grant Arts Centre that are commissions. There are also two of the Four by FourCommissions, one chosen by Akram Khan — a new work by Mythili Prakash, Here and Now, at Croydon’s Fairfield Takeover — and the other by Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker — Georgia Vardarou’s Why Should It Be More Desirable For Green Fire Balls To Exist Than Not? at the Lilian Baylis Theatre. I think it is part of our job to support artists and trust in them. That’s part of the fun. You’re asking people to take that leap with you and you get to see something at the start of a journey. I love those works that make me leave the theatre in a different place from where I went in; that’s what I want an audience to feel.
Mythili Prakash (photo: Jonathan Potter)
NM How do you see Dance Umbrella supporting the dance ecology in London?
EG One of the big decisions I made when I became artistic director was to bring over artists who are not already represented here. I felt liberated by the fact that most people don’t know most of the names most of the time, so it’s our reputation that we have to build through the quality of the work we present. Hopefully that means people will trust us and come to see fascinating artists because they appear under a banner whose quality audiences have come to value. Another decision was to stretch the diversity of choreographic expression as wide as possible, as with Charlotte Spencer’s Is This A Wasteland? in 2017 and Annie-B Parson’s 17c last year.
Another thing we are doing this year in Croydon and at the Opera House is working with our partners to put a mixture of work in a single frame; this is where I feel most responsible in terms of curating, figuring out what sits next to what, how will the audience see it after seeing something else. I’m excited by Amala Dianor’s work, Somewhere in the middle of infinity, at the Linbury, because he is in such an interesting place and the diverse training and styles of his three dancers contrasts with what Merce Cunningham is doing with his solid, single technique at the other end of the bill (Sounddance performed by CCN-Ballet de Lorraine). That’s why I like the title of the program, The Future Bursts In, that is taken from a 1964 Observer review of Cunningham’s first London performances. We have to look at works differently now; there are no longer those kinds of monolithic techniques.
Amala Dianor’s Somewhere in the middle of infinity (photo: Valérie Frossard)
NM How do you sift through the works you see to arrive at a Dance Umbrella program?
EG Apart from working on the diverse elements of age, culture, gender, and the geography of the city, I often invite those pieces I am not sure I liked at first, but which remain with me; they become milestones in my art journey of life. This is why I enjoy programming a festival rather than a venue; it’s the difference between the responsibility of programming year-round to develop a dance scene, with the growth over time of individual artists, and then the idea of a two-and-a-half week festival that’s about the new, the international. It’s a quite different focus, and it’s fun to play within that framework.
NM The geographical reach of the festival seems to have increased this year.
EG Yes, this is the most we have ever attempted. We have added the Royal Opera House — though it’s not a first for Dance Umbrella — because of the mix of audiences and the strength of the technique of the dancers in the program. And, of course, there’s four different locations in Croydon’s Fairfield Takeover. We are also developing our partnerships with festivals around the UK and internationally though we only tour within London; Philippe Saire’s Hocus Pocus is going to six venues around the city. I love that. This year the festival will embrace a total of 23 locations. It’s a bit mad!
NM In terms of the future?
EG This is my sixth year and I have no plans to be programming this festival years into the future. It’s a huge job, because it’s personal — art is personal; there’s no other way to do it. I love the job, and I love the team I am working with, but the scene is constantly changing and new, younger voices need to be heard. You can only reinvent your own wheel so many times.
Dance Umbrella runs from 8 – 27 October. Here’s the full program.
RISE 2019 – festival of contemporary dance, Findhorn May 3-5
Robbie Synge and Julie Cleves in Passing Through (photo: the artists)
With the upcoming edition of RISE, curated by Karl Jay-Lewin, a little under a month away, I want to draw attention to the artists who’ll be making the trip to the wild beauty of Findhorn and have a deep dive with one particular duo; there’s a strong international presence with works from Canada (Singeries by Mandoline Hybride) and Taiwan (Bon 4 Bon by Chang Dance Theatre) alongside independent, female lead works (Screensaver Series and The Human Clock by Janine Harrington, and These Hands and Ritual Echoes by Crystal Zillwood) from England. There’s a number of collaborative pairings from Scotland/Canada (Paysages Mixtes and Dix Commandments by Katrina McPherson and Harold Rheaume) and Scotland/England (Extremely Pedestrian Chorales by Karl Jay-Lewin and Matteo Fargion), yet none from mainland Europe.
RISE is a festival of contemporary dance which this year centres upon themes of landscape, the everyday and relationships; the terms ‘festival’ and ‘contemporary dance’ have lost their vibrancy and currency in recent times as everything is a festival and everything is movement-based practice. There is a definite change in the use of language and the approach of how people are describing and curating festivals and showcases; we often hear talk of communities, activism and dance but they turn out to be little more than a hollow program of works slapped together over a period of time with little care for the audience/artist.
RISE is different — and I say this from experience — as it gives space for communities to form; it offers time for morning walks along Findhorn beach, time for the whole community to eat together, to share stories and reflections on the work seen. There’s classes for professional dancers and for little people with their big people alongside a talk by Simone Kenyon’s work being with women who walk, work and live in the Cairngorms – a work being made in response to Nan Shephard’s seminal Into The Mountain.
