PETER, dance with… podcast

Ep 35 PETER, dance with Martin Sonderkamp | [⤓]

Ep 34 PETER, dance with Agnieszka Sjökvist Dlugoszewska | [⤓]

Ep 33 PETER, dance with Caterina Daniela Mora Jara | [⤓]

Ep 32 PETER, dance with Andreas Berchtold | [⤓]

Ep31 PETER, dance with Emil Ertl | [⤓]

Ep30 PETER, dance with Cecilia Roos | [⤓]

Ep 29 PETER, dance with Zoë Poluch | [⤓]

Ep 28 PETER, dance with Frank Bock | [⤓]

Ep 27 PETER, dance with DISCOllective | [⤓]

Ep 26 PETER, dance with Yari Stilo Series 2 | [⤓]

Ep 25 PETER, dance with Klaudia Rychlik | [⤓]

Ep23 PETER, dance with Anna Asplind | [⤓]

Ep22 PETER, dance with Darya Efrat | [⤓]

Ep21 PETER, dance with Elise Mae Nuding | [⤓]

Ep20 PETER, dance with Laressa Dickey | [⤓]

Ep 19 PETER, dance with Gergő D Farkas | [⤓]

Ep18 PETER, dance with Simon Vincenzi | [⤓]

Ep17 PETER, dance with Hannah Krebs | [⤓]

Ep16 PETER, dance with Nelia Naumanen | [⤓]

Ep15 PETER, dance with Linda Wardal | [⤓]

Ep14 PETER, dance with Susan Sentler | [⤓]

Ep13 PETER, dance with Žak Valenta | [⤓]

Ep12 PETER, dance with Anna Pehrsson | [⤓]

Ep11 PETER, dance with Pontus Pettersson | [⤓]

Ep10 PETER, dance with Ekin Tunçeli | [⤓]

Ep09 PETER, dance with Ami Skånberg | [⤓]

Ep08 PETER, dance with Matilda Bilberg | [⤓]

Ep05 PETER, dance with Charlotta Ruth | [⤓]

Ep04 PETER, dance with Siriol Joyner | [⤓]

Ep03 PETER, dance with Benjamin Pohlig | [⤓]

Ep02 PETER, dance with Yari Stilo | [⤓]

Ep01 PETER, dance with Luusi Kateme | [⤓]

1. Katye Coe – https://www.katyecoe. org
2. The Dancer as Agent conference (DOCH Stockholm, November 2013) – http://sarma.be/pages/The_Dancer_as_Agent_Collection
3. Frank Bock – https://www.frankbock.com/
4. Freelance Dance Workers – https://freelancedance.uk/
5. Wainsgate Dances – https://www.wainsgatedances.com/
6. Hebden Bridge – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebden_Bridge
7. Old Town, West Yorkshire – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Town,_West_Yorkshire
8. Gibson Mill – https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/yorkshire/hardcastle-crags/history-of-hardcastle-crags
9. Wainsgate Chapel – https://wainsgate.co.uk/
10. Alva Noë – https://www.alvanoe.com/
11. Charlie Morrissey – http://www.charliemorrissey.com/
12. Rob Hopper – https://www.instagram.com/robdothopper/
13. Open Practice – https://wainsgate.co.uk/wainsgate-dances-open-practice/
14. Kenilworth – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenilworth
15. Sheila Chandra – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Chandra
16. George Fellows
17. Matthew Bourne – https://www.new-adventures.net/about-us#matthew-bourne
18. Akram Khan – https://www.akramkhancompany.net/
19. Mulan (1998) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulan_(1998_film
20. Oliver Twist – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver!
21. Spice Girls – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_Girls
22. Online Open Practice Playlists https://open.spotify.com/user/charliemorrissey
23. Charlie Ford – https://www.charlieford.studio/
24. Middlesex University – https://www.mdx.ac.uk/
25. Lucy Suggate – https://www.lucysuggate.com/
26. Caroline Scott – https://www.feldenkraisyorkshire.com/
27. Maya Carroll – https://www.instagram.com/mayarosecarroll/
28. Chrysa Parkinson – https://www.uniarts.se/english/people/co-workers/chrysa-parkinson/
29. Self interview on practice, Chrysa Parkinson – https://vimeo.com/26763244
30. Karen Barad – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad
31. Matthias Sperling – http://www.matthias-sperling.com/
32. Neurolive – https://neurolive.info/
33. 
    
34. Roberta Jean – https://www.robertajean.org/
35. Kieran Brown – https://www.instagram.com/kieranbrown790/
36. Steve Paxton – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Paxton
37. Goldberg Variations, Johann Sebastian Bach – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldberg_Variations
38. Deborah Hay – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Hay
39. Joe Moran – https://joemorandance.com/
40. Amy Voris – https://www.amyvoris.com/
41. Caterina Barbieri – https://caterinabarbieri.bandcamp.com/
42. Beyoncé – https://beyonce.com/
43. Skinner Releasing – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_Releasing_Technique
44. Contact Improvisation – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_improvisation
45. Kinship Workshop – https://kinshipworkshop.info/
46. Tom Goodwin – https://tomgoodwin.info/
47. Helen Poyner – http://www.walkoflife.co.uk/helen.htm
48. Elise Brewer – https://www.instagram.com/elisebrewer
49. She Dancing, Katye Coe – https://www.coventry.ac.uk/contentassets/f2156ed41a1e45259209b700e9e9af60/awofmbando.pdf
50. Jon Young, Sit Spot Score – https://thenaturewheel.com/2025/07/15/sit-spot/

PETER: Okay, good morning. Um, welcome to Peter Dance with Katye, Katye Coe. Good morning, Katye Coe, how are you?

Katye Coe: Good morning. Yeah, well. I feel like I should say that we’re sitting in a…

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: In my living room.

PETER: Yeah. And we’re sort of starting here because, in a way, the thing you’re sharing is part of where you live in a part of your world. And we’ve met in Stockholm at different events. I mean, you’re such an amazing figure. Been connected to Frank Bock, who I know really well. But if people don’t know you, what do you, what do you call yourself?

Katye Coe: Oh, yeah, I call myself, um… Mostly, I call myself a dance worker.

PETER: Yeah, that’s nice. The work is really important to do with sort of workers’ movement and workers’ rights.

Katye Coe: Uh. Yeah. I think so, and actually, yeah, there’s an organization that I’m involved in, which is called the Freelance Dance Workers, and when we set it up, it kind of made me feel more, uh, at home in myself. It’s like, yeah, I’m a dance worker and actually it also means that when I’m dancing or teaching or rehearsal directing or working with people one to one. I can be I’m a dance worker in all of those uh, capacities, I suppose.

PETER: Yeah, because you do sort of therapeutic work as well, so then it fits within that umbrella a little bit.

Katye Coe: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I’m a dance worker and I… have been a dance worker for… Uh, 30 years? 32 years. I said 20 for many years, and then something kind of… Oh, yeah. Oh, actually, it’s 30. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then, I’m excited that you’re here, partly because, uh, this place, and this… Um, well, this house, but also this, this situation of being an old town and being, uh, almost next door to Wainsgate Dances is still quite new for me. It’s like the newest, the newest additional iteration of, um… Yeah, where I do, where I do stuff and how I do stuff. Um, and it’s been really brilliant to have you here for a couple of days.

PETER: Thank you. Can we say where we are?

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER: We’re in Hebden Bridge.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Well, actually, we’re in Old Town, which is… It’s up the hill from Hebden Bridge. So…

PETER: So you get the light. I love that, what you said yesterday. We were on a walk and you said, oh, this because we’re up the hill from the valley. We get the light, whereas in Hebden Bridge itself, it’s a bit darker.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and hopefully, um, yeah, after we’ve been in the studio, uh, I’m hoping that we’re also sitting in the house with a kind of storm outside. So we get the light, but we also get the wind.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: And the weather. You really get the weather up here. But hopefully we’ll get we’ll walk down.

PETER: Okay, then. Yeah.

Katye Coe: Later, because, yeah, the walk down into the valley has also become quite an important, uh, I don’t know, part of my being here is to go down into the valley and then come back up.

PETER: Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah, so we’re in Old Town. Which is also sometimes called Wadsworth. It’s also sometimes called Chiserley, but it is this… Well, collection of houses around what was once Gibson Mill, which was kind of… Um, built in the Industrial Revolution, and, um, I, I, I think, I’m, I’m not sure, but the chapel, where Wainsgate Dances, um, happens, um, was there as a Baptist place of congregation for all of the people that live around here, but also worked in various mills.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: I don’t know, there’s something about work. Yeah, yeah.

PETER: Yeah. No, I mean, and you’ve had, like you say, a 30 year career, you’ve been a rehearsal director, you’ve been in dance companies, touring, and you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s interesting. Yeah. to see how now this is a part of your work and it’s a life in a lot of ways. We’ve been talking a bit about dance and Alva Noë and different things that I’ve been thinking about recently, but yeah, it’s integrated somehow. Maybe that, that, the best one way to describe that is what we’re going to do today. If that’s fair to say.

Katye Coe: Yeah, um, so it’s really generous and brilliant that you could come, and we could, like that, if this could also be in the rhythm of, uh, yeah, a day when practice begins at 9 o’clock and um, yeah, part of the reason that I moved here, um, is because of what happens at Wainsgate and what has been happening at Wainsgate for a while and my friend Charlie Morrissey among others…

PETER: How you might meet later?

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we will absolutely meet him, and, um… Yeah, he and Rob and others in this place have been developing, um, a kind of curatorial, but also a community presence for dance and dancing, and other things there. Um, and in lockdown, uh, or just before lockdown, um, they, they started to, um, have this daily practice Monday to Friday, 9 till 10 with a playlist. Um, in, in the Sunday school room at the chapel, um, called Open Practice. And, um, and then I think very quickly after that lockdown happened. And I was living in the Midlands and everything stopped. And everything went online, and I went to Open Practice every morning, pretty much, from Kenilworth, from online, yeah.

PETER: So online

Katye Coe: It was all online and there was a huge, it was, sometimes there were like 60 people, 20 people. Of course, from all over the world.

PETER: Yes, of course.

Katye Coe: Um, joining in, uh, this hour-long playlist from living rooms and some people had access to studios and Charlie would often be…

PETER: In the chapel.

Katye Coe: In the chapel in his office. Yeah, so, my experience of Open Practice to begin with was during lockdown, and then various times that I’ve been up here to do workshops or rehearse with Charlie. Um, Open Practice is the beginning of every day. And it doesn’t stop for anything. Okay. Um, I, it’s a kind of foundation stone. Um, yeah, the, so if someone’s doing, you know, using the space like we are today or a residency or whatever, it doesn’t start till 10:15 because Open Practice happens first and the encouragement for any artists that come to do anything here is that they will also join. Um, Open Practice because it also means that you kind of meet.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: The folk who also come, who are a real mixture of dance enthusiasts, movement enthusiasts, professional dancers, others.

PETER: And is it still online as well?

Katye Coe: No. That stopped. It stopped, and it… it… Yeah, that Charlie would talk about this better, that they’re kind of hybrid model, I think is kind of complicated.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you’re either all online or you’re all in the room. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: And now there’s a 2nd foundational practice, which has just begun this new year, that happens downstairs, called Open Drawing.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And I’d been away and I’d forgotten that it was starting, but so now we have a shared playlist. And people making marks downstairs.

PETER: Yeah, drawing… sketching… drawing…

Katye Coe: Yeah, sketching, right.

Katye Coe: Yeah, it’s, it is, um, it’s got brackets around it, so it is drawing, it’s not sculpture or painting. It’s like, yeah, the, the, the skill of drawing or the act of drawing or mark making. And so that happens from 9 till 10. Uh, downstairs because the building is also full of… artists and art enthusiasts. Yeah, so now there’s this kind of simultaneous Open Practice happening. Which, yeah, you’re gonna come to, and that will start our day off.

PETER: Yeah, that sounds great. And then we’ll come back and talk more after.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

PETER: And I will find out, I suppose, but are there any rules or protocols that are sort of shared?

