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Michael Clark's new work

Wednesday 1 July, 10:00:00 GMT

Michael Clark interviewed by Judith Mackrell

Michael Clark is nothing if not a purist. During the entire time that he was working on his Stravinsky project - choreographing Rite of Spring, Apollo, and Les Noces - he immersed himself completely in the world of Stravinsky's music. "It was one of my rules," he says "to listen only to Stravinsky. I'm sure I broke it on a number of occasions but I did listen to a lot."

Now, for his current project, Thank U Ma'am, Clark is lost in a completely different musical world, his earphones constantly tuned to the trinity of 70s rock music David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

When I spoke to Clark, he was in Venice, premiering the first version of what is still a work in progress. He agrees that he appears to have made a drastic shift of genres and that the contrast has been very good for him. "After working on Les Noces, which is so specific musically and rhythmically, I wanted to have a different kind of dialogue with the music. Bowies' The Jean Genie is very straightforward, it gives you a very different kind of freedom."

But Clark also insists that there are deep connections between the two projects. "I have been thinking in threes a lot, and after the trilogy of Stravinsky I was interested in the trilogy of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Bowie." And more surprisingly he says, "when I listen to Aladdin Sane I think I can hear Rite of Spring in there."

His initial route into the music was Bowie. "I listened to him when I was 12, and although I struggled with some of it, Diamond Dogs, I was determined to like it." It was also Bowie the performer who fascinated him. As a young boy living in Scotland and coming to terms with his own sexuality, to see Bowie on Top of the Pops in his Ziggy Stardust era was a revelation to Clark. "I was intrigued by this strange character and wanted to understand what he was about. And then to see him put his arm around his guitarist Mick Ronson, that was so significant. I thought, oh there might be other people like me."

As a grown up choreographer Clark says he has also had a long standing desire to work with Bowie's "Heroes". He thinks it's an electrifying song "Bowie puts the title in quotation marks, but I see it without them, I think there is something very heroic about it." But he is also fascinated by its structure. "It has this simple structure of six verses, but there is a density there with the changes of dynamic and texture. The sound is so great, you could work on it forever."

Clark was also determined to use footage of Bowie singing "Heroes" which in Venice was blown up to fill most of the back of the stage, Bowie backlit, and looking ineffably cool. "I knew that the dance would struggle against the image," says Clark but in fact he makes fascinating, subtle connections between them. Not only do the dancers mimic and elaborate some of Bowie's iconic gestures, but they also mimic the powerful inward stillness of his stage presence. "Bowie actually did very little movement when he performed," Clark observes, "but what he did had a huge significance."

Also feeding into the piece is the body language of Iggy Pop. "Bowie once said that The Jean Genie was about a character who was very much like Iggy Pop and the section I dance with a chair, that's partly a reference to a film of him when he's singing with his head wrapped up in a chair."

The fact that Clark is dancing in the piece himself is slightly accidental. His main solo was put in to fill a long costume change, his dance with the chair is partly a private joke - referencing two camp characters from 1960s radio who used to talk about the choreographer Reno de Spooner. "All the things he could do with a chair you'd never believe." Clark grins wickedly, "Everyone has a chair in their work".

There are many other references in play too. While Clark's choreography displays elements of 1960s minimalism, it is also coloured by the Broadway energy he can hear in tracks like The Jean Genie. "There are lots of dead ghosts in my choreography. Bob Fosse's in there somewhere, and Jerome Robbins. And the male solo in Aladdin Sane I see as the brother of the Chosen Maiden in Rite of Spring."

This solo is danced by a young newcomer to the company Simon Williams and Clark is very enthusiastic about his technique and what it has done for his own choreography. "This is the first time with a male dancer that I've got somewhere I haven't been before." In fact he says his new company is altogether fantastic, as good as any dancers he's worked with, if not better.

"What I'm asking from them is so much more demanding, it's taking us all to a new place."

Working Women Working

Thurs,4 June 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Shobana Jeyasingh, Charlotte Vincent and Wendy Houstoun interviewed by Donald Hutera

'I hope this composite interview approach doesn't mean we're being talked to as The Women.' These cautionary words belong to Wendy Houstoun when informed that she, Charlotte Vincent and Shobana Jeyasingh were all going to have their work for Dance Umbrella 2009 spotlighted. Together. 'I hate being grouped alongside people with whom I have nothing in common except for gender,' Houstoun continued.

The point is well taken. Certainly the last thing Dance Umbrella wants to do is support tokenism of any kind. Still, the temptation is strong - especially in light of recent (May 2009) online debates about the disparity between opportunities for men and women in dance in the UK - to make note of and, indeed, celebrate the intelligence and dedication with which each of these three experienced British artists has been crafting dance-based performances for many years now.