However there is one work which embodies all of the festival themes: Passing Through by Julie Cleves and Robbie Synge. Julie and Robbie have had a long relationship with Dance North Scotland, spending time in residence, making some of the films seen in the work and they’ll present the latest iteration of their partnership at the festival. I spent some time with them recently in Glasgow talking about the work and their relationship.
IA: There’s something radical and political about the act of sitting. It’s been used throughout history as a marker of resistance; what are your thoughts on that and how sitting has manifested in your practice.
JC: The thing about sitting is…sitting in the wheelchair the whole time, and people ignoring me, blanking me and asking whoever is with me questions; they don’t treat me like a human. Whereas when I’m on blocks I know that I’ve got power in that moment. I’m in control of how they’re noticing me.
RS: I haven’t considered the dramaturgical connotations of sitting; but it’s always struck me when we’ve done it in places where the ownership of the land or the environment is a particular way. So for example Findhorn beach. Karl’s initial support was to go and make a film on the beach and talk about it. Sitting there on the sand for the first time…politically it’s a leisure and recreational space, but when we went to Tate Modern last year (the installation with the swings — One Two Three Swing! by SUPERFLEX — was so clever because you can sit together and have this conversation; it encourages social dialogue and inclusivity. Of course for us we can’t get on those swings. But we turn up with this massive bag on the back of Julie’s chair and the security guards don’t question it, because probably…
JC: I’m not going to blow anything up!
RS: She’s a bit disabled. It’s a bit awkward to ask her. So I get my backpack searched and we rolled down the bank and decided to get down among the swings, and once you’re down there there’s no quick or easy way out.
IA: It’s about 15-20 minutes to get back up?
RS: Yeah. We were clocking out the corner of our eyes all these security guards going ‘Is this OK?’
JC: And we were literally right in the middle with the swings all around us.
R: We also discreetly placed a camera on top, which is a big no-no there. That felt like an act of resistance, but it’s a bit like ‘Fuck you with your swings which are inaccessible and are bullshit around access and your inclusive joyful social experiment’. Similarly we did it on land near Tower Bridge which is owned by Kuwait Oil…in that area there are people with sunglasses from Men In Black watching you…
IA: You’re making a choice about where you make the films.
R: There’s a kind of cinematography even if it’s quite amateur. It’s Tower Bridge. It’s a recognisable landmark to people. We tried to choose as many recognisable things as we can. We thought about going to Parliament Square. It’s amazing when you dig in to the access and find out what’s permitted. There are all these 10-metre squared sections where you’re allowed to protest. It’s owned by a certain estate. I thought about going into Westminster…going along to a protest and us getting down there and just dancing. I think you’d find that exciting.
IA: There’s activist possibilities to it?
JC: I think it’s pushing the boundaries really. Just to see what would happen. That’s what gives me the excitement really, to see how far we could go. It’s like Robbie’s saying, there’s the leisure spaces and then there’s the one where you say let’s see how many people we can piss off. Or how are they going to kick us out.
IA: In some of the films when you’re in the woods or the beach, you get the sense there’s nobody else around and that has a totally different feeling; we are being let in to your world. But then there’s the opposite. You being very visible in spaces like Tower Bridge or Calton Hill; you’re toying with that duality of look but don’t look.
RS: I think we both respect that it might be interesting, amusing or provocative, this question of people’s responses and the strange responses it provokes. I don’t want to laugh at people for their responses because it’s an unusual thing to see…us with these boards taking two hours to go along a little loop. People do check in and I totally respect that. But when it’s in the middle of Tate Modern and they’re singing the praise of some accessible, social artwork…if you’ve got a problem with us sitting on the floor, come and make our film better by standing in the shot and talking to us about it. Going to the beach is different. It’s a personal conquest.
JC: And it feels different; inside me it feels different. In Tate Modern I really didn’t like it there. We walked around for ages trying to look for a spot and we were like, are you sure this is OK? It really didn’t feel welcoming at all. But the beach or Calton Hill is a lot more welcoming and I can feel it inside; I’m a lot more relaxed. I like how it takes me from one to another.
IA: You use the words ‘solutions’ and ‘design’ and you’ve iterated from yoga blocks to wood blocks to gravel things. Can you talk about how your being together might be solving a problem?
RS: I guess it started with a very biomechanical process in the studio…about how two bodies work together to move. We worked out very quickly that if there isn’t contact, weight and pressure between us then we are quite static. In order to set up the challenge of can we move from A to B across the studio floor — which is the challenge we give ourselves — we tried to find ways of doing that. After a while being in the studio we thought it would be nice to do something else like walking around the town together. By that stage we’d already got to the floor in the studio. That was the thing that got us going, embodied solutions to problems rather than the machine. Could we do it together? Save money, save time. And where could we sit? We don’t need to just sit in the studio, we could sit…
JC: …anywhere. It’s been quite a slow process but it started very simply…with us getting to know each other’s bodies. My skeleton is nothing like yours, and it’s nothing like anybody else’s in this room. So it’s finding out about that, finding out how best to empower and enable me. And also do the same with Robbie. It’s a two-way street. Then it’s taking that from there and that’s how we’ve got bigger and bigger; as we’ve got bigger we’ve thought we need advice, support and funding.