Katye Coe: There are. Yeah, for Open Practice, yes. And we have some time in the studio after as well. Yes. Yeah, Open Practice has a kind of list of, uh, how it’s a kind of how-to, and those have been developed and kind of honed over the years of it happening. Um, mostly kind of edited and designed by a group of us who all kind of share the running of Open Practice. Um, and I guess it comes from the lockdown. I don’t know if Charlie’s ever thought about this, but some of those rules come from the lockdown period. Which is this is your own… this is to dance in your own way, in your own practice. Um, in your own space. So you set up, you know, often people use mats and you, yeah, you set up somewhere in the room and you kind of stay there. You don’t travel around or uh, yeah, or be in direct relationship to anyone else. Some people bring their little ones sometimes. That’s different, obviously. They’ve got, they’ve got babes in arms or small ones, then they share space, but, um, yeah, all of the adults are encouraged to, yeah, stay in their own lane, basically.

PETER: Interesting.

Katye Coe: Um, yeah, and that, I, just as a dancer, that’s been really, um, good for me to understand how to practice without, like, having the whole space to move through.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and you can do whatever you want to, you know, you can lie on the floor and stretch and you can really move to the music. You can sob.

PETER: Yeah I suppose because it is, you’re provided your own space, it allows for actually, within that space, you can do whatever, whatever determined.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and you’re welcome. People arrive later. They or they need to leave early. It’s also fine. Um, there’s a school in Old Town, a primary school, and a couple, you know, few people come some days, who’ve just dropped their children at school, so they come a few minutes late, or the bus brings them late. Yeah, and for me it’s become… when I’m here, mostly, that’s how I start my day.

PETER: Yeah. Great. Well, we shouldn’t be late, so…

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Let’s pause here.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Part 2

PETER: Yeah, because we’ve already been, um…

Katye Coe: alongside…

PETER: alongside and had so many things come up. Yeah, so we’re back.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And we have, it’s maybe how many hours is it? A couple of hours since we last spoke.

Katye Coe: Yeah, two and a half, yeah.

PETER: We walked through the storm.

Katye Coe: Yeah we did. …Yeah

PETER: And then we warmed up, and the playlist started. And, uh, many people came. I thought it was a lot, but you said it was a bit of a quieter day.

Katye Coe: It’s a quieter day. I sense, probably, partly because of the storm. We’re in something called… What did you say, Chandra?

PETER: Chandra, yeah. I think so.

Katye Coe: There’s a musician called Sheila Chandra, who I often play in my playlist, if it’s mine. But her music is not so stormy. Yeah, so we came over to Wainsgate Chapel and upstairs, we’re sitting in the Sunday schoolroom.

PETER: It’s beautiful. There’s big windows. There’s a stained glass window. The paint is flaking from the ceiling a little bit, and it’s a beautiful, varnished wooden floor. And outside, there are two pheasants, which were accompanying me through the whole dance. We were on opposite sides of the room, and, of course, we stayed in our sort of pockets.

Katye Coe: Yeah, I mean, because it was quieter, I could catch you, like, I was catching sight of you in, um, in, in there and, um, yeah, I guess there were 7, um, well, and you got a touch of the oldest and the youngest today.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: Probably, I think that’s the oldest and the youngest, kind of, on Earth, regular people, Julia, who’s, who always sits there.

PETER: To our right?

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah. Um, I think Julia’s in her mid 80s.

PETER: Wow.

Katye Coe: Um, and is pretty… yeah, comes most days.

PETER: with a… she had a stick, a walking stick.

Katye Coe: Yeah, she has a stick.

PETER: And she has a chair. Yeah. To sort of…

Katye Coe: Yeah, and she’s a real kind of dance fan.

PETER: Yes, yes, you were speaking of Matthew Bourne., when we came.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, she loves Matthew Bourne and Akram Khan. That kind of side. She’s really active. Um, and, uh, yeah, I’m inspired by, among others, Julia’s kind of place in the world, like, she’s, she’s definitely down at the traffic lights on the pro-Palestine roadsides, as often as she can be. Um, and then George (George Fellows) came, um, he was a…

PETER: Yes, a young, young child.

Katye Coe: With a young child, and George, I think George is a dancer. Okay. Um, I think it’s true, maybe a street kind of street dance specialist, but he might hear this and tell me differently.

PETER: It looked like he was doing yoga.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And he came for two years with his older child, who’s now gone to school, and so he’s now introducing his younger child, and they often come for a short amount of time, but it will grow, and gradually, they’ll be here for the whole hour.

PETER: Oh, wow.

Katye Coe: Um, yeah.

PETER: And what was nice was the relationship between them, ’cause I was right next to them, and the child was asking the dad to continue doing something, asking George, I should say. Or not like that, do that again.

Katye Coe: Oh, yeah, Choreography. Yeah, in the best possible way.

PETER: Really that two-year-old, it’s sort of, like, mindset of, like, no, this is how we’re going to do it.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah.

PETER: Doing it for me. I don’t care what you want.

Katye Coe: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, so I love that sort of inspiration, and there are maybe two or three little ones who come with a caregiver, some type, but George is regular, and, yeah, George is actually one of the people, um, he, he would only be able to do it on a Tuesday, but he often runs a playlist. Okay. On a Tuesday, and he used to, his eldest used to choose some of the tracks for the playlist, so we’d often get, like, something from Mulan or something from Oliver Twist. Oh, these brilliant things, and I really love the Spice Girls. Um, and, yeah, maybe there’s something to say about Charlie, um, being, of course, like the main space-holder, and if he’s here, Charlie is the DJ, as well.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And when Charlie’s away, there’s a kind of group of us that, um, sort of on a rotor, or whenever we’re available, we’ll do the job of opening up the space and, um, uh, providing a playlist and sort of just holding. As you can see, very softly holding the space.

PETER: Yeah, so today, Charlie was the one creating and playing the playlist and am I right in understanding he has it online as well? So it’s also possible to…

Katye Coe: Yeah, all his—I mean, there must be 100s now—um, of Charlie’s Spotify playlists, and you can, if you just go to Charlie Morrissey, you find all of them, including, actually, the ones that most of the rest of us produce, sometimes we just send them to Charlie, and he publishes them as well. And, yeah, the group of us is me, and Charlie, and the other Charlie, you met downstairs. Yeah. He has his studio here.

PETER: One of the rooms off of the Sunday school.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s four…

PETER: Pink doors.

Katye Coe: Four pink doors that look kind of like, almost like, I was thinking they look like a children’s TV set.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: But they are some of the artist studios. Um, which reminds me, Peter, that there’s possibility of interruption.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: is part of being here. So, if…

PETER: Of course.

Katye Coe: If one of the—I just noticed Charlie’s door is unlocked, so he may well…

PETER: Be back.

Katye Coe: Be back with his, uh, yeah, uh, drawing stuff at some point. So, Charlie trained at Middlesex—Charlie Ford, this is the guy who met downstairs—trained at Middlesex, but is an art visual artist. A really, um, brilliant, um…

PETER: Did you know each other when you were studying at Middlesex?

Katye Coe: No, no, no. He is much younger than me. Um, and he, his parent, yeah, he was born quite near here, I think, and came back. And his partner, Lucy Suggate, is another dancer, choreographer, she, um, is part of the, part of the group of us, I suppose, who, in some way, I think, particularly Lucy, um, sort of support this space and how it’s evolving. And then there’s someone else called Caroline, who’s a Feldenkrais practitioner. She also runs playlists. So there’s, I’m naming a few people as the kind of folk who take care of this morning that happens, and then there’s a wider community you met Maya yesterday.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And every time I sit on this floor, actually, I really remember me and Maya doing a varnishing afternoon, ’cause it took several days to revarnish this floor. When we came back into the building after the renovations earlier this year. And, yeah, there was a whole gang of us that were sanding and varnishing. Hello. Uh, that’s Charlie Ford walking through. We were just talking about you.

PETER: Only positives,

Charlie Ford: In a good way. Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah.

PETER: Yeah, so if we go through what we did… So we’ve arrived in the space. And there is this… We have mats that we were all lying with.

Katye Coe: Yeah, most people choose to have mats because the floor is chilly.

PETER: But it also aids this, because we were speaking to Charlie just now, like, it found a little bit of its shape through the pandemic, as we think we said before.

Katye Coe: This online version.

PETER: Yeah, so we all have our little spaces, which, at the beginning, would define a bit by the mats and then…

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Gradually, the mats got taken to the side.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And it’s all non-verbal. There wasn’t any, “okay, warm up over, we starting now…”

Katye Coe: Oh, no. It’s…

PETER: The music starts playing. Yeah. And then, at some point, I realized, okay, this is what we’re doing. This is it.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really sort of unannounced. Um… and even as a newcomer, you, I think, you kind of got the gist of it.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: So you can kind of vicariously pick up how Open Practice kind of works. Um… I mean, you also have a knowledge of what it is to be in a dance studio, so you kind of…

I trust… trust… I would get it, but, yeah…

PETER: but with some of the more, the people who aren’t dancing as much as we are, maybe, does, do you or Charlie give them a little bit more information?

Katye Coe: When if newcomers?

PETER: Yeah, yeah, if they’re new, of course,

Katye Coe: Yeah yeah, newcomers, if they don’t come accompanied by someone who—’cause people bring people. But if they come on their own, whoever’s holding the space, or one of us, will often kind of indicate where the mats are, let people know to set themselves up, and on the door out there, is the list of “this is what I’ve been practicing.” This is how it works, and that’s on the website as well. Yeah, people can read through that and it’s like, oh, okay, so you just get on with your own stuff. No one’s going to tell you what to do. It’s okay to do whatever you want to do within the parameters of…

PETER: And the people really make the—we were discussing this already a little bit—but the people really make the practice of that day. They make the Open Practice of that day. It reminds me of sort of what I know of like Quaker sort of church…

Katye Coe: Meetings.

PETER: meetings. Exactly. Because I’ve been to one, and I remember, you know, you walk in, you sit down, and you sit in silence, and then, at some point, you decide, I’ve been there long enough, and you get up, and you leave.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And there’s a little bit of a texture of that, a quality that people enter, they know what to do. They lie down, and then when they’re ready, they get up and leave.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and I guess that’s also the shape of the arc of the hour. If, if, if I’m thinking about this, it’s like, you’re in, uh, you’re in the shape of an hour, and you don’t have to think about it, because the music’s gonna stop. And usually, I mean, I know enough about the way that the arcs of the playlist work is, like, usually the energy generally of the music, the kind of, you know, increases, not always. And then it stops and then it’s finished. And there’s often a thank you, but there’s no kind of round of applause or… And I really, you know, one of the best things about being here, doing whatever I’m doing, I was really thinking about this morning is that you and Charlie were talking a bit about freedom. I can really, really dance. Like, I can really be, I can dance so I can, I can dance in whatever capacity feels kind of available for that morning. And no one’s really taking any notice.

PETER: Yeah, yeah

Katye Coe: Um, and sometimes I really, I really feel like I’m really, like, wow, I’m, like, full. Um, and it’s, and I, I sort of know that I might be giving some energy out, or, like, so, you know, often I pick up from someone like Charlie, or maybe a bit more today, you, and maybe I do pick up often from the other dancing folk in the space, ’cause sometimes I need a catalyst or a bit of… yeah. But mostly, I get a sense that I am not influencing or making other people feel in any way conscious of what they are or not, or they’re not doing.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And that’s really unusual.

PETER: It is, it is, and this, because normally when we’re dancing, we’re doing it for a choreographer or for a performance, a production that we’re making. There’s an intention behind it. And there’s something about—and even if the same we took a class or something, a one-off workshop or improvisation class—you feel like, oh, this is my opportunity. So you want to make the most of it. There’s something about the regularity, the consistency, that you can come back tomorrow and dance again or next week. That it’s always there as a sort of staple. And there must be, yeah, a real relief, because of course, I was still negotiating, like, this is my opportunity to be with you and to bring what I’m working with or what… what I need to work on. And, of course, I have productions in my head. Oh, should I be focusing on that? And so on. But the lack of like direction, verbally, and the freedom of the space, like you say, and the conditions, perhaps, and also the shared, the sharing of that conditioning as well, right? There are other people committing to this moment to not exchange, even, there wasn’t even a conversation after, “how was it? What kind of dancing were you doing?” Even though that’s kind of what we’re doing now.