Houstoun and Jeyasingh, both London-based, began making work in the early to mid-1980s. Vincent, who lives in Sheffield, started her choreographic career the following decade. The latter two run their own eponymous companies. Jeyasingh has a reputation for fashioning brainy yet visceral dance pieces with an up-to-the-minute edge, and ones that frequently feature live and/or commissioned music. Vincent's brand of dance theatre combines conceptual playfulness and raw emotion, and often draws upon the personal stories of either herself or a multi-national cast. Houstoun, meanwhile, is an independent artist who has performed with groups like DV8 and Forced Entertainment as well as creating projects and shows of her own that are invariably stamped by an engaging, questioning wit.

The bottom line is, all three make work that matters. So let's bang the drum on their behalf and in the process find out more about who they are, where they've come from and why and how they do what they do, including what they've got planned for DU09.

Realising that it's still early days, what can you say about your upcoming Dance Umbrella performance?

Wendy Houstoun: The piece is called Keep Dancing. It uses text, archive video footage and performance. I'm taking a kind of 'poor theatre' approach in keeping with our financially stricken times. It deals with the idea of inertia and the will to act. It's also about persistence, or some deep down drive that makes us keep going. I'm thinking of it as quite positive and optimistic.

Charlotte Vincent: If We Go On is Vincent Dance Theatre's new middle-scale work for eight performers. Wendy Houstoun is writing texts for the production - some will become scripts, others are formal triggers for action I anticipate that, unlike the company's work to date, the actions of the people onstage will be connected visually, textually, spatially and musically, but not physically. This structure will encourages the audience to fill in the gaps of logic and narrative that I usually try to spell out, leaving space for multiple meanings to emerge about fragmentation, contradiction, exhaustion and restlessness.

Shobana Jeyasingh: Don't ask me what it's about, okay? It's all kind of in the pipeline. I don't even want to say names in case it isn't those names.

Are there overriding ides or elements in the new work that you have perhaps been investigating for a while now?

SJ: Whenever I finish a piece I always leave it with lots of questions. My next piece tends to be about trying to find the answers, and that leaves you with another set of questions. To people who've seen the finished product it probably looks very different, but my concerns have been the same. I'm just answering questions from the piece before.

WH: I have a drive to know how language and movement sit next to each other, and a continuous interest in attending to the audience in a direct way. I also take pleasure in cheap jokes and moments of stupidity. At the same time I want to combine personal observation with a wider social commentary.

CV: I feel a need to explore different strands of theatre. For instance, I'm becoming more interested in dismantling the act of performance whilst being engaged in the act of performing. It's about making explicit the mechanics of theatre rather than buying into the magic and illusion of an out of reach world onstage. You could say I'm interested in the fall rather than the leap. I'm also interested in finding an appropriate language for our times, and for my age and gender. How can I stretch the meaning of choreography by applying its rules and devices to musical, visual and textual forms? And how can I work with text and movement without one form replicating the other?

What are some of the ways you've changed since you started making dance?

WH: Age, of course, is the obvious answer and, along with that, context- the times we're living in and the aesthetic that goes along with it. In 1985 I was making small, unpaid stuff that went round the alternative cabaret scene in London. In 2008 I was doing a lot of small, unpaid stuff in small bars and alternative cabarets in London. My work's been influenced by people and ideas I've met over this period of time. It's gotten more playful, more self-aware theatrically, and language has become more central.

SJ: Making dance is basically about engaging with other human beings. But with choreography, more than any art form, you can't help but be implicated in the flux of life. The bigger change - the scenery and cultural flow around me - has changed incredibly. It's to do with the way Britain has changed, and funding, and the people who audition. Everything I do is influenced by the skills base of the dancers. I need bodies moving in front of me because that's really what makes me think. I've come from a tradition where body and music hold hands. The whole test of the dancer's virtuosity is how well they follow patterns of the music. A bit like the ballet. After a few years I felt I didn't really want to do that any more. I became more and more seduced by the dynamic narrative and musicality of the body. I still wanted music, but I was quite interested in what the relationship between it and the dancing body could be. We're so dramatically programmed to dance to music. For me it's far more interesting to find the phrase that suits the movement, which may or may not arrange itself in the way the composer's arranged the sounds.

How do you think you're perceived in the UK dance/performance scene?

CV: Demanding. Outspoken. Female.