IA: Have you engaged any designers? Or have you done it yourselves?
R: So far it’s only been us…just because it’s that thing of money and when you’re in this sector it’s a familiar thing touring a piece but it’s quite unfamiliar engaging with designers. We had a great residency at Siobhan Davies studios, and met a lot of people from architectural backgrounds and academic institutions. We had a follow up at Metal and now we need to contact these people and see where it’s going. I think it will be productive. But in terms of the next stage, there isn’t anything in the pipeline. We’re always thinking about how we might improve on the blocks.
JC: You need to think small and then prioritise it. We had some great responses from people at Siobhan Davies; it was just an idea we had about these blocks and then you go in and you’ve got someone who is a really posh architect who is like ‘Actually that’s a bloody good idea, but if we make it like this it’ll be a lot better or a lot lighter’…or whatever. It’s really exciting to know it can develop into something else.
RS: If it could all fold up into a little backpack or if it was made of carbon fibre or was a lot lighter and took up less space… It’s about avoiding motors, electronics and keeping it primitive.
IA: Choreography as design. There was an article on how choreographers have impacted on city planning. Dancers are people who are using their bodies as their tools every day.
RS: The idea of embodied solutions rather than an engineer thinking ‘I’ll put a motor in it’ which is a very disembodied experience…
JC: …Or a piece of equipment like the hoist. That’s the last thing I want. I want something I can move with…I want to move on my own rather than be being part of a piece of equipment.
RS: What we’re doing isn’t a solution for everyone. It’s an art project and we really hold onto that. We’re not going to create a product that is going to sell millions and we’ll be retiring in the Bahamas.
IA: You could create Julie and Robbie : Embodied Solutions with a bit of venture capital…You’ve done a lot of work and thinking on it.
RS: I think it’s a very social thing. The benefits aren’t the result of the action of getting up stairs. It’s the interaction between people which is communicative and cooperative; in the way you would see in a kid’s playground…it might take two people to pull a rope and turn a thing…it’s that sort of potential you wonder about in the back of your mind. Is this a thing in our digital age? With everyone in their tunnels…is that a thing we could do?
JC: I think it’s important that the blocks are a great thing, but we shouldn’t just roll with it and forget the other stuff we’re doing. That’s what’s so good with us…it’s only a part of what we’re doing.
IA: I was looking back and the first thing I could find of you two is a video from 2009.
RS: Oh god!
IA: It was of you two. 10 years ago. How has your relationship changed over time. A decade of collaboration is a great longitudinal study. That’s what’s at the heart of this. Julie and Robbie.
RS: It’s open ended. So it probably won’t have an ending. It’ll keep going as long as we can put up with each other. We’ve discussed the quickness and pace of that early work…we both slow up a bit and our interests have evolved now. We’ve just hung out more and you get to know people better; I think as we’ve gone on we get more aware about other people’s perceptions and the broader discourse around disability and privilege. Our relationship hasn’t really shifted much, I think we were always good pals, but we’ve talked a lot more about ourselves in relation to other people and the obstacles that can throw up. Obstacles, funding and narratives other people want to hear.
IA: Are you like Ant and Dec; is it Robbie on the right Julie on the left.
JC: Oh my, that is scary!
RS: I wonder if there is a consistency there…it would be funny if there was.
IA: What’s your response, Julie?
JC: I think at the beginning it’s like any kind of dance relationship or friendship. You want everything done tomorrow or yesterday. You know we had these great ideas of what we wanted to do in the studio. Ups and Downs and Whoopsie Daisies was great and it was about when you’re a teenager and ‘I’ve got to do everything.’ Then as we’ve gone on we’ve learned a lot about each other, we’ve relaxed with one another and I think that’s shown in our work. There’s a lot of shit stuff that Robbie’s seen — when we’ve been out travelling — the way people treat me. A lot of people don’t see that. That’s going to affect the work and how we talk to each other about it. I’ll come up with stories as well: yesterday so-and-so said this to me. I think as time has passed we’ve got a lot more honest with one another. Now I feel a lot more like a Grandma. I feel pleased with what we’re doing and I still want to challenge myself more. But I’m really happy where I am.
RS: Being a family guy now, and having a child, certain things aren’t quite as exotic and exciting any more. They’re just a bit tiring. But also being comfortable with what we’re doing and just letting it tick over…being conscious there’s opportunities out there and our work has become more about the story, the broader relationship and the implications rather than what you can do in 40 minutes.
IA: It would be interesting to do a retrospective of the 10 years. This presentation feels like a concentration of that. How could you represent that 10-yearness?
RS: One of our strands is having a website. A digital encounter. Partly because it’s difficult to travel and have those live encounters…but we want to get it out there and a timeline that we can add to every time we hang out and do one of these things. An accumulation that you could scroll through, stop at and look into it further.
JC: As Robbie is saying about family, my body’s ten years older. It’s s not what it was and there’s times when I’m feeling weaker or whatever. We have to think around that and ask ‘Do we use film more?’ It’s getting your head around that because we’re both changing, our bodies are changing and we need to talk about that…how can we express what we’re expressing now in ten years time.
IA: How would you define your relationship? Julie first this time.