Katye Coe: Right, yeah, it’s really funny, like, the content somehow, it, the content of what I’m doing is, it’s at once, absolutely important, and two nonconsequent—like, without consequence or importance at all. Yeah. My head just went somewhere from quite a long time ago, and maybe, because, um, Chrysa Parkinson, uh, made a kind of animated film on practice.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: Which I still feel like… feels like yesterday, but actually, it’s really quite a long time ago, probably now. Um, that I uh, wrote about and loved and taught with, um, as I often, in teaching spaces, that I’m not in so much anymore, but when I was working with students regularly, um, there was often this kind of question of like, how do you develop a practice? And I found her, um, actually, I used to set it as a task. It’s like, this, you’re going to make a self-interview on what you feel like, is, you know, has good agitation for you in practice right now, but I was rethinking about that in terms of how I might still somehow subconsciously be really referencing some of the things that she refers to in that self-interview. And that, in a way, how I sometimes navigate Open Practice. I could, like, relate to a sort of self-interview.

PETER: Yes. Yes, yes.

Katye Coe: Because there’s no one else to interrogate, or reflect with, or discuss, and she has this—I might misremember this—but there is a part of that interview where she refers to practice as training. So if she’s preparing for something, she, I think she named skipping, um, you know, if she was preparing for something that required a certain endurance or a certain buoyancy, she would, that would be her thing that she did that day, and it was skipping or that week or… yeah. Um, and I definitely know that if I know I’ve got a particular week ahead, or I’m, you know, I’m preparing for a tour or a performance, or then I will do something different, or I will, uh, use the hour, perhaps in a preparatory way. Yeah. But if it’s just the kind of maintenance hour or a practice hour, yeah, I think I am, like, really interviewing myself through physicality, and affect.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Through that hour.

PETER: Yeah, and in fact, at school, that some, that, that was something that sort of could exist. Like, it would be often a question that I would give, or I would hear, in school contexts, where you’d be invited to, almost interview the body, or interview the self, of like, what are you busy with today? What’s the body carrying with it? What’s what’s important, this moment? Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah. And how do I sit or not sit because I’m moving, but how do I sort of sit in the fact of that? And then you also, there was something else I wanted to just mention in relation to being in class. Being in class also infers a particular way of seeing and being seen, which, in the best scenario, is really brilliant, because, of course, as dancers, we’re also practicing to be seen, so, uh, it’s important, but there’s something about the lack of focused witness. In these, um, in these kind of companionable hours that I come here and do this, that feels kind of, um, yeah, it’s like self-authorial.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: It’s like, oh, no, this is just for me to sit and be with what feels like it’s arriving.

PETER: And what’s really striking is, I think, as I’ve taught how to make a practice or, talked around practice, and also tried creating my own practices for myself. And I think, like, in thinking around practice, I’ve always felt that if one can establish a practice and have a regularity, to be questioning and creating, one provides themselves the sort of space and knowledge through which to then draw from later. Gives them a sort of, like, control of their work, you know, in one way or another. But it’s really hard. its just like…

Katye Coe: Its really, bloody hard.

PETER: Like, when you’re alone, and… there are emails to check, there is…

Katye Coe: oh, there’s all kinds of distractions.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah. life. food TV, internet, scrolling, like, it works. Um… so, what’s really interesting to hear is, actually, how, uh, you moving here, the, the dance, um, uh, space, Wainsgate Dance, and the chapel, the room, the community, and the initiation, the holding, uh, all those things provide us a container within which it’s possible to go into dance. And of course, it’s restricted, isn’t it? There’s only so much you can do within this hour, within a certain site of space. However, it’s sort of open enough and generative enough to really provide something that the playlist has enough variation and sort of direction. And then also the thing of the people, they’re bringing their life that day, even if it’s someone you know, and you were speaking about people who were missing, and yet they still sort of echo in that relationship. And then also visiting artists like myself, of course. I imagine just provide just enough of direction or encouragement, or motivation, or holding or…

Katye Coe: It’s like an intervention.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah. I think visitors, especially when they’re dance artists, are also, they’re an intervention, or an intravention. Karen Barad, I remembered. Karen Barad is the person I was thinking about yesterday in relation to intra, rather than inter. I can’t remember in which context, but I felt important to remember.

PETER: She’s the one who works with quantum… Physics.

Katye Coe: Physics, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and I’m really glad you mentioned the kind of thing about doing it on your own. Uh, I’ve, I’ve just worked out over the years and I used to give myself a really hard time about it. I’m not very good at practicing on my own. Um, and I really, I think I really spent a long time giving myself a very hard time about it, because some people really are. Yeah, our friend Matthias is, like, really amazing at, like, being in the studio alone and just, um, there’s an introversion or an internalism that he has. Um, but there’s also something that I can do on my own when I’m alongside.

PETER: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Katye Coe: There’s this brilliant kind of, like, it’s almost like a liminal space, which is, like, oh, I’ve got enough information in my brain and my body after this many years of doing this thing that I don’t… I like input, but I will choose when I want input nowadays. But I’m here, and so something, I’m implicated in my practice, because someone’s next to me, and someone’s over there, and someone’s over there. So I kind of have to do it. Not that it ever feels like I have to, ’cause I pitch up, but I’m held in the sort of responsibility of getting on with practice when I’m alongside, and I don’t check emails, I don’t go on my phone, I don’t… I just go through that hour. Um…

PETER: Yeah.It’s also, like daily practice can so often then turn into exercise, conditioning, and so on. Whereas this has—it retains the creativity if one needs that.

Katye Coe: Yeah,

PETER: They sort of return to you.

Katye Coe: I agree, absolutely, because, yeah, there are other things, of course, that, uh, I need to do, too, like… and I was just thinking about alongside-ness, and, like, if I swim, which is one of my go-tos, um, these days for kind of conditioning, I suppose, or, like, you know, uh, accompaniment to this space. I’m also alongside.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: Like, when I go to the pool and the lanes are open, I’m not getting input. I’m not going to a swimming lesson, or an aqua aerobics…

PETER: Or “you, do more backstroke.”

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah. That kind of thing. I’m going up and down, but I’m also… alongside again. So I don’t just get in the pool and sort of, you know, float about or…

PETER: No, absolutely.

Katye Coe: Although, that would be nice sometimes, but I’m implicated into the activity, partly because I’m in this space of being alongside, and I don’t go with someone.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: But there are other people there. And interestingly, the other thing that I do sometimes is run or practice outside, and I can do those things on my own. I wonder if there’s a difference between being out…

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And being in… not really thought about it like that before, but there’s a sense that I’m not on my own when I… step out of the door with my trainers on. I’m already…

PETER: I mean, at least my experience, maybe just to see if I can find out, but it’s like an adventure. There’s a mission. One has to get to a place, and then you’re in the place, and you have to sort of survive almost.

Katye Coe: Exactly.

PETER: And a lot of the practice in sort of a wild or wet and sort of outdoor space is meeting all the conditions of the weather and the ground.

Katye Coe: Yeah, being there. Yeah.

PETER: Yeah. Trying to…

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah, I was I was just in… I love going out, running with someone, but I…

PETER: Whereas the dance studio, you can just come and lie on the floor and fall asleep. It’s so warm and comfortable.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER: And there’s nothing to prompt you, to continue negotiating, to see the situation, maybe.

Katye Coe: I wonder, yeah, I wonder also, this might be to kind of off, um, off-piste, but I keep thinking about him and, you know, we’re mammals, so we’re relational beings, and, um, there’s something about, like, running outside or being in landscape, for example, where I am in relationship, um, and if I come to Open Practice, from 9 till 10 in the morning, I’m also carried in relationship.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: Um, it’s not something that I’m intentionally attending to. But that alongside-ness is nevertheless relational. Um, and you took, you know, you were speaking earlier about your work with babies, and, you know, that work is, um, relational, but not, um, attentional with a capital A.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There has to be a sort of forgivingness. I mean, sometimes it slips into, when trying to talk about the baby work, like, is it participatory? That the children are participating, but I don’t think you can really call it that because the babies aren’t doing something you want them to do.

Katye Coe: No

PETER: They’re not participating in something. You’re just allowing them to…

Katye Coe: Be present

PETER: Be Present as they need, and then I tried to be alongside that with the dance. But it’s so nice, this two sort of spaces and being alongside, like when you’re outside, you’re very much alongside the weather and the nature and the environment. And then here, you’re also, there’s an alongside, so it’s really an integral thing. And I wonder, because I was very interested in how you spoke about your role as a dancer, and dancer’s—a dancer’s agency—and perhaps there’s a question around how does the authority of being alongside things function, and maybe in relationship to freedom, in fact, there’s an… there feels as though there is something about… exactly… you’re not, you’re not being imposed upon, but at the same time, you are taking care of those that you’re in relationship to, a type of freedom that hasn’t an ethics incorporated into it.

Katye Coe: Yeah, I’m just gonna check. I’ve heard you write.

Yeah. I’ve said a lot of you.

Katye Coe: No, so are you referring to… the… places that might feel authorial and free, or free, freer, in this space, in this Open Practice space, or in the space of dancing in general?

PETER: Yeah, in general.

Katye Coe: Yeah. I’m speaking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking about imposters syndrome. And, uh, I don’t know why it jumped in there, but I think I was thinking about Open Practice and how I mostly feel… free to be dancing… free to be dancing. In this space, which I think might even have… feel a bit different to being a dancer, or being a dance worker. Even though I feel like practice, like, this morning, is super adjacent to, and often, like, really woven in with… my work as a dance worker, or my work as a… a dancer. But there’s something that I learn along the way, which is to do with, um… a kind of slow disintegration of, uh, proving anything.

PETER: Mm hmm.

Katye Coe: I can’t believe I’m, like, in my 50s and still kind of back. Oh, I’m just, like, there’s, even though I can really resist that in a good way, or, like, I can still get a sense. I get a sense lesson less that I am doing something or being something different. When I enter this space. For mentoring a rehearsal, studio, or… even a performance. situation. Of course, I’m dealing with things that are much more specific. in terms of instructions, or scores, or whatever it might be, but I, my sense is that I get closer and closer to, um, a human being who does dancing, um, Where wherever and however the invitation is, or whatever the invitation is. Yeah. I don’t know if that even touches the question that you ask, but… there’s something…

PETER: think it does.

Katye Coe: Something that’s surviving, that it doesn’t feel quite formed yet, but it’s like, oh, yeah, there’s a… There’s a something that sometimes I still have to get over.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: That’s true. of when I’m asked to do something for something. And I, the circumstances are that I will midwife ideas, because that’s what I set up in my own circumstances in order to be available for a choreographer or for an artist who’s working with me. And then there’s, like, a… there’s a… Uh, it’s like I’ve got to get over a hill of something, in order to really know that what I bring is, uh, what I bring when I come into the room ready. is enough.

PETER: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. The dynamic of the relationship is so, I mean, I’m sort of unpacking my role as a dancer, still, and I really resonate with that sense of, like, trying to prove something, where, in this situation, there’s also, there’s something really generous that’s given by having it such an Open Practice that people who don’t identify as dancers, or don’t have dances, their main activity, they do, are also able to attend, and it brings a lot of, a lot of information and value, sort of valuing, revaluing of qualities and movements that perhaps, if we were all professionals.

Katye Coe: Mm hmm.

PETER: we wouldn’t have in the same way. And, of course, it also brings the thing of the conventions that often are frustrating when meeting people who don’t have dancers, they’re sort of daily practice. of like there has to be music or that it has to be movement. It has to be dynamic. You know, sort of the, the, the things that sometimes can be irritating because, because as alongside it being open and saying, you’re more than welcome to attend people who don’t have dancers of professional practice, maybe. But we’re gonna do what we do.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Regardless of you being here, but you’re more than welcome to stay, and there’s something super generous about that alongsidedness.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: That, it, it doesn’t compromise, it doesn’t say that, actually, as a professional, today, I’m just gonna work with my spleen and, and lie very still, and, and that’s fine. It doesn’t compromise that need and desire to sort of, sort of, try to provide extra motivation or… to tick the boxes of what is assumed to be dance, maybe. Yeah. And vice versa. And it means that it allows that people that are coming from outside of the dance field. Maybe they are working with something that we wouldn’t imagine to work with, and we can lend from that. We can sort of brush up against that and be with that.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and I think probably, well, hopefully, they brush up against, you know, your spleen or whatever.

PETER: Yes, yes, I think. They must, right? We’re so interconnected.