WH: I'm not sure I want to know, really. Often words like maverick, idiosyncratic and quirky are used, which drive me mad as they're patronising, dismissive and don't really engage with the work. I think how I'm perceived would change depending on whom you talk to. Possible answers could be as someone who's persevering, and who's still wrestling with ideas. I'm very conscious - and proud - of how DV8 is still something people refer to a lot. Hmm.. perhaps an ageing dancer who won't go away?

SJ: I've been asked how I feel about the work being considered cerebral. Is that a polite way of saying it's a bit cold? The dances I made in the past were very bharata natyam dances. The dancers didn't find it emotional because I wasn't using the narrative part of the dance, so to them it seemed a mechanical arrangement of bodies. I always found this strange because I find a dancer onstage emotional per se. In the best possible world structure is an emotional experience. But you also need an audience that is empathetic to dance structures. Obviously there can be a difference in expectations. And yet we're all cerebral. We wouldn't be able to exist if we weren't thinking. I enjoy thinking. For me every dance is like a crossword puzzle. All the pieces are there, you just have to find and then put them in the right order.

Is there anything more you'd like to say about women choreographers?

SJ: It's like hacking a path through the jungle, not just in dance but in terms of being a woman and an Asian. But I haven't looked back to see whether anyone's following. Everybody influences everybody else, don't they? Looking at the demographic of dance, there should be hundreds of women choreographers. There are certainly hundred of female dancers. The male dancer is still a bit of a rarity, but when it comes to positions of responsibility it tends to be very male-dominated. It's not like that in writing or the visual arts.

WH: My best response is to continue to make work and attempt to get it programmed so that it's visible. But I'm not, and never have been, interested in the notion that women's work should sit separately.

CV: Understated. Overlooked. Not sexy enough. Not seeking glory but rather grafting away, searching for a meaningful language that isn't based on conventional mastery and virtuosity but perhaps highlights collaboration and shared processes and is somehow more human.

Dancing out of Africa

Fri,1 May 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Eckhard Thiemann interviewed by Donald Hutera

For anyone who has yet to visit Africa first-hand, the very idea of this vast continent might seem too big, too varied or too complex a mix of nations, cultures and styles to be easily grasped. Something similar could be said about the many African-born dance artists currently working in their homeland or abroad. Several of the best and brightest will become the focus of a key strand of Dance Umbrella 2009. Spread across four London locations, from Southbank to Stratford Circus via Covent Garden and The Place, African Crossroads - as this mini-season has been dubbed - is designed to upend any knee-jerk, preconceived ideas of what contemporary dance from Africa is about.

Dance Umbrella's Artistic Director, Betsy Gregory, has been watching new African dance and following the development of its artists for the past six years. 'Last year, at a major platform in Tunis, where I saw the work of over 30 choreographers and companies in the space of a week, I realised that the time had finally come to shine a spotlight on this work and to introduce a range of African artists to UK audiences and promoters.' Gregory invited Eckhard Thiemann, also an enthusiast, to work with her as Producer of African Crossroads and together, they have curated the programme which you will see in the festival this year.

'There's a growing generation of dance creators who produce work which develops traditional dance forms,' says Thiemann, 'but also challenges notions of African people dancing.' A London-based independent programmer, producer and artist's manager who specialises in international projects, Thiemann knows what he's talking about. During his five-year stint as the head of Woking Dance Festival, he oversaw numerous residencies and artistic exchanges between African and British dance practitioners and promoters. Given this history, Thiemann is ideally placed to spearhead African Crossroads alongside Gregory. Their joint goal, he says, is 'to introduce to the UK the notion of the dance artist from Africa, rather than the form "African Dance."'

Drawing inspiration from a combustible mix of social reality, subjective history and aesthetic abstraction, African Crossroads looks set to be a real eye and mind-opener. What's on offer is three full-evening works, a mixed bill and a couple of Brief Encounters (short works shown before a mainstage show that spotlight emerging or established artists). Many of the dance-makers taking part have either passed through or, in some cases, possibly bypassed traditional forms in order to find new, relevant and resolutely personal ways of communicating via movement.

'Their work is conceptually driven, politically enquiring and radically individual,' Thiemann elaborates. 'A lot of it's coming from a strong urban background. It's because more people in Africa now live in large cities than rurally. The cities have become melting pots of diverse communities harbouring all kinds of different cultures, religions, languages and tribal backgrounds.' This bracing socio-cultural multiplicity puts paid to so many European stereotypes of dance in Africa. As Thiemann says, 'All too often it's still understood as being rural, inherently connected to live drumming and tribal allegiances, collectively created and performed, and imbued with notions of formal authenticity.'