JC: No!
RS: Yes!
[pause]
JC: I would say…he’s my brother. He’s annoying, frustrating…sometimes he thinks he’s right when he isn’t but I smile anyway. But he’s very very talented. Sometimes I think he doesn’t realise that. I think I’m lucky to have met him in a way. Now if you say anything horrible about me…
RS: You know when you’ve got a scab on your…no…when we met it was quite an important time for me. I’d massively changed direction in what I was doing. I’d sort of studied biological sciences and worked in that and did all sorts of things. I was teaching English for a while, stuff happened, and I was sort of lost. I did Laban for a year — not even a year, 9 months — and I got an audition for Candoco somehow. I don’t really understand how and I remember my technique teacher at the time — I’m going on a bit of a roundabout way here — was quite condescending about my auditioning for Candoco. But then obviously I didn’t get in, but met Julie and it was quite an exciting adventure, to challenge dance and what we were doing. I was quite bored of what we were doing at college. This was the first creative project that I felt co-ownership of. It wasn’t that we were really good friends…it was a really good gift to have that way into a friendship, and a unique friendship that’s bound together in this investigation. Physically of course we’re very close, and I think that opens doors, if we have that kind of relationship then you’re able to share more. It’s just got stronger and stronger, and more and more exciting. When you have really good friends, that becomes apparent really soon, it doesn’t take long.
IA: Could you talk a bit about labour? The energy and the investment in the physical.
RS: For me that’s something society wants to reduce. They don’t want you going out to your woodpile, chopping it and carrying it to stay warm. But what else can that bring you? What can labour bring you in a physical, tactile experience and engagement in the world with its materials? I get a kick out of our adventures. In life in general I often do things the difficult way…which is a constant kind of cursing myself but it always feels great when you’ve done it. I love that it’s just the two of us, and Julie’s PA maybe with a camera ‘Karen. Karen can you push stop?’
JC: She’s gone off to Hollywood now, she has.
RS: I suppose it’s a bit of a social statement that we clearly engage in an amount of labour that is maybe primitive to some people. It’s technology. These blocks are a primitive technology. But what can you get from encouraging labour rather than discouraging it, which is where my head first goes.
JC: I don’t know what you mean by labour. Do you mean the energy I put into the work or…?
IA: So if Robbie is describing himself as a blue arsed fly in order to set up the shot, if it takes four hours to set it up, that is an investment of time. What is that time like for you?
JC: It’s totally different for me. If we’re setting something up physically I’m unable to do anything. So I’m sat and he’s running around doing everything. Sometimes that can make me a bit upset because I see him running around and I want to get up and help him. But I think it’s to do with my energy and I have to prioritise it as well. For my sake and Robbie’s. I’ve learned that I need to listen to my body more and I’ve started doing that now. That’s a really good thing. I still like to take risks…you know that log over there, I want to get on it. I still want to.
RS: It occurs to me that I’m quite often busy around Julie attending to things, orbiting in a sense in and out and there’s a couple of things to say about that. What is going on in Julie’s body, and the effort involved isn’t always as apparent because there’s a different type of effort involved. People might not want to see the narrative of this privileged young man being physical around a disabled older woman…well tough luck, because that’s the way it has to be if we’re going to do this. If that’s not the desired easy narrative in current times; take time to talk to us rather than assuming. There are questions of consent, initiation and decision making.
IA: Is Robbie doing this to Julie…
RS: There are moments of initiation. Sometimes when we’re doing the movements Julie will initiate something and we’re very careful with that. But you can take it to such an extreme you drive yourself nuts trying to cater to what everyone thinks. In the performance we just did, when I made that comment, ‘Look at that man doing something to that disabled woman’, it got a laugh because I think some people would be thinking that and it’s important to acknowledge that. If we can demonstrate our awareness of these things, it’s nice to be a bit provocative as well. It’s really good to talk about it to a third person, to be interviewed; it’s a good creative tool.
IA: What are the things people are curious about?
JS: I always say to people ‘Ask anything. No I mean anything.’ But people won’t.
IA: It’s like ‘Oh, is he touching your bum when he’s pulling you up…’
JC: Yeah, and ‘Is it OK that he does that to you?’ But they don’t. They still don’t…but I’d love it if they did.
From an interview with Emily Molnar, artistic director of Ballet British Columbia
Artists of Ballet British Columbia in Crystal Pite’s Solo Echo (photo: Michael Slobodian)
On March 6 & 7 Ballet British Columbia will be performing on the Sadler’s Wells main stage. For those who might read into the company name images of evergreen forests, indigenous peoples, paintings by Emily Carr, a rugged Pacific Northwest coast and English weather, the association with ballet may not immediately spring to mind. But those who know the names of Crystal Pite and William Forsythe (both of whom feature large in the Sadler’s Wells program this summer), may be surprised to learn their connection runs through Ballet British Columbia (Ballet BC). The company, founded in 1986, is based in Vancouver and Pite, who was born in the province, started her dancing career there. In 1996 she joined William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt and when she returned to Vancouver she began to choreograph for various companies, including Ballet BC, and founded her own company, Kidd Pivot. In 2010 Pite and Kidd Pivot moved to Frankfurt as the resident company of Kunsterlhaus Mousonturm. The paths of Pite and Forsyth are in turn intermingled with the career of Emily Molnar, Ballet BC’s current artistic director. Molnar is a graduate of the National Ballet School in Toronto and a former member of the National Ballet of Canada before she, too, joined Ballet Frankfurt where she met Pite. Forsythe’s approach to constructing and deconstructing ballet was a huge influence on both dancers. Molnar returned to Vancouver as a principal dancer at Ballet BC and took over the artistic directorship in 2009. So while the company’s name serves to identify it geographically, its artistic lineage is very much aligned with Frankfurt.