Katye Coe: Yeah, the porosity, I think, and particularly for people that come enough to kind of get to know what it’s like to be here. Um, I guess, because the other thing is, it’s like, this is a space where no one’s watching, but this is also a space where eyes are open.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Usually,

PETER: yeah.

Katye Coe: You know, like, of course, people close their eyes at the beginning, or, like, sometimes, if they need to, but, um, there’s a porosity to presence, which, uh, yeah, which I really enjoy, and Charlie, I’m really mindful of something Charlie said this morning when we were chatting before. After Open Practice, and he said, Sometimes I just look, and I see, and it’s, like, the best improvisation ever. And there are, there is something that, sometimes I, if I am, you know, a bit more kind of witnessy, if I’m in a corner, or I see, or I feel something, I do get this thing where it’s like, wow, like, everyone should see this. You know, so there are these moments where you just sort of go, Wow, this is a composition that could never be made.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And it has it all, and, of course, the very crux of that is that it isn’t.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah.

Katye Coe: But it doesn’t stop it from being kind of… sort of fantastic, you know? Because it’s like I can’t magic the unicorn up. The white horse. He’s, I’m sure, he’s in his stable around the corner, but there’s, there’s also kind of magicness that you can’t, um, it’s, it’s the same in Landscape. You can’t magic the magic, the magic comes, passes by. if and when it, if, if you spend enough time practicing there, wherever there is, whether it’s in, it’s, or it’s in this room, 9 to 10, Monday to Friday, or whether it’s… And I feel like there’s something that, uh, you said and that maybe we were talking about time.

PETER: Well, giving a chance, I was thinking about, that, because in my baby performances, it’s, like, three hours long.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And obviously, we assume that a child doesn’t have a long attention. However, by giving three hours, you give the chance for something to occur. The chance for attention to wander and come back. And by remaining consistent and somehow stable, it provides exactly as you’re saying, like openings into coincidence and beauty that you can’t really conjure up. You can’t prove in a way.

Katye Coe: Yeah, I feel like often in processes, like research, research and development processes, or processing, pre-production. I think it’s probably different in Sweden. Maybe, or Finland, or wherever, but we, I think the opportunity for those collisions of brilliants to happen, um, just often have to be kind of forced, because it’s two weeks or three weeks, and they’re not always together, like, Yeah, so that… As dancers, we pitch up with a lot of kind of ready to go ness so that it’s more likely that those chances are more… possible.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And hopefully, choreographers or artists do that, too, but it’s limited by time and resource, in a way that somehow I experience in this room, in the mornings, it’s not limited.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: I mean, of course, like, the heating’s on, and there’s, you know, speakers, and there are people. But it’s all operated by, you know, people leave a donation. And, um, we all run it voluntarily, ’cause the reciprocity is really, I think, everyone’s, who’s listening to this has got that by now. Like, the reciprocity is so generous. It’s like, but it doesn’t have a limitation of… an end thing. Like, an end product or an end of process or an end of… which holds, it’s my experience of it, it gets held in a, in a way that I don’t know… apart from outdoor practice, uh, I’ll describe a Sit Spot in a minute, and, um, apart from that, I don’t think I’ve, I don’t think I know. in my body… Uh, so well, as I do now, because I’ve been here for… two years and… I’ve been doing this thing now.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Um…

PETER: And it… I mean it is also the thing, isn’t it, that if, if you would put a price on it, it changes it. So it’s, I’m so fascinated by these like subtle choreographies that sort of, they act upon the work, regardless how much a choreographer tries, maybe to shield or protect the process from something like the fact that there are ticket sales. They could, or even it’s performed at a place which is hard to get to for some people. That acts upon the, upon the, the piece. There’s something beautiful, because, of course, there’s still barriers to entry here. Like, it’s up a hill.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Even, there are stairs.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah, we don’t have a lift yet.

PETER: Yeah, it’s in the middle of the Yorkshire moors, sort of thing. And, uh… But, but there’s something about that you lean into those things. They’re sort of acknowledged and recognized and sort of accepted. It’s also that thing of, I can imagine, and I feel like you’ve even said it, that some people come and say, oh, can’t we do something that’s, I don’t know, more of a normal dance class?

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Could you, could you do some samba?

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And even that tone of like you’re making this very closed, elitist by only having it with this playlist.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: and not having it as a 5 rhythms or having it as another dance class space. And yet, by sort of leaning into those conditions, you are also providing a very specific space and need. That’s important, because even though it’s a very open, it’s very free, right? There’s a freedom to it. And there’s an importance of keeping the edges specific, so that it can maintain the uniqueness of that openness, rather than allowing it being cooperated by everything else.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s definitely not a kind of. Yeah, I agree, and I think Charlie, I’m one of the wonderful things about watching him and being alongside parts of the development of this, is that he’s really honed it, you know, with Lucy and others. It’s been honed to actually, interestingly, what you’re saying is something that is also quite specific.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: It has now a very embedded and embodied set of circumstances that is kind of unquestioned mostly. It maybe was questioned more so, you know, several years ago, but, um, and also that most of those things happen nearby, um, and this, you know, you could, there are workshops here, and that kind of thing, but for my perspective, as a dancer, um, I have learned… as much about my practice in this non led space.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: That I keep showing up to, than I have in any other thing, and it’s interesting. I think I said earlier, it’s like, oh, you don’t get input. here, and that’s really great. I love, you know, for, not for the, always, I’m coming to a workshop this weekend, and I’m often getting input when I’m in a rehearsal space, and, um, in other kinds of training spaces, but, it is, that’s not true. Actually, there’s a lot of input that happens, but it’s much, it’s not about instructions or conversation, verbal conversation. The input is self, you know, go back to Chrysa’s self interview. It’s like, I’m checking and attending to myself in this particular set of circumstances in a way that… Uh… has implications for what I learn and understand. And I just, I wanted to mention that also, um, in two quite significant processes, that I’ve done recently, Matthias’s group piece for Neurolive , and the rerehearsal of the duet, and also, as well, Roberta Jean’s process that was a long, slow one since lockdown. The invitation to have an hour… In those situations, I was so welcome, and all we would often come together and do something at the end of the hour, so that we could feel each other in the space, ’cause it was a group work. But this kind of hour long something, like, starts to feel very…

PETER: Because you would do Open Practice before you went into rehearsals.

Katye Coe: Yeah, pretty much. Matthias would borrow one of Charlie’s playlists.

PETER: Okay.

Katye Coe: Or I will put it on, or someone. So there was a… and Matthias is rehearsed here, and so I had other people that were in the work. So there’s this kind of, like, um, and, and in that situation, we’re working with a mature group of practitioners who, who also know how to get on with it.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: I think if you’re working with, like, I was just thinking again about students and how amazing it would be.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: To have a three year program where the first day of the day was…

PETER: Open Practice.

Katye Coe: Was Open Practice?

PETER: And it is, I was also, I think, the Self Interview is a really good way of describing the experience I had, because we haven’t really spoken so much about it, but in tangential ways, we have, but definitely, that was one of the things of, like, um, rooting through myself and where I am, where physical body is, and what I remember, what I, like thoughts that come up like, oh, let’s try that. Let’s work with that, and then I work with that, and then I’m like, ah, and then I, and maybe I’m ignoring the music for that, and then at some point, the music comes in and like, oh, I could follow that. And then I find myself doing that. And then I see someone doing a sort of rhythm or step or quality of stretch or something. And that sort of filters in. And then I’m asking constantly myself, like, what am I doing? What is it? I mean, I, one of the practices I brought with me was one I call, “is this it?” And I literally ask myself, like, do I do I recognize what I’m doing right now? And do I, how, what is the thing I’m doing right now? How is it performing? How am I understanding it? If I move it, if I shift it, is it still the same? How does it alter? What is the itness of this moment and things? Yeah, how was it for you? Because, of course, this is just one day in 100s for you.

Katye Coe: Yeah, um.

PETER: I mean, you mentioned that I affected it, but I imagine everyone.

Katye Coe: Yeah, I mean, I think your presence, yeah, it was interesting. Charlie gave the prompt of, like, going somewhere, going somewhere unfamiliar, ’cause he’s aware that, you know, not you, but for those of us that come here regularly, it’s like, you know, I tend to be along that wall. Along the stage. I know. It’s just… And it isn’t… it isn’t because… Well, I like it there, and it’s near the unicorn when he comes past me. And I was like, Oh, yeah, I’m next to Peter. Um, and then there was this prompt, and, um, because Jess, who wasn’t here today often, is in this space.

PETER: Yeah, where, you ended up.

Katye Coe: Yeah, I was like, Oh, okay, I’m gonna go in that space. And if Jess comes, I’m gonna, like, really say hello to her and let her… Um, yeah, uh, so I was kind of in Jess’s place. Or, like, swapping places and suddenly I was like, oh, there’s this big diagonal between us. Um… Yeah, so I think, like, I began with… a slightly different set of circumstances in that you’re here.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: I’m here, and I think I was aware of, kind of, wondering who was gonna come in today. In a way that I probably wouldn’t normally…

PETER: Yeah, ’cause you’re showing…

Katye Coe: I’m kind of showing you. Yeah, yeah, I’m demonstrating. Yeah. And so I was like, Oh, great, George is here. And great. Julia’s here, and, um, and then, yeah, like, and then sort of, you know, a few minutes in, I get busy with, uh, an injured hip, and like this, and that, and, you know, um, and, I mean, all sorts comes through the hour. I was in this space quite a lot last week because another person who I’m working with Kieran was here, and so his kind of, the kind of ghost of Kieran was here, and then, I think, I said, like, I started to notice who wasn’t here, and it’s, like, I’m often really inspired by the qualities of, for example, what Lucy might be up to. Like, if Maya is here, the other dancers who often come, I thought a little, I thought, for a moment about how the playlist was for the drawers downstairs.

PETER: I also saw thinking about that, because this is new, isn’t it? That they’re drawing downstairs?

Katye Coe: Yeah, this is… This is the third week.

PETER: I was, so… I mean, and that’s sort of against the point. I was so, like, I want to see. Oh, no, I see what’s coming up.

Katye Coe: Yeah, I said that to Charlie the other day. I was like, Oh, God, I don’t want to show and tell. Not to show, not that they need to see what we’re doing, but I have, of course, because I don’t count myself as having a drawing practice.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: But I’m aware of, I think there were, like, five or six people downstairs, like, in their own… And in many ways, it hasn’t the same rules. It’s, like, you come, you have, some basic stuff is provided, but you might bring your own charcoal or whatever it is you’re drawing with and you get on with it. And the music is much quieter, but it’s the same playlist. And last Friday, we had Rob’s playlist. Um, and Rob is an artist doing the drawing downstairs.

PETER: Wow.

Katye Coe: So, I’m hopeful, I was thinking about that, and it had a, it still had the same arc, in a way, but it had a different sensibility to it, I think, because, uh, yeah, the practice of drawing is still embodied, but it’s like a different…

PETER: Yes. And it would be so different if they were in the room with us drawing.

Katye Coe: Right. Us, or… And we’ve all had that, though.

PETER: Yes. Yeah.

Katye Coe: Which I quite like, but it’s like, oh,

PETER: It’s a very different.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, often if artists are in the space, they’re drawing the body’s moving.

PETER: Yes, yes. yeah, yeah. Which is a different thing completely. Yeah. I also wanted to say that Charlie mentioned that, for him, the practice started before this, when he was sort of borrowing from Steve Paxton, who he’s worked with a lot, where Steve would dance to the Goldberg variations by Bach. over and over again.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Just as a way to, as a container, in a way, to sort of hold a practice. And of course, later on this became a performance, I think. But it was improvised all the time. And he was doing the same to Goldberg variations. And then it changed and morphed into the online practice. And the, at some point, I assume he didn’t say why, but the playlist changed. But it’s interesting to see what it is now, but also in relationship to that history, because, of course, Steve was looking for a way of practicing.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Which is the same motivation, in a way.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Now, there’s this whole network, which is sort of structured around practice. It reminds me of Deborah Hay’s practice.

Katye Coe: Right.

PETER: She would return to this same practice day in day.

Katye Coe: Right, right. And I vicariously feel like I never did Deborah Hay’s solo. Commissioning project, but I work with choreographers, significantly Joe, and then Matthias.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: Who have done those…

PETER: Is that Joe?