Thiemann wisely refrains from playing favourites amongst the roster of talent he and Gregory have assembled for Dance Umbrella. He does, however, point out the pioneering Kenyan choreographer, dancer and festival director Opiyo Okach. Dividing his time between Nairobi and France, the latter is a catalytic force in African dance and dance-theatre. Featuring an ensemble of African and British dancers, musicians and other creative collaborators, his work Shift.centre. is a loosely structured improvisational performance into which the peripatetic audience is invited. 'The beauty of Opiyo's production,' Thiemann believes, 'is that it's all about how he sees his practice globally. Because he's seeking a deeper engagement with the world through his work, there's an openness and about it. That's the spirit we want to get into this entire season.'

Speak of African dance and spirituality and the name Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe is never far behind. Mantsoe is no stranger to Umbrella audiences, having appeared in 4 previous editions of the festival since 1999. This gripping South African soloist is back with Ebhofolo, an hour-long, ritual-like dance that alludes to both a physical and spiritual homeland. The source for much of Mantsoe's work is inextricably bound up with feelings about his ancestry. Not so Nelisiwe Xaba. 'Both she and Vincent are from post-apartheid Soweto,' Thiemann explains, 'but I can't think of two artists with a more contrasting means of expressing themselves.' Xaba's influences include fashion and design. Apparently she's also got a highly developed sense of irony and sarcasm about anything to do with Africa. (She's been known to mimic some of Mantsoe's and Okach's movement in her work.) Correspondances is an audacious-sounding collaboration between her and Kettly Noel, a Haitian-born, French-speaking dancer who lives in Mali. One of this duet's chief appeals, according to Thiemann, is that it's a strong piece by women working in a decidedly male-dominated African dance scene.

Not that there aren't other women featured in African Crossroads. Nadia Beugre appears in Un Espace Vide: Moi (An Empty Space: Me). Presented as a Brief Encounter, this solo with live music is a meditation on loss and the process of moving through grief. Too, the Senegalese dancer Fatou Cisse will perform alongside Andreya Ouamba in Contre Poids, the lone duet on a mixed bill of enticingly varied male solos to be shown at Stratford Circus. Jointly organised as a special event by Dance Umbrella and East London Dance (ELD), this event represents the widest cross-section of dance from Africa in the programme. Additionally, each of ELD's associate artists - Alesandra Seutin of VOCAB Dance Company, Adam Towndrow, Nasae Evanson and Anni-Lunette Deakin-Foster of C-12 Dance Theatre and Tony Adigun of Avant Garde Dance - will create a short response to the work of their African counterparts. Nor is the mixed bill all that we'll see of Ouamba. He'll be collaborating with the Canadian-born, UK-based dancer Matthias Sperling on Diplomacy 2, a Dance Umbrella commission unveiled as a Brief Encounter prior to Vincent Mantsoe's performances.

African Crossroads is going to be a rich, exciting array of talents and perspectives. Just don't go to it expecting to see undulating bodies in grass skirts. In other words, there's no room here for cliches or outdated, one-size-fits-all generalities. Thiemann sums up the season nicely when he says, 'These artists are all very different from each other. And they can disagree artistically, like artists in the UK do. There's no generic formula. This is what they do at this moment in time. It's work that could only come from Africa.'

Rosemary Lee: A Quiet Rebellion

Wed,1 April 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Rosemary Lee interviewed by Donald Hutera

She's danced in solos and choreographed huge group performances, made films and devised installations. As Rosemary Lee is the first to admit, 'I don't know how to classify myself, and that's good. But I'm hard to categorise because I don't fit into any boxes. I keep challenging myself all the time, and in different forms. I'm always trying to change the context, looking at other ways to present some of my concerns. Then I can reach different audiences.'

Lee, 50, has been defying artistic pigeonholing for close to three decades now with movement-based, image-laden works in which strong concepts have often been balanced by an unexpected emotional delicacy. Her major creative concern in 2009 is Common Dance, a Dance Umbrella co-presentation to be staged in Greenwich Dance Agency's impressive Borough Hall. This large-scale, site-specific performance project will involve a cross-generational cast of approximately a hundred professional and non-professional dancers, singers and musicians, all of them bound together by a specially commissioned choral score from composer Terry Mann.