Although she also makes work on the company, Molnar has spent the last nine years selecting a broad range of works from different choreographers to develop a dialogue on dance and performance with her audiences. To commission and create 40 new works for a company of 18 dancers and to maintain healthy home seasons in a theatre the size of Sadler’s Wells is evidence of the success of her approach. She describes herself as having been a difficult student because she would constantly question the school regime, the way dancers trained and the technical as well as psychological effect of such training on the dancer. This propensity for questioning fed into her approach to choreography — working with Forsythe must have been especially stimulating — and later to her artistic directorship of a company. She is constantly instilling in her dancers not so much the ‘how’ of a performance but the ‘why’, and in building her choice of works and programs she pays attention to ‘why’ an audience may set foot in the theatre and to the dialogue that inevitably ensues. She wants to reward her audiences for taking that step, but she also wants to lead them on a journey that may take them outside their familiar frame of reference.
The program at Sadler’s Wells comprises works by Pite (Solo Echo) and Molnar (16 + a room) along with a third by the contemporary female voice of Sharon Eyal (Bill), a dancer and choreographer who spent 23 years working with Ohad Naharin in Batsheva in Tel Aviv. Pite and Eyal (along with her collaborator Gai Behar) are recognized names in the UK, so Molnar will be the outsider, setting up the kind of dialogue with audiences here that she has pioneered in Vancouver. Augurs are good; the program was first aired at the International Dance Festival Birmingham in 2016 and my friend Ian Abbott was impressed not only by Molnar’s ‘integrity, sense and articulate coherence’ in her advocacy of female choreographers at a pre-performance event but by the company’s triple bill which he likened to a delectable three-course meal. Dance Consortium was so impressed by the bill of fare and presumably by the bill that it has chosen to tour Ballet British Columbia in the UK this year.
Swallowsfeet Festival, The Old Market, Hove, March 24-25
Swallowsfeet Festival promotional image (photo: Paul Seaby)
This article first appeared in the March edition of the magazine, Viva Brighton, who commissioned it. It appears here with the editor’s kind permission.
Billed as Brighton’s only platform for international contemporary dance in a city that hosts England’s largest arts festival, Swallowsfeet Festival embodies a culture of spirited resistance to the status quo. If one takes New York’s Judson Dance Theatre collective in the sixties as a point of departure, spirited resistance is what guides much of contemporary dance and since it uses the body as its primary instrument, its arguments are a form of physical discourse.
When Swallowsfeet Festival presents its program at the Old Market theatre on March 24 and 25, it will be celebrating its fifth outing. Some of the planned activities around the weekend have had to be put on hold following the failure of an Arts Council funding bid but the core program remains intact thanks to the pluck and conviction of the six-member Swallowsfeet Collective: Jessica Miller, Rosa Firbank, Jessica Léa Haener, Sivan Rubinstein, Gordon Raeburn and Harriet Parker-Beldeau.
They all met while studying contemporary dance at Laban Conservatory of Music and Dance in London but it was Miller who first grounded the performances of the collective in her native Brighton as an outlet for a group of Laban students to present their final works to an audience of friends and family. Just four years later the open callout for the 2017 festival has produced 280 proposals from 39 countries which the Collective has distilled to a program of nine works in the image of Brighton itself: edgy, diverse, challenging, and engaging.
Having narrowed down its 280 proposals, the Swallowsfeet Collective decided to include in the festival those that had, in the vocabulary of the physical, the possibility of the greatest impact on its audience, and the focus of these nine works coalesces around four predominantly physical themes: sexuality, gender, health and identity. At its best, contemporary dance picks up on issues of its time and transforms them through the body as voice.
Ironically, one of the works on the program, Joe Garbett’s No.Company, was conceived as a reaction to funding cuts for the arts. First shown at Emerge Festival in London, six choreographers in six different locations sent movement ideas, images and suggestions via text message to the two performers who then spent only two days in a borrowed space putting it all together. This is unheard of in the current funding matrix of rehearsal time and studio rental, but the result was fresh, immediate and magical. For Swallowsfeet Festival, Garbett is using a different score of text messages and is inviting two couples to interpret and perform two separate works from it; like musical improvisations, they will never be repeated. It might sound like a choreographic manifestation of a throwaway society, but the impression No.Company made when I first saw it was profound. It is this ability of contemporary dance to make the body speak, whisper and shout that has driven the Swallowsfeet Collective’s choice of all nine works on the program in March.