Katye Coe: And Amy Morris, actually. Jo Moran… Joe Moran, yeah. Yeah, Amy Morris, and Matthias Sperling, all, like, long term collaborators, who I would… Yeah, you know, frame as people that I’ve danced with. either currently or historically, for a long time. And they were really influenced by Deborah and did the commissioning project, where you had to practice the work, the solo, you know, you did, however long it is in residency with her, and then the deal is, I think it’s an agreement that they all make, is that you practice every day.

PETER: Hmm.

Katye Coe: For however many months. And I remember very distinctly, I think I was doing my MA at the time at Siobhan Davies. And, um, Matthias would be in the downstairs studio every morning from 9 till 10, um, doing his Deborah Hay practice.

PETER: Wow Yeah.

Katye Coe: And I often wonder if I would have… stuck to that.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: But it was a solo practice. Yes. Not accompanied by music. And, yeah, there’s also maybe something worth mentioning, which is, you know, I taught class classes in different contexts for many years, and often intermittently use sound. but would never have a whole class to music. Except on the rare occasions, you have an accompanist in the room.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: Which is very special and very rare nowadays. I can’t remember where that would have happened. Maybe at The Place, a bit. Uh, possibly… maybe a bit at Rambert. Mm hmm.

PETER: Yeah, Rambert usually has it.

Katye Coe: Yeah, although I was teaching improvisation, so that would happen in the afternoon.

PETER: Okay.

Katye Coe: Because improvisation should happen in the afternoon. Although, I do not call myself an improviser. I do not call myself an improviser, because I feel like a bit like somatic practice. It’s been a kind of, it’s been associated with particular kind of something, which I’m actually not very skilled at, that kind of instant choice making, that I associate good improvising with, um, I don’t do that. I believe when I’m teaching, that I’m teaching technique. It’s just not coming from a modality that can be copied or…

PETER: It’s not counts. It’s scores.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, and sometimes it looks like really set material because of the exactness of what I’m bringing people towards, and I think, Charlie, if I think about people like Charlie Morrissey and Amy Morris and others, it’s the same, but they’re the depth of detail embodied detail and philosophical information that I get a sense of in myself, but also experiencing those other people’s classes is not. It’s not improvisation with capital I. And actually, I can get quite wrong footed in an improvisation score because there’s something about instant composition that I… I’m all right at. But it’s not my… It’s not what I teach.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: Or turn to.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: But yeah, I just wanted to mention the music because the attending to a playlist, or being with a playlist, often that I haven’t chosen. Um… has, like, bought something to me as a jay on that tree, then?

PETER: Oh, yeah.

Katye Coe: Um, Yeah, I’ve bought something to my dancing practice that I think I had, I wasn’t doing every day before.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: A lot of the time when I’m rehearsing, a lot of the time in performing, I’m not dancing to music.

PETER: No.

Katye Coe: Or with music. Especially not kind of, you know, disco.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And all the other things that get played, you know, sometimes it’s Caterina Barbieri, a bit of Bach, and a bit of Russian, you know, folk music, and a bit of, um, you know, Drum and Bass, and a bit of Beyoncé, all that, all that stuff, but to, to, um… To learn how to practice in that sound. has been also really an adventure.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: For me, and I, yeah, sometimes I’m like, Am I in a club, or am I in a class, or am I, it’s, you know, or am I, it, but it’s, uh… It’s been a brilliant adventure for my dancing to integrate, um, being in the rhythm, in the, in the nuance of rhythm, in, in the, in the texture of music, in a way that I hadn’t consistently experienced for a really long time. I love it, and I also feel far less judgmental than I did when I first started, around what I liked, what I didn’t like.

PETER: Oh, that’s good. Yeah. ‘Cause it is hard, I think. I think I find it in myself, as well, where there’s a sort of irritation of, like, my freedom is being limited by this noise that I can’t get rid of.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Or sound.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And then the sort of, also the every track, because the track only lasts so long, and then the new tracks start, and there’s this like, oh, but I don’t want to go here. I was still working with that.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: Or, um, that thing.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER: So that’s nice to hear that it has that effect.

Katye Coe: Yeah, it takes a while.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And it’s only occasional now where I…

PETER: Which is funny, ’cause as students will be like, Where is the music? I can’t work without music, or…

Katye Coe: Right.

PETER: If they’re making a solo or a choreography.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah.

PETER: So I chose this piece of music, and the question for me is always, but why that music? What’s the reason for it? And they’re like, well, it’s the, we have to dance to music.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER: I have to dance to music.

Katye Coe: And also, often when I’m choosing sound for class, uh, I often have a kind of thinking, you know, now, because of Open Practice, for example, Caterina Barbieri was not a composer or musician note I knew before, and I’ve gone down a kind of rabbit hole of, like, incredible sound. Um, often, like, really big, really long, like, 20 minute tracks. I take information into my teaching with sound now that I, I’m so happy to be sort of DJing, and, like, I’ll go, Is it Caterina Barbieri? No, I think it’s like, oh, yeah, actually, it’s probably, you know, something completely different. And sometimes it’s like, really, like, you can’t not, um, because I think also historically, I’ve often, because I train as a Skinner Releasing teacher, Contact, you don’t usually work the sound at all. In Skinner, you’re finding the music to offer the specific graphic or score too, whereas in here, you’re dealing with the music.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: It’s not, it’s not that, it’s not been curated in a way that attends to whatever it is that I am busy with.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: So you kind of have to grapple with it and deal with it. And yeah, for a few months, I was like,

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Could somebody put some silence on like that. John Cage. Um, but actually, you kind of eventually move past that in the way that you move past not being able to really, like, cover space and…

PETER: Yeah, because, I mean, there’s always something you’re having to deal with. The sort of misnomer of silence is that it’s neutral or empty. There’s plenty to be listening to. But equally, there are other things that restrict and mold and shape, the movement or the body or the experience that you can’t get rid of. Like, I think that, like, I think one of the, I think one of the ones that I was thinking about today was just the limits of flexibility type things.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: This, like, there’s a specific range. And if I go into a certain range, I also go into a certain aesthetic as well.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: of overextended or even just more flexible and or even yogic. There are places within the range and the flexibility of movement that echo certain things.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: That can frustrate me as well when I find myself stuck.

Katye Coe: Right, kind of thing. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

PETER: But, um, you wanted to try sitting.

Katye Coe: Oh, well, I thought, yeah, if, if we go out… Yeah. Um, yeah, I would… Because, of course, I brought you here, and this is… really important.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And it actually is a great way to meet in movement. I was like, Oh, it’s this. Um, because there’s also, but I also recognize that I, they’re, in this landscape here, I also have another regular thing that I do that has actually nothing to do with Wainsgate Dance. has nothing to do, but is an, is like an intrinsic part of my, um, facilitation work and work, um… as a dancer, but also as someone who is, um, committed to, uh… yeah, connectivity with a more than human landscape and beings, like, and it’s, it’s really long, that… that. It’s really long, that practice, and this bit living…

PETER: Something you’ve done for a long time, or it’s a durational thing?

Katye Coe: No, it’s not long. It’s 15 minutes.

PETER: Okay, so… But you’ve done it for a long time.

Katye Coe: I haven’t asked Sit Spot for so long, so, you know, one of the other things that I do often, um, not as… and often alone, um, so it’s not related to performing, although I have done a lot of performing outside. Yeah. But, yeah, I have a practice of moving, or sitting, and then moving, outside, in landscape, or in, often, say people say, Oh, it’s in nature. And there’s, you know, I don’t want to get into it.

PETER: What is nature?

Katye Coe: Yeah, I don’t want to get into a critique of what nature is, but there is another thing that I do when I’m here, which is, um, connected to, uh, some work that I do with Kinship Workshop, which is, um, an organization that Tom Goodwin arrived probably nine or ten years ago now, and that I’ve been initially kind of supportive of, and then a bit, uh… also facilitate workshops where we take people outside. in really simple ways. Um, that is, has definitely been a result of. It’s like Karen Barad’s intra thing. It’s a result of my many years of practicing dancing and knowing about tools that can bring us into a bodily awareness of where we are and how we are in relation. And the workshop itself, or the content of the workshop over the years, has got kind of simpler and simpler. When we first started it, there was a lot of, like, quite, um, you know, kind of specific scores that would kind of be about moving a lot for everybody, less autonomy, less choice, and, um, in the wintertime, which we’re in now, we don’t run those workshops so much. because of the weather. But we do run this thing called Practice Group.

PETER: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: Uh, and it’s Practice Group that meets, we meet online, um, once a month, and it’s for anybody that’s ever been to a kinship workshop of any kind, anywhere, ’cause it’s a, it’s a traveling workshop. It happens.

PETER: In different places?

Katye Coe: In different places. Some places we’re invited to, some places we go back to, and since I moved here, and Tom moved to Bute, just off… uh, coast of Scotland… Yeah, yeah, it’s about an hour train journey to Wembs Bay, and then a 45 minute journey. So the workshops happen, among other places, in both the places that we now live.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And we did them in Kenilworth, as well, when I was leaving there, and anyway, over the winter, there’s a commitment to a regular practice, which I probably do, not every day, but most days. Um, which is a sort of minimum of, um, yeah, 10, 10, 15 minutes of something, uh, we call a Sit Spot and it’s a local place outside. Could be your garden, could be a park if you’re in a city. For me, I go up to this, what I call a “bowl”. Tom calls it “secret bowl”, ’cause it’s kind of a little bit off the path. And I practice there, and sometimes I just do a Sit Spot, sometimes I stay out there for a while and move in the, you know, Helen Poyner kind of way for a while. And then we come together online once a month, and, you know, just as a place to kind of come together from wherever we are, and there’s people in, sometimes people abroad, sometimes there’s one woman who’s sometimes in Egypt, and there’s a person, uh, in Wales, and there’s several people in Wales, actually, and, you know, Scotland and all over the place. And we meet for a couple of hours… And then we go off, and we practice again.

PETER: Okay, but when you meet online, you talk about it.

Katye Coe: Yeah, we call it kind of coming round the fire.

PETER: Okay. Yeah. Um, so… Yeah, like reconnecting somehow.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and talking about what’s occurring in this very simple practice and what we’re noticing…

PETER: And so, there’s a lot of, like, practice, like, with Helen. She will lead this sort of thing.

Katye Coe: Yeah. But when you’re training with Helen… You also commit between the, you know, if you do the year long training, I think it’s three or four.

PETER: Sessions?

Katye Coe: Yeah, like 4 or 5 days. And then in between, you commit to an hour of inside practice and an hour of outside practice every week.

PETER: Wow. Okay.

Katye Coe: And you also commit to, like, a subgroup that might be geographically chosen, ’cause people come from all over the country to do it. And you also meet up with them and practice together. So there’s this, I think, probably, both Tom is training with her now, and I trained with her historically, but we’re held in this idea of a regular practice of some kind. And I, yeah, so if I’m here, I practice up there, or I practice when I’m walking through the meadows to get to my office, where I see clients. down into town. So there’s a walk through the meadows, that I sometimes just give myself extra time for, and I, instead of doing a Sit Spot, I’ll do a Slow Walk, just an observational walk, because I…

PETER: and so what are we gonna do? Like, just practically speaking?

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: If it’s okay, to ask.

Katye Coe: Totally.

PETER: So we find a place outside.

Katye Coe: Yeah, we’ll go to…

PETER: Up on the hill.

Katye Coe: We’ll go to the bowl. The secret bowl.

PETER: Behind the chapel.

Katye Coe: Just because then you visit, where I practice. I love taking people there. Okay, great. And I’ll set it up, it’s very simple. that you find a place to get comfortable. That is probably not lying. They’re always a resting practice as well, but there’s something about, particularly after moving a bit inside, that we can take our bodies to, um… Uh, yeah, I can’t remember the name of the… Um, American person who named it as a Sit Spot (Jon Young), but if I think if you refer to a lot of indigenous ways of being in the, you know, in relation to nature, they would often have, they wouldn’t call it a Sit Spot, but they would often have a regular practice of observation. That brings them into some kind of right relationship or alignment with where and what they are. Living with. And so I will, it’s very simple, but I might give a couple of pointers, which is to, because it’s cold, that a Sit Spot doesn’t necessarily have to be completely still. that you can, you know, you can really shift, probably in the same place, so that you’re, um, like you stay in relationship primarily to your own body.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And that can also be through kind of, you know, just keeping touch alive with rock or ground or self touch. Eyes are always open. We don’t go in here and kind of do any of that. Like, but all your senses are open. Um, and, and you’re just, um… uh, practicing sensing in. That’s a bit of a, like, uh, sometimes I don’t like that phrasing, but, um, you’re just being, you’re just seeing what arrives. What arrives into a scene which is more like a receiving scene than a kind of hunter seeing?