First, a few words about the music. Conceived in three parts (corresponding to the diurnal cycle of dawn, daytime and nightfall), Mann's multi-layered, 30-minute composition will be embedded inside an ambient soundtrack of bird song and beehives, distant voices, rustling grass, humming glass and bells. He and Lee have invited Finchley Children's Music Group, a chamber choir of young people aged 14 to 19 years, to participate. The live instrumentation accompanying them will be simple - just pipes and drum. The text the youths will sing is a collation of prayers, poems and lyrics stretching from medieval times to the present, a direct reflection of Lee's ongoing interest in poetry ('That's what's beside my bed, not novels') and the oral tradition. 'Poetry's the closest art form to dance for me,' she says. 'Both are about trying to find an essence of something that's particular, but also universal.'

As for its choreographic content, Common Dance won't be telling a story. On the other hand, as Lee is well aware, any gathering of human beings can convey, however indirectly, certain messages about society. 'In a quiet way,' she concedes, 'I want to remind the audience that although we may be of different ages, races, backgrounds and so on, something is connecting us. And what does that mean?' The cast - ranging in age from schoolkids to seniors, and recruited from the Greenwich community and across London - will be split into four groups, or units, of about a dozen people each, with each unit anchored by the presence of one professional and one apprentice dancer. 'At times it will be like watching the activity of a village,' Lee enthuses. 'You can tell that what they're doing has rules and instructions.' But just what those are, she adds, needn't concern us unduly. As for the simple structures and patterns of movement that Lee will be using, most of it will be derived from folk dancing but somehow - to use her word - subverted.

Common Dance taps right into many of Lee's preoccupations. This includes wondering how natural can people be onstage, and how do they perform when in the middle of a ritual? 'I've always been interested in traditional form and rituals,' she elaborates. 'But say "ritual" and immediately it becomes New Age and religious.' That, she stresses, is not her sensibility at all. 'My desire is to see if we can work together in dance and experience profound moments of synchronicity. I'm also interested in indigenous movement and indigenous forms, and in identity and commonality.' With all this in mind, she dubs Common Dance 'a contemporary folk piece' - with folk used in the sense of joining in rather than as a vehicle for virtuosic display.

Lee's artistic and personal motives in tackling Common Dance are complex and insebly linked. Born and raised in East Anglia, she regards the region - and growing up in a family of environmentally aware Quakers during the 1970s - as fundamental and indelible influences on her life and subsequent, multi-faceted career. Even as a child she was attuned to 'the profound connection between environment and character, and a sense of place and our relationship to it. Living on the edge of two worlds - land and sea - which is forever changing, I was very aware of the elements. I still am. You think everything is solid, and it's not.' As for family, Lee's father was an oceanographer and geographer and her maternal grandfather an ecologist with a Pied Piper streak. 'My relatives were the first nature writers,' she states. 'You could say that I grew up watching community-based work, in a way.' Given this background, little wonder that her partner (with whom Lee and their two teen-age offspring live in Muswell Hill) is a climate-change strategist employed by Greenpeace. Nor should her definition of the artist's role in society come as a surprise. Quoting her friend and colleague, Graeme Miller, Lee says, 'As an artist I have a desire to be a useful citizen. I don't see artists as being removed from daily life at all.'

Lee began organising big ensemble pieces in 1987, and in locations ranging from venerable banqueting halls to erstwhile fortresses. 'I haven't made that many of them,' she insists, 'because you'd burnt out if you did. I'm not very good at joining a group, but I love forming them for intense periods of work.'

Philosophically, Common Dance arises out of Lee's hankering after what she calls 'an egalitarian approach to life,' and one that respects the individual but also emphasises co-operation and support. 'These are things that seem to have been devalued during the last 10 or 20 years.' The piece's underpinnings are, naturally, political. 'We don't have to talk about it, but it's there in the experience.' And in the words she uses to describe the work's themes - community, kindred-ness and 'the idea of common ground and the right to gather. That's something that's been eroded as well.' Citing the link between folk songs and dances and, say, direct action and counter-cultural protest, Lee comments, 'It's not just about having bells on and being twee.' Elsewhere during our conversation she mentions the Inclosure Acts, a process in the 18th and 19th centuries by which common land was taken into fully private ownership and use. Even now she sounds angry about it, and its various, more contemporary manifestations. Is she? 'Very. We've lost our ability to question conventional wisdom, and that bothers me. People aren't willing to fight the tide.'

Lee nevertheless claims she is incapable of making issues-based work. 'But if you looked at all of the work I've made, there are issues there.' What, then, might she say is the core issue driving this new production forward? 'To get dancers to look at their own existence in a slightly different way,' she replies. 'Can everybody own the work and feel equal in it?' Ideally, the collective efforts of Lee, Mann and the 100-plus member community they gather together will likewise inspire new perspectives on living in each of us in the audience at Common Dance.