To book tickets for Swallowsfeet Festival and find out more about the events, go to
Do Not Go Gentle, an interview with Debbie Lee-Anthony and Lauren Anthony
Debbie Lee-Anthony and Lauren Anthony (photo: Bailey HYT)
Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that good night was addressed to the poet’s father, encouraging him to ‘fight against the dying of the light.’ It is a poem that focuses intimately on family but at the same time serves as an affirmation of life. When Debbie Lee-Anthony wanted to create a work to celebrate the life of her sister-in-law, Kath Posner, whom she had recently lost to cancer, she discovered her favourite poem had been Thomas’s famous villanelle. Debbie and her daughter, Lauren Anthony, decided to work together to weave a choreographic response to Thomas’s words. Adding to the work’s emotional complexity, the score is by Debbie’s brother, Hamilton Lee, who as Hamid Mantu of Transglobal Underground is a percussionist and composer in his own right. The first time he will see the work dedicated to his late wife will be at The Place on January 31st as part of Resolution 2017.
Debbie graduated from The London School of Contemporary Dance in 1982 and made a career as a freelance dancer and teacher. After becoming Senior Lecturer in Choreography and Dance at the University of Winchester she has recently returned to life as a freelance dance artist while teaching part-time at the University. Lauren graduated from Middlesex University two years ago with a first class degree in dance studies, and is currently a member of a hip hop dance company, The Rebirth Network. It was when she saw her mother perform Threshold at GoLive in 2015 that she saw the possibilities of performing with her. Do Not Go Gentle is the first time mother and daughter have performed together under the company name Mater-Filia.
Having created mainly solo works for the last five years, Debbie began by creating her own material to the poem which she then showed to her daughter. Lauren learned the material and sampled it with her acquired blend of hip hop and contemporary technique. They developed material as they went along, inciting each other with their different approaches and abilities and using the infrequent rehearsal time to catch up and comfort each other as much as to push the boundaries of the work. While Debbie was inspired by the words and the spaces between them, Lauren focused on the rhythms of the verse, but what constantly brought them together was the spirit of the piece. Both have collaborated closely with Mantu in his creation of the score which contains a sampling of the poem read by Anthony Hopkins; if Lauren wanted a little grunge beat in there for her solo, or if Debbie needed an additional softness or a slowness, Mantu was able to oblige. The project has thus grown organically around the celebration of life, for while Do not go gentle is dedicated to Kath Posner’s memory, it is not expressly about her; like the poem it is an ever-present rage against time.
If the creative circumstances of this work are not rich enough, there is another aspect that is integral to it. As an academic, Debbie has for many years written about ageing and the mature dancer. In retrospect, her publications such as Age, Agility and Anxiety (2007), and Conflict, Content and Context in the ageing body (2008) serve as a theoretical underpinning of her current experience in Do Not Go Gentle, and a paper she wrote on Sharing the dance through the lived body (2010) perfectly describes what she brings to the stage. Apart from managing the physical challenges, her greatest fear is not remembering, but because of that she goes over and over the material in between rehearsals. Now the work is finished she is feeling happier; the structure is secure and she and Lauren can use the remaining rehearsals to inhabit it fully, constantly challenging time until the stage lights die at the end of the performance.
Honji Wang and Sébastien Ramirez (photo: Filine Fink)
Sadler’s Wells is continuing to expand its remit, for the first time co-producing an event at The Royal Albert Hall on November 2: musician Nitin Sawhney, an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells, is performing takes from his most recent album, Dystopian Dream accompanied by singer Joss Stone and other guests. Already known in dance circles for his compositions for Akram Khan (Vertical Road, Zero Degrees, ITMOi and Bahok), Sawhney’s event will feature dance by the Wang Ramirez duo in their first appearance at The Royal Albert Hall. Honji Wang has already danced with Khan — so many roads lead to and from Khan, another Sadler’s Wells associate artist — but in her partnership with Sébastien Ramirez she has performed with flamenco dancer Rocío Molina, in hip hop, and for the Rebel Heart Tour with Madonna for which Ramirez provided choreography.
Wang was born of Korean parents in Germany. She studied gymnastics, classical ballet and hip hop with a flavour of martial arts. Ramirez is a French b-boy of Spanish origin who shares with Wang a start in gymnastics and a love of martial arts, with further interests in capoeira, boxing and Brazilian jujitsu. His career was already under way when he met Wang in 2004 at a freestyle event in Berlin. With their cultural identities and complementary dance forms already intermixed, the duo has openly searched for ways to cross-fertilize with other styles and traditions. Performing to the music of Sawhney is a continuation of that path.
“We are always experimenting with our way of dancing, moving, and creating together,” says Ramirez in conversation. “What it means to do certain moves with a certain intention, how this will be seen and understood by the audience…So we constantly search to develop the techniques we have mastered into a new growth that becomes our own form. It’s a life of exploring and it keeps us constantly moving…”
Wang uses an imaginative image to describe her approach to artists working in different styles: “I’m extremely nosy to experience their cocoon; I want to enter like a little mouse and see what they see.” Perhaps it is this willingness to see through the eyes of others that makes Wang Ramirez collaborations so seamless. When I saw her dance with Khan last year Wang remained faithful to her own dance but complemented Khan in her power and fluidity.