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: You’re listening. You’re feeling.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: Kinesthetically, and that’s it.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And I can keep, you know, I keep time. So that you don’t have to, and then…

PETER: But it’s nice just to, because it sounds like something you can really, even though it’s very simple, it’s something you can really go into practice. So just to like, yeah, name a little bit like what we can try today to get a taste of it. But yeah, observing and providing the right condition so that you can observe sitting, feeling, sensing.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and being alongside…

PETER: And alongside again, yes.

Katye Coe: Alongside you, but also, you know, one of the ways that we want to, like, the attempt with connectivity and outside is that we are part of, and with, and also a visitor too. the environment that we, whatever environment is that we’re in, and Helen will always talk about in, not on. We’re not on landscape or on, we are in and with. And of course, like the regularity of that practice means that if you go to the same place…

PETER: It changes.

Katye Coe: There’s always something magic. There’s always something unexpected. There’s always something new, there’s always something. Yeah, and, um, yeah, so we can do that.

PETER: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. We’ll come back, and we’ll tell you what happened, and we’ll say goodbye and stuff.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, well, we can, maybe we can finish where we started and we can reflect.

PETER: Oh, that’d be great.

Katye Coe: We can do a bit of reflecting, ’cause I’d love always love to hear what… Yes. what arrived for you. And we can do that at home with a cup of tea, so we kind of do the circle bit.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Thank you so much. See you in a minute.

Part 3

PETER: Okay, so we’re back a little bit after we were.

Katye Coe: Yeah, ate some food. Yes. Lit of fire.

PETER: Yes. Back in the cozy cottage.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: There was something really amazing with the practice, about contemplation and silence. In fact, we walked almost the whole way back without saying a word, just… sort of a queue that to start walking. But nonverbal. And so such a special place. to be. And like, just experientially, I was with… You know, at first, I’m with the sort of bigger things, and I’m looking around, and there’s rocks, and there’s the heather, and there’s you over there, and there’s our bags, and then there’s the clouds, and I think the hills on the other side of the valley made it look like it was a sea, almost, and then there’s the clouds moving, and there’s the wind. And which is really sounding through the heather.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And a few trees as well. And… And then… And then I move, and I’m against this rock, and I’m finding different places between the heather and the rock, and I’m sliding and adjusting, and at some point, I’m going into the detail of each leaf and the water droplets and the seeds, and the different types of plant, the different types of green. And, um… And then, at some point, I find myself face, face down, towards the mud, and I really saw, like, all the different, the molding leaves, and the green around the roots, and in the mud and the dirt. And there’s just so much. It’s such a complex environment to be in. Yeah. And I think that’s what I was trying to say is… I feel as though… one almost doesn’t want to talk about it. If that means…

Katye Coe: Mm. Yeah. Um… I realize that I usually go and do… um, a Sit Spot or a bit of outdoor practice. Not usually, but maybe half. Half the time I go. Before Open Practice or at the other, at the other end of the day. And um… Yeah, I was really wet. that there are, there’s heather, and also, there are a lot of billberries there. So some of what I think you’re probably seeing was and the new leaf is coming. Like, everything’s full of new, spring life, and, um, Those were bilberries. Some of the bilberries that fed me in June last year, when I was only eating wild food, and… Um, it’s a long season. The Billberry season. It’s a long season and they’re very… They’re very, you have to be really patient to collect them. They’re not agreeable. Um, And so I was really with the, um, robustness of those plants, and I was also slightly being moved by the wind.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And realized that, yeah, that I wasn’t moving because the plants were moving, but I was moving. I could easily move as they were moving because the wind is so strong today. I have not been up there in, I’ve been up there in the rain and really cold, but I haven’t been up there. With the storm blowing above us. And having walked over, you know, coming from the relative kind of, um, uh, humanness of the chapel.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And then into this place and then dropping down into a place where the human form just looks suddenly takes on a different kind of size in relationship to its surroundings. Um, and I feel it, even when I just do a Sit Spot like that, it’s like I feel the insignificance. of my… body in relation to those huge rock faces and the myriad of, like, of plants and also underneath, yeah, the lichen and the, all the different greens, and I sat up next to, um, quite a large crack in the rock, which I, I’m pretty sure hasn’t, has inhabitants.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And I, that’s where I checked when I went up there because I thought of all days, If there’s a fox or a weasel or something, it’s likely to be home right now because it’s so, and and I can see outside the raised kind of step where I, I can, I often see kind of feathers or, like a few little bones. I haven’t seen any scat there, but I’m pretty sure I’m at the entrance way of… probably a fox. I imagine. And um…

PETER: And the rain was sort of special as well. You could see the wind because of the rain.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: being sort of this mist, this sort of moving in waves with the, with the, with the wind. And for me, the body feels… Yeah, like you say, it feels so small in this grandeur, and also so much apart, and I’m super aware how these plants will keep growing and shifting, and I wondered, because of all the seeds, I wondered if some of the plants that I was seeing up on the cliff were related to the ones below, and if they move away from each other or closer to each other through time, and how I move and get closer and nearer. And I think this I really noticed when I worked with Elise Brewer, an artist in Sweden. And we were working outdoors of how you find, on a slope with all these rocks and bushes and things, you can find positions that are so comfortable, which you just don’t find in them, not because we don’t have that sort of, there’s no, those options of this landscape that molds a new mold too.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah.

PETER: to the landscape. It’s very special.

Katye Coe: Yeah. Yeah, and I watched you kind of tip down at one point, sort of, um, tipped off the edge and I really know the generosity of the ground then. Like, in a lot of landscape actually, but, um, More land and heather and bilberries, like, offer this bed that you can kind of roll through. But rock is really, that rock is really… Well, I often think about it. I think we talked up there. It’s like, I imagine the rock that built this cottage is probably quarried from there because it’s so pre-industrial. There’s no way of transporting anything very far. So, I think I’m probably not inaccurate in imagining that and the solidity of this little home. is really mirrored in the sort of… because even though the storm was happening and we were blustery up on the tops, you dropped down into those bowls and it’s also shelter. Yeah. It’s shelter for other beings, and it was shelter for us in that time, and, um, You’re absolutely right about this quiet that it leaves me with.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And if I, you know, if I don’t have company and I come back, I can often. Yeah, be very happy not to speak for a really long time.

PETER: Yeah, yeah.

Katye Coe: And, and, and the weather is really loud today, but so the birds were not, I saw one seagull, I think. Yeah, we were trying to.

PETER: Yeah, navigate the wind.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah. They have been thrown about.

PETER: Yeah, I remember.

Katye Coe: Yeah, exactly. But the nesting birds will arrive soon, not into the bowl, but up onto the more above, and curlews arrive to nest here every year, and so the that places gets filled with their calls, and… Yeah, really… I really, it’s very simple. Yeah. It’s very simple. But I was really… I often am aware of like how cliche this is, but it’s like, oh, well, I’m part of a congregation when I’m there. I’m part of a whole ecosystem of other beings that, because we’ve been using this word alongside this, like Charlie said, for Open Practice, it’s like, oh yeah, okay. But I, um… I sometimes, I sometimes get a sense. like, well, I can speak about it in two ways, and they’re both true. I can speak about it. It’s like, I’m going there because I want to offer myself and that place a little bit of time to be felt and seen and to be part of. And then, you know, and then at some point I looked up at the rock face that I was, uh, leaning against, and there was these drips kind of coming down, and they hit my face, and I was aware of your presence over the other side, and I was like, wow, this is, feels like prayer.

PETER: Mm. Mm.

Katye Coe: Um, Or. Worship. But I don’t want to be reverent about it. It doesn’t feel like I’m being sort of reverent, but it does feel like I’m part of something. that I know enough about, both in the practice and the place, to, um, know that if I give it that 15 minutes or an hour and 15 if I’m gonna move. Um, There’s a reciprocity in that place that means I’m welcome there. And… and… yeah.

PETER: Yeah, and I was, I had to think of, because of the quietening and the speechlessness of it, I had to think of your text, is She Dancing.

Katye Coe: Oh, well done.

PETER: Yeah. And… it’s a fantastic text, and really, for me, really captures this… especially this difficult of talking about that. The thing that aren’t utterable, that aren’t vocalizable, and… I feel like that, like, this podcast is really… Um, it’s uh, It’s, It’s an impossible task, which we’re so used to as dancers, we’ve often given these assignments within an improvisation setting, or within class, or exploration, which invites us to do something that is not fully achievable. And that’s this sort of assignment of, like, how, like, we are only using words to try and get closer to what it is we’re doing, and I think I use, well, the podcast uses a lot of, like, instruction, basically, like, we did this and this, this. These things happen.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: You could recreate the instruction, but it doesn’t tell you everything about the reality of it.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: And Especially these outdoor practices. We all know where the outdoors is, but to know the specificity of it, and the uniqueness, and the realness, the liveness, it’s the same I have with babies to come back to that again, is… I, even though I’ve been working with them for 10 years, I still have an assumption of how they behave and what they’re like, And then every time I meet them, they surprise me immensely with what they’re interested in, and just how their tempo is, and how their physicality is. Like, the detail, which amounts to their whole, because they don’t simplify themselves. They live in that complexity of detail, and… and always overwhelmed by the… the… my inner incap, incapability of actually naming exactly what it is. And still, I’m still struggling. And again, that just, it, again, realliterated that.

Katye Coe: Yeah, it’s very, what you say, really resonates. I know that Tom and I have struggled… for… the entire time that we’ve been working with this, um… nature connection, work, and even the word nature connection is already, is already got weird. Um, work of being in kinship with more than human. Uh, beings, we have really struggled in many different ways to describe something that is fundamentally embodied. And I get a sense that “She Dancing”, um, Which also really needs context. Yeah. Not for everybody. But I often imagine publishing it as a piece of writing. was both a blessing and also potentially meant that it got read, like writing, rather than read like dancing. Whereas the performing of it is, you know, that I dance for 40 minutes. Um, Among people who are not really paying attention to what I’m doing. Sometimes I dance in a different space where no one is there. If the band is if the band is playing, I’m just not visible in the dancing, but then I come out and I’ve been dancing for 40 minutes and then I speak it. Yeah. I speak it… I speak it… as a piece of music for me, but it is supposed to be read from the experience of dancing. That’s how I made it happen. I have read it in settings before where I haven’t danced before it, and it’s really different. Um, so there’s something about reflecting on being, on moving or sitting in, in an open sense way out, out there, that also requires the embodiment of it in order to reflect, which is probably why we didn’t need to say anything.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: It’s like, well, we’re just with the experience of… something that, in many ways, is just very every day. It’s just not our, It’s not the everyday for the huge majority of people living in such a fast. indoor world. And we feel like, well, I trust that, that… a commitment to that practice and a commitment to finding ways to offer other people that practice. Um, you asked about activism yesterday and it’s like this is… a way of… activating a more right relationship with. yourself and And I believe that dancing does that too. So there’s… there’s probably a pathway between the words in “She Dancing” and the words that we might use to describe… Kinship Workshop, and… I think it is activist, and I… I would say it’s quiet activism, and it’s everyday activism, and all those other things, and… It’s just re, it’s not making anything new happen. It’s just going some time for ourselves to feel things we already know somewhere. Like deep and deeply. And anciently.

PETER: Yes, yeah.

Katye Coe: And I think, I think that’s the same with dancing. I think these human bodies have always known dancing. Always. It’s not far from… and knowing.