When she first heard Sawhney’s song, Homelands, Wang remembers, “I loved that sound, but for me he was an artist who was far away from where I was; I was just 16 and didn’t know what the hell was going to happen with my life. Later on when I heard his music again in performances of Akram Khan I was always thinking the music is such a great mix of something ethnic with massive beats and rhythms. So when we got a call from Sadler’s Wells to ask if the collaboration with Nitin would interest us, we thought, yes, of course.”
Ramirez describes the process of creation: “We always want to get as close as possible to strong emotions by using body movement, dance, visuals, and technology…having met Nitin in his studio and after listening to the music, we enjoyed exchanging ideas and concepts right away; it came very naturally and a it’s project we are excited to work on. The way we will prepare is a spontaneous process between each of us around lots of discussion and emotional statements that we will relate to our choreography and graphics.”
Whatever the outcome on November 2, Wang Ramirez will not simply accompany Sawhney’s music; they are catalysts who will transform it through their own alchemy while letting the music transform them. That’s after all the true nature of an artistic collaboration.
Wednesday 2 November 2016 at 7.30pm
Royal Albert Hall, SW7
Tickets: £25 – £60
Ticket Office: 020 7589 8212 or www.royalalberthall.com / 020 7863 8000 or www.sadlerswells.com
How does a dancer in the formative stages of his performing career deal with an accident that leaves him paralysed from the chest down? Marc Brew had trained at Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School in Melbourne, then at the Australian Ballet School where he performed as an extra in Australian Ballet productions. His first professional engagement at the age of 18 was with P.A.C.T. Ballet in South Africa but it was there that he was involved in a car accident in which three of his friends were killed. Waking up in hospital with a white sheet over his body he learned that his spinal chord injury at C6/C7 meant he would never again have the use of his legs. “At first I was in denial. I thought, just get me back to Australia and into the gym again and I will be fine,” he laughs. Initially he was not able to move his hands but a lot of muscle strength came back to his shoulders and arms. Rehabilitation proved to be a whole identity shift. “I had to reassess what a dancer was. For me a dancer had to be on his legs, turned out in the hips. I had to stop looking in the mirror.” Brew had a lot of friends who wanted to get him back into a studio. In class one day a couple of dancers in New York came across a young woman who rolled into the studio in her wheelchair. “They jumped on her,” laughs Brew, “and told her all about me.” This was Kitty Lunn, whose career had been similarly interrupted after breaking her back in a fall. As she later wrote, “What I learned was that the dancer inside me didn’t know or care that I was using a wheelchair, she just wanted to keep dancing.” This was the kind of encouragement Brew needed and he travelled to New York to work with her and the company she founded, Infinity Dance. “I had to find a way to translate and adapt my former technique to my present body,” he recalls. “A year after the accident I was still thinking what my legs and feet would be doing.” However, the chair work, floor work and contact improvisation he worked on led him down the path of contemporary dance. Since then Brew has been dancing, choreographing, teaching and speaking around the world.
Brew had always been encouraged to choreograph since his school days. Within two years of his accident he was back in a studio creating and teaching and he hasn’t stopped. “I feel I have come full circle in regard to my practice. Before my accident I set work from my own body but after it my work was more task based. Now I am going back to generating my own material. I teach it to dancers and see what they do with it; then I direct it to bring it all together…My disability has helped inform the way I work…It was strange to work recently with Scottish Ballet. Instead of giving directions for the legs, I would give them upper body directions and let them sort out what they would have to do with their feet… All my ballet training is still there. It’s in my arms. Line, placement and shapes are still there. I just have to find new ways of exploring movement.”
In 2008 Brew created Remember When, the first work of a planned trilogy and at Sadler’s Wells in March he will present the second part, For Now, I Am. Introducing the personal pronoun into the latter title suggests a change in his attitude towards his disability. “I have reached a point of acceptance, which for me means being whole. I love my body as it is now. This is the first time in 18 years that I am showing my body, allowing people to explore it as if it were being examined on the hospital table. I am giving permission to everyone to explore.” Brew started the creative process wanting to explore the notion of being broken. He analysed his body by looking once again in the mirror, coming to terms with being both broken and becoming whole. Through Jamie Wardrop’s video projections, Andy Hamer’s lighting design and Claire McCue’s musical score he uses the analogy of water as an element of ritual cleansing. He also uses X-rays and scans to map his accident, finding a new freedom in working through those painful memories. “With rehearsal director Ruth Mills, I am able to talk about it now. I feel I am moving through it, like a chrysalis being born…Acquiring a disability is different from being born with a disability. Before the accident I was Marc and I still am. I am comfortable with having a disability; I claim ownership over it… Disability creates different possibilities. I hope other people see it in the same way. That’s what I find difficult, how other people view disability…It’s great that Sadler’s Wells is supporting my work and finding ways of communicating the human condition to the audience.”
What about the third part of the trilogy? Brew smiles. “I have some ideas. Maybe the last performance will be my funeral.” More laughs. “You’ve got to have a sense of humour.”
For Now, I Am is at Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s Wells on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 March before embarking on a national tour. The evening is a dual presentation of movement and words, illuminating distinctive artistic practice, entitled Dance & Dialogue. On Thursday 10 March, renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and Marc Brew compare creating, performing, and collaborating in their respective art forms. On Friday 11 March, Alistair Spalding, Sadler’s Wells’ Artistic Director and Chief Executive, will be in conversation with Marc Brew on creating dance that reflects life experience.