PETER: No, and we spoke about the dance being simple. There’s something so, yeah, it’s so readily accessible. And of course, that’s sort of the power of it as well. And I feel so blessed to have met your work in this way and to be able to come into your practice in this way, to be invited in. And maybe, yeah, maybe the podcast acts as some sort of conduit to really focus in and say, what do you do? What does it do? And you’ve really illustrated, at least to me, the living in this place, the being in relationship to this community, to this temporality, this timing, this practice of going to the chapel, and then having, or being situated in a sort of more rural area and being able to go into more wilderness like places. Um, Yeah, it’s such a pleasure. And if I can, because it is really so inspirational. It really teaches me a lot about what I’m doing by doing this. And if I can imagine, it’ll borrow from you and sort of imagine that this podcasts aren’t really to be listened to, to be danced as well. Or to be considered more of as a dance. And that was always the in, there’s always a tension there, a sense there. In fact, often people, I approach, they’ll, some people I approach, they’ll say, but I don’t dance, and it’s called Peter Dance With. And I’m like, oh, but it doesn’t have to be dance that we do. But because, in fact, the encounter is about embodying embodiment and being in the now and trying to resonate with that practice, or that activity, or that day, that person, that place. Yeah. Such a gift. Thank you so much.

Katye Coe: Oh, it’s a real pleasure. I really… Yeah, I’m really grateful. Also, that you can articulate it in that way, and what I realize about today, and yesterday, is in my usual kind of spidery way. I didn’t know. I didn’t know if we were gonna… Like, I don’t know, like, start sort of dancing some kind of score that I would propose inside the studio. I didn’t know we were gonna go out. But there’s something starts to become clear when you also spend time with someone.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: It’s like, oh, these are the 2 practices. These are the 2 dancing, moving, somatically, deeply informed practices that I do hear. Whenever I’m here. So it’s that you were dancing with me, but you were also dancing with this place.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: All the people that I know and not all of them, but, you know, it’s like much more spacious than 2 in a way.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah, in that way, you’ve really held that role, I spoke about it before the chapel of the role of the dancer by holding the choreography that you sort of live within.

Katye Coe: Yeah, or midwifing.

PETER: Exactly.

Katye Coe: Oh, this happens, this is gonna happen. Exactly. That place is gonna be there. Whether I’m whether we go there or not.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: And that Open Practice is gonna go be there. whether we go there or not, but they just… Yeah, they’re just the things that I do. And it’s really funny, because at the very beginning, we were talking about being a dance worker.

PETER: Mm, mm.

Katye Coe: You know, it’s often how I get paid is for dancing, teaching, dancing. But also, today, doing these two things is like, is about dancing.

PETER: Yeah.

Katye Coe: And being.

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: Of course, there’s labor, if you want to talk about it in that way, but it’s like, this is not paid. Work. This is just daily life.

PETER: Yeah. That’s such a, that’s the, yeah, the best way to sort of wrap up in a way, the whole, the whole thing.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

PETER: I will link to everything we’ve mentioned. Hopefully, I’ll try and catch it all. And I will also share your website and so if people want to get in touch with you and learn about your work.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or at least my email because my website’s really embarrassingly outdated.

PETER: Oh, I feel your website’s very resourceful, though. Okay, cool. It’s very nice, actually, to read and to read a website from a dancer’s perspective as well.

Katye Coe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER: Because you articulate the practices with others in a really beautiful way. Yeah.

Katye Coe: Yeah, and we can add the kinship workshop website, which has, it has a Sit Spot score in it.

PETER: Oh, great.

Katye Coe: So if people want to do a Sit Spot after the hearing about hours, they can just go there and follow the score. Follow the score.

PETER: Oh, that’s brilliant.

Katye Coe: And if people want to do an Open Practice?

PETER: Yes.

Katye Coe: They can get it.

PETER: Exactly.

Katye Coe: get in touch with Charlie, we’ll borrow a playlist and…

PETER: And maybe you will be at the Open Practice and they’ll get to meet you as well.

Katye Coe: Yeah, but people could also… Think on the idea of it if they’re farther away and… Get in,

PETER: Yes. try to borrow the…

Katye Coe: borrow the… playlist. Dance from 9 till 10.

PETER: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Katye Coe: Thank you,

PETER: thank you, Katye.

Katye Coe: Yeah.

1. The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs – http://www.leaanderson.com/works
2. Contemporary dance – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_dance
3. Laurel and Hardy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_and_Hardy
4. Laurel and Hardy – Dance Routine – Way Out West (1937) – https://youtu.be/LXCwlO2jnYU?si=yra0RLSojsATBJy0
5. Hannah Höch – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_H%C3%B6ch
6. Hannah Höch, Grotesque – https://artofcollage.wordpress.com/2019/09/26/hannah-hoch/#jp-carousel-3017
7. Hannah Höch , Balance – https://artofcollage.wordpress.com/2019/09/26/hannah-hoch/#jp-carousel-3005
8. Ballet – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballet
9. Yippeee!!! (2006) – http://www.leaanderson.com/tag/yippee
10. Busby Berkeley – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Berkeley
11. Edits (2010) – http://www.leaanderson.com/works
12. Sadlers Wells – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadler’s_Wells_Theatre
13. Neu! – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neu !
14. Neu!, Super https://youtu.be/DJ4Pf-WB57U?si=KeP26P39PBHYxRff
15. Merce Cunningham Company – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merce_Cunningham
16. Zeitgeist – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist
17. The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs: 40 years of style and design – http://www.leaanderson.com/works/birthday-book
18. Steve Blake – https://steveblakemusic.wordpress.com/bio/
19. Simon Vincenzi – https://www.simonvincenzi.com/
20. Sandy Powell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Powell_(costume_designer)
21. Lea Anderson, Laboratorio de danza Step by Step, presentación – https://youtu.be/3ztxV4A3_9o?si=du9h0VAkUOTQ3s8h
22. PETER, dance with Frank Bock – https://stillpeter.com/peter-dance-with-podcast/#fb
23. PETER, dance with Simon Vincenzi – https://stillpeter.com/peter-dance-with-podcast/#sv

PETER:

Hello, and welcome.

Lea Anderson:

Thank you very much.

PETER:

Today we are dancing with Lea Anderson. And I feel, in so many ways, you don’t really need an introduction, because you are so much a part of—especially—British dance history, and such a legacy.

I feel very honoured and privileged to get to meet you in this way as well, to be in practice, in dancing. You’re such a wonderful, kind, open person, and so rich and knowledgeable.

Last night we had dinner.

Lea Anderson:

Yes.

PETER:

And we couldn’t stop… talking.

Lea Anderson:

I know. I thought I had probably exhausted you.

PETER:

No, no. It was fantastic. It really was such a privilege.

But in case people don’t know you, how do you introduce yourself today?

Lea Anderson:

I know, it’s hard…

PETER:

I know you do film and all sorts, so—

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, I do. I do, yeah. I make dance for anywhere that it’s needed. In all sorts of performance, anything really.

PETER:

And famously, we can say that you’re one of the co-founders of The Cholmondeleys, and then later The Featherstonehaughs.

Lea Anderson:

The Featherstonehaughs. Yes. Yes.

PETER:

A touring, well-established contemporary company here in the UK.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Yeah, that’s true.

PETER:

Contemporary dance.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah.

PETER:

And today—maybe you can describe a little bit what we did. We’ve already done the dancing—

Lea Anderson:

Yes.

PETER:

—we can say, because secrecy was such a big and important part of the practice. So do you want to try and explain, for those listening, a little bit?

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Yeah. I’m quite often interested in giving tasks to people—dancers, performers—without them knowing where it’s leading, and to trick them into not doing what they always do.

Because I find when I—well, certainly—you have a tendency to want to move one way, or spin one way only, or not spin at all, or jump, and I’m trying to find different ways of getting people to move.

So I didn’t tell you what we were doing. We just copied Laurel and Hardy dancing.

PETER:

Yep, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

And we replicated it and treated it as if it were a piece of very important historical dance history that we needed to save for posterity.

And we wouldn’t distinguish between “dance steps,” mannerisms, style, or things that arise from people’s bodies—certain body shapes and tendencies.

And then, once you’ve really spent a long time learning it and you’re completely committed to it, we then try to substitute sections of it inspired by collages by Hannah Höch, and see what comes out.

PETER:

Yes, it becomes a mash-up. There’s two parts, isn’t there, really?

There’s the first part—which was funny, not funny. It was very endearing. There was almost a role-play moment where you switched and you were like, “Now, Peter, stop messing around. We are now dance historians.”

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes, yes. This is a story. And people are never quite sure how serious I am.

PETER:

But it’s lovely, because then we’re sitting with Laurel and Hardy—this very short dance scene—and you’re exactly right: there are so many elements within it.

We’re focused on the bodies. We’re not doing too much with the surroundings. We’re dealing with the clothing, of course—that was important. And we’re trying to copy and pick up exactly each detail, and also how to transcribe—if that’s the right word?

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes.

PETER:

From video into the room.

Lea Anderson:

Into a three-dimensional world, yeah.

PETER:

With conversations like: which side are we standing on? Is that my left hand or my right hand?

Lea Anderson:

Are we mirroring them, or are we replicating their right and their left?

PETER:

Yeah.

Lea Anderson:

And it makes me realise—I don’t know if copying movement from video is something people do much nowadays—but when you see someone stepping into the role of someone else they’ve learned from video, you see the ghost of the original dancer within them.

And obviously the ghosts of Laurel and Hardy were dancing in us, because you can’t avoid that. Their mannerisms and movements are there.

PETER:

Yeah, and even watching Laurel and Hardy, I felt like we were having conversations about their ghosts.

You were often saying, “I think Hardy’s not picking up the steps well, so Laurel is leading him.” And I had a lot of thoughts, because I was focused on Hardy and you on Laurel.

I was thinking: maybe the narrative they’re portraying is that they’re almost just tapping their feet, because they’re these clueless, innocent, beautiful creatures who end up in funny situations—and then this tapping casually turns into a dance.

Lea Anderson:

Yes.

PETER:

So I was noticing these layers—and you spoke a lot about layers. Not necessarily meaning, but layers of information that are already in the video itself, as much as we are embodying those layers and ghosts.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah. And it’s also kind of fun and silly to take something like that so seriously, which can be good. It can distract people from taking themselves too seriously. Contemporary dance can be very—

PETER:

Well, exactly. Exactly.

And this was one of the difficulties of doing this with me, because the way you normally work isn’t a one-to-one rehearsal. You usually work with dancers, watching them take on these tasks.

And we also had a warm-up—I forgot to mention.

Lea Anderson:

Oh yeah, the warm-up.

PETER:

Which was walking for ten, then nine, then eight, all the way down. Really complicated: staying on the beat, changing direction at the right moment, with timing always shifting.

Normally, these playful invitations give dancers space. But today we had the conundrum that we were doing it together.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah. We did it together.

I devised this way of working because if people work in twos or threes rather than alone, they can’t just get into what they think is the “right” thing or the tasteful thing.

When I sit outside and people work in twos or threes, they have to negotiate together. They can’t go too far in one direction, because they have to justify it with the source material.

PETER:

Right.

Lea Anderson:

So someone says, “No, Laurel does this. He doesn’t do that.” And you ask, “Where in the film does that happen?”

You get these ludicrous conversations, but the movement and the relationships that emerge are things I could never imagine beforehand. That’s what surprises me and what I enjoy. Human relationships are very complex.

PETER:

Yes.

Lea Anderson:

Dance can get very inward—very about how I feel all the time. But movement we enjoy is about how we respond to each other, to the surroundings, to clothing.

PETER:

Yes. And this really resonates with my experience teaching improvisation—working in pairs or trios creates relief. Authority is distributed, discussion happens, laughter emerges.

Whereas teaching the whole group as one can become silent, hierarchical.

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes.

And ballet, for example, is a series of very strict rules and poses. You don’t express yourself. So there’s always this gap between what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing.

I work this way because I get more interesting material. You discover people’s personalities.

PETER:

Exactly. And by centring the social in the creative process, you amplify it.

We were working with material from Yippeee!!! .

Lea Anderson:

Yes. I used this method to make duets in Yippeee!!! , mostly sampling Busby Berkeley, but also other 1930s material.

PETER:

I remember seeing it—2006 or 2007 at Sadler’s Wells. It was one of the most striking performances I’ve ever seen.

There were so many relationships embedded in those duets and trios. It really stayed with me.

Lea Anderson:

That’s funny—you’ve seen it.

PETER:

Very vividly.

And the facial expressions—the animation, the drama, the absurdity—it was beautiful.

Lea Anderson:

Contemporary dancers aren’t famous for facial expression. So getting them to lift eyebrows, contort faces—it’s great.

PETER:

Then comes the mash-up part. We introduced Hannah Höch’s collages.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Putting two-dimensional imagery into three-dimensional bodies, while keeping strict structure. Pulling the brain in two directions.

PETER:

And then adding music—Neu!.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. To change it further. But the ghost remains. You can keep transforming it, but the origin stays somewhere inside.

PETER:

It becomes like an object we can examine together.

Lea Anderson:

And the audience doesn’t need to know any of this. What matters is the strange relationship they see between two people.

PETER:

Exactly.

And that secrecy—the audience doesn’t know the source. The material becomes social, relational.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. The source material is for the performers. The audience can come in and ask, “What the hell is this?” And I like that.

PETER:

That reminds me of seeing Merce Cunningham—abstract, yet deeply readable. You see struggle, negotiation.

But you go further by including the struggle of doing it together .

Lea Anderson:

I don’t believe in abstract movement. Everything is readable. Humans read each other all the time.

The more layers of meaning you give, the richer it becomes.

PETER:

That’s the pleasure of working with you. There’s such wealth, and it’s still developing.

Lea Anderson:

It’s about misreading scores to make something new. We don’t know how people danced thousands of years ago—but they were human, so they danced.

Misunderstanding is productive.

PETER:

Yes. Difference and sameness existing together.

Lea Anderson:

Exactly.

PETER:

One of the joys today was realising: I can do this. It’s joyful. It’s not distant.

And it connected to childhood memories of Laurel and Hardy—playfulness, humour, not taking the body too seriously. It was emotional.

Lea Anderson:

That’s interesting. Movement knowledge lives in us. It’s complicated and simple at the same time.

PETER:

Yes.

I’ve been reading your book— The Cholmondeleys: Forty Years of Style and Design .

Steve Blake talks about dance being visceral and immediate, yet becoming elitist.

Lea Anderson:

Dance has a strange reputation of not being for everyone. But everyone dances—at weddings, parties, clubs.

PETER:

Exactly. It’s in us.

Lea Anderson:

Who cares if you don’t do it “well”?

PETER:

Exactly.

Lea Anderson:

Laurel and Hardy came from stage traditions. Their movement is recognisable. It doesn’t need explanation.

PETER:

And yet dance is policed. “What are they trying to say?”

But it doesn’t mean nothing.

Lea Anderson:

If I wanted to say something clearly, I’d just say it.

PETER:

Exactly.

Lea Anderson:

Dance is not charades.

PETER:

Yes.

Lea Anderson:

I also work with cards—visual scores. Images that suggest movement. Often incomplete, so dancers have to imagine the rest.

PETER:

Problem-solving rather than self-expression.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. And humour. Humans are humorous.

PETER:

That really stayed with me today—thinking about humour, play, surface.

Not depth coming out, but layers going in.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. The more you copy, the deeper it goes. Like baking. Or papier-mâché.

PETER:

Exactly.

Lea Anderson:

It’s compromise. Two-dimensional images in three-dimensional bodies.

PETER:

And we’re always almost dancing—catching ourselves from falling.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. If we ever work it out.

PETER:

So where does it go next? If this were a show?

Lea Anderson:

I’d research for a long time. Set strict rules. Strings of investigation. Discard some, keep others.

Rules like: music never starts with movement. Or movement never stops when music stops.

Costume, light, set—everything makes it harder, and therefore richer.

PETER:

And you work like this right up until premiere?

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Relearning with costumes, relearning in the dark. That’s part of the meaning.

PETER:

It’s a beautiful journey—Hannah Höch meets Laurel and Hardy meets dancers meets audience.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Complicated, but alive.

PETER:

So, how can people find your work?

Lea Anderson:

I’ve got Vimeo. Instagram. A website.

PETER:

We’ll link everything.

Thank you so much. Your optimism, joy, and curiosity are such a gift.

Lea Anderson:

We’re only in it for the fun. Otherwise we’d do something sensible.

PETER:

Exactly. Thank you.

Lea Anderson:

Thank you.

PETER:

We’ll see you again soon. Bye-bye.

Transcript:

PETER:

Hello and welcome you.

Lea Anderson:

Thank you very much.

PETER:

Today, we are dancing with Lea Anderson. And I feel in so many ways, you don’t need an introduction, because you are so much a part of, especially British dance history, and such a legacy. I feel very honoured and privileged to get to meet you in this way as well, to be in practice in dancing. You’re such a wonderful, kind, open person, and so rich and knowledgeable. Last night we had dinner.

Lea Anderson:

Yes.

PETER:

And we couldn’t stop… Talking.

Lea Anderson:

I know, I thought I had probably exhausted you.

PETER:

No, no. It was fantastic. It really was. such a privilege. But in case people don’t know you, how do you introduce yourself today?

Lea Anderson:

I know it’s hard…

PETER:

I know you do film and all sorts, so..

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, I do I do, yeah, I make dance for anywhere that that it’s needed. Yeah. And in all sorts of performance and anything, anything.

PETER:

And famously we can say that you one of the cofounders of The Cholmondeleys and then later The Featherstonehaughs.

Lea Anderson:

The Featherstonehaughs. Yes. Yes

PETER:

A touring well established contemporary company here in the UK.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Yeah that’s true.

PETER:

Contemporary dance. Yeah.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah.

PETER:

And today, we maybe you can describe it a little bit what we did. We’ve already done the dancing,

Lea Anderson:

Yes

PETER:

we can say, because secret was such a big, important part of the practice. So do you want to try and explain for those listening a little bit?

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Yeah, I quite often am interested in giving tasks to people to dancers, to performers, without them knowing where it’s leading and to trick them into not doing what they always do, because I find when I well, certainly, you have a tendency to want to move one way and then do something else on the other direction or spin one way only, or not spin at all, or jump, and I’m trying to find different ways of getting people to move. So I didn’t tell you what we were doing. We just copied Laurel and Hardy dancing.

PETER:

Yep, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

And we replicated it and treated it as if it were a piece of very important historical dance history and that we needed to save it for prosperity. And that we wouldn’t distinguish between “dance steps”, and mannerisms or style or things that arise from people’s bodies, certain body shapes and tendencies. And then once you’ve really spent a long time learning it and you’re completely committed to it, we then try and substitute sections of it inspired by collages by Hannah Höch. and see what comes out?

PETER:

Yes, it becomes a mash up. There’s two parts, isn’t it, really? There’s the first part which is. And it was funny, not funny. It was very endearing. There was almost a role play, like moment where you switched and you like, “So we are. Now Now, Peter, stop messing around. We are now dance historians.”

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes, yes, this is a story. This is a story and yeah, people are never quite sure how serious I am.

PETER:

But it is lovely because then you we’re sitting with Lauren and Hardy, this very short dance scene within their thing, and you’re exactly right. There is so many elements within it. And we’re focused just on the bodies. We’re not doing too much to do with the surroundings. We’re dealing with the clothing, of course. That was important. And we’re trying to copy and pick up exactly each detail and also how to transcribe. Is that a good word?

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes.

PETER:

From video into the room.

Lea Anderson:

Into 3D world.. yeah

PETER:

With conversations about like, which side are we standing and is that my left hand or is that my right hand?

Lea Anderson:

Are we mirroring them or are we replicating them their right and their left?

PETER:

Yeah.

Lea Anderson:

And it makes me realise, I don’t know if copying movement from videos or is something that people do much nowadays, but when you see someone stepping into the role of someone else that they’ve learned from a video, you see the ghost of the original dancer within them. And obviously the ghost of Laure Hardy were dancing in us because you can’t, that’s what people are there. There’s some of their mannerisms and movements.

PETER:

Yeah and even watching Lauren and Hardy, I felt like we were having conversations about their ghosts. So you were often saying, I think, I think Hardy’s not picking up the steps well. So Laurel is leading them. And I had a lot of thoughts because I was focused on Hardy, of course, and you Laurel, of, oh, but I wonder, like, this is sort of because the narrative is well that they’re trying to portray is that they’re almost just tapping their feet, and because they’re sort of this clueless, very innocent, beautiful creatures that sort of go into funny situations, that this tapping of feet just, it’s sort of casually turns into a dance.

Lea Anderson:

Yes.

PETER:

So I was also noticing these layers, and you spoke a lot about layers of meaning, maybe, or not meaning. You didn’t say that, but do you know what I mean?

Lea Anderson:

Yes.

PETER:

These layers of information that is also in the video itself, as much as we are then embodying those layers and those ghosts of Laurel and Hardy..

Lea Anderson:

Yeah and also it’s kind of fun and silly thing to do, to take so seriously. which can sometimes it’s quite good, it can distract people from being, from taking themselves too seriously. contemporary dance can be very.

PETER:

Well, I mean, Exactly. Exactly. We could maybe talk about that because that was one of the difficulties of doing this with me was the way in which you normally work. This isn’t. This isn’t a one to one, let’s say, of a rehearsal. When you collaborate your working with dancers and you’re watching them, take on these tasks and you’re using this method to have fun. And we also had a warm-up. I forgot to mention.

Lea Anderson:

Oh, yeah, the warm-up.

PETER:

Which was walkinging for 10 and then 9 and then 8, and then 7 and all the way down. So really complicated, making sure you’re on the beat, but having to change direction at the right time with the timing always changing. So there’s this fun playful invitations that give the dancers normally the space to do those things. However, today, we had the sort of conundrum of we’re going to do it together.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah. We did it together. I think that, I’ve devised this way of working because if people are working in twos or threes and not on their own, if you work on your own, then you can kind of get into what you think is the right thing to do or the sort of tasteful thing or the unusual or special thing. And I quite like to get away from that and find something that you could never, ever find unless you sort of crash some things together and you forced people to respond.. And so by me sitting outside and people working in twos or threes, they have to negotiate together, but they can’t go too far in a direction because they have to discuss it and justify it with the source material.

PETER:

Right, right, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

So you have to say, “no, Laurel does this. He doesn’t do that.” So you can’t where in this picture or in this film, does somebody do that? They don’t. and then they say, “oh, yes, but I feel it it’s the only way to get.” So you have these ludicrous conversations but the movement that comes out and the relationship that it describes can be something that I could never imagine any, you know, before. and that’s what surprises me in and I enjoy it, yeah, because human relationships are very complex.

PETER:

Yes, right, right.

Lea Anderson:

And they’re not always so sort of seriously about mine. It can get very inward dancing. It can be very about how I feel all the time and the movement that we see and enjoy and is about how we respond to each other and to the surroundings. And to our clothing.

PETER:

Yeah. Everything. But actually, it’s just so great you bring this up because when I started teaching improvisation, I was obsessed with the organization of our we in pairs, or are we working in threes, or were we working as a group, as a whole, or are we working alone, so to speak, alone? And it was fascinating because I drew to this similar conclusion and I was like, I need, or it was beneficial for the class to have them working in twos or threes.” And I felt like there was this huge relief of I felt it as my authority didn’t become the sort of the singular thing in the room, where everyone’s looking to me almost for, like, am I doing this right? And secondly, it was discursive. The room lit, you felt this energy sort of emerge where everyone is talking and discussing and it’s playfall and, it’s laughing, and there’s a sort of joy emerges, whereas when I would teach and I would teach the whole group as one, I would be this thing, and there’d be this sort of silence, and everyone is looking in. It’s so fascinating that you. Yeah, you remind me of that. And the irony, I think this is the thing that I’ve wanted to really point on, because you’re talking about dance in general. And there’s this irony as something that you do ballet, but in a big class, you with many, many people all the time, but you’re extremely alone. And there’s this you’ve not said a word for an hour and a half often and the teacher has just talked to you and yet it’s extremely relational. It’s an extremely social thing, but we’re not working on that often. We’re working in this silent way. So by introducing this mode of play, you’re including the social as in a way.

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes, and I’m also thinking about ballet is almost like a series of, it’s got very strict rules and very strict poses which you and which you memorize and learn and move from one to the other. You don’t do your own thing. You don’t express yourself. So again, it’s about how you your ideas of what you’re doing and what you’re really doing. Yeah. But also, I think that I just did because I get in more interesting stuff.

PETER:

Yes. Yeah. It was a natural

Lea Anderson:

Yeah. and people’s personalities, you know, you find amazing things that you would never guess.

PETER:

Yes, exactly. Exactly. No, but I think what I’m trying to say, I think, because I overanalyze everything, and I