This interview, commissioned by Pulse Magazine, was published in its September edition. It is reprinted here with the editor’s kind permission.
Like two tributaries that feed into a great river, Subathra Subramaniam’s paths of science and dance feed into the work she has been creating since she started Sadhana Dance in 2009. She has danced since the age of seven when she was still living in Malaysia and later found her guru – Prakash Yadagudde – in 1988 at the Bhavan Centre after her family had moved to London. Dance in the classical form of bharatanatyam was always her passion but she never considered dance as a career. Subramaniam wanted to be a doctor.
While studying medical biochemistry at King’s College, London, she continued to dance with Shri Prakash and it was there she met Mayuri Boonham with whom she was to form Angika Dance in 1997. Following her degree, she spent two years dancing with various companies but the current of science flowed continuously and in the early years of Angika she studied for a PGCE to become a science teacher and taught science in secondary schools for five years. When Angika became successful, however, something had to give and it was the teaching. The company continued until it was folded in 2008 but the work Subramaniam co-created in that decade – deeply rooted in the bharatanatyam form but based on a desire to push its boundaries from within its own aesthetic tradition – honed the formal basis of her dance style.
After the break, Subramaniam knew that she still wanted to work within the form, but to make dance that was fundamentally important to her, something that would answer the essential question: why do I make dance? It was at this point that the two streams of her life fused: she began to make work that reflected the way the world works based on scientific concepts that asked questions to make us think.
Sadhana derives from the Sanskrit word for the pursuit of a spiritual goal, combining perfection of execution with study and reflection. Subramaniam’s methodology has evolved accordingly, employing rigorous research, immersing her dancers in the subject and finding new ways to generate appropriate movement material. Her first work, The Shiver, was born out of her experiences on five expeditions to the Arctic with Cape Farewell, an organization that parallels Subramaniam’s goals in bringing scientists and artists together to look at the environmental impact of human activity. Her first expedition was in 2003 and she subsequently undertook the role of co-director of educational activities for the organization. When she later met Lemn Sissay, who had made a radio documentary called The Shiver — and whom she subsequently commissioned to write the text for her piece — she discovered he, too, had been on a Cape Farewell expedition. She spent a year as artist-in-residence at the Environment Institute at University College, London, and a period of time observing the activities of the NGO, WaterAid, in India before creating Elixir, and her latest work, Under My Skin, entailed months of research working with surgeon Roger Kneebone both in the studio and on simulations of surgical operations, and spending two days in the operating theatre observing not only the actions of the surgical team but the relationship of trust between the surgeon, the anaesthetist, the scrub nurse, the assistants and the patient. ‘I am capturing their movements in dance, not simply describing what happens in an operating theatre… I feel I am starting to find a movement language that engages with subjects like surgery without being too literal and without being so abstract as to distill down the concept to a point where it is unrecognizable. Under My Skin is a way in to the subject, not the subject itself.’
She insists she is not trying to teach: ‘I don’t want dance to be educational; I want to create good work, interesting work, work that people can enjoy aesthetically’, though she insists that ‘dance has a role to play in the public engagement of science’. To prove the point, Under My Skin was the first dance performance presented at the Cheltenham Science Festival and she presented Elixir in Sofia, Bulgaria, to a sold-out audience that was interested primarily in the science.
Subramaniam surrounds herself with a team of collaborators with whom she has built up a relationship of trust over the last three productions: Kathy Hinde and Matthew Olden on music and projections, Kate Rigby on costumes and Aideen Malone on lighting design. She feels fortunate as not only do they all understand her aims, but, as she says, ‘good art comes from good collaborations’. Another part of her team with whom Subramaniam shares a special relationship is Quentin Cooper, her husband, whose interests closely correspond to her own. He is best known as the presenter of Radio 4’s former science program, The Material World, but was at one time a film critic and a reviewer of dance and puppetry for The Stage before he produced Kaleidoscope, the BBC Radio 4 program for arts and science. He and Subramaniam met at the launch of a Cape Farewell voyage at the Royal Society for the promotion of Arts. Cooper often chairs the post-show talk – called appropriately a Café Scientifique – at Sadhana Dance performances, stimulating discussion of both dance and science with characteristic enthusiasm.
Subramaniam is currently working on the early stages of a new piece as part of The Place’s Choreodrome project. Her research will involve spending an extended period of time working with psychiatrists, neuroscientists, therapists and patients at the Child and Adolescent Unit at the Maudsley Hospital in London. She was recently in the studio at The Place exploring the bharatanatyam form ‘to see if it has another way into tackling the subject in terms of its abhinaya, or expressive element’. This parallel way of creating dance allows her to channel all her experience into each work. ‘If you just want to come and see the dance, that’s what I am passionate about: making dance and making dance work. But I am equally passionate about making dance on science-related subjects.’
Under My Skin will be performed at The Hat Factory on October 15 at 7:30pm, and at The Place on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 October at 8pm with a Café Scientifique and a series of events around the theme of surgery and the arts. Under My Skin is also touring in the spring of 2014. For more details visit Sadhana Dance.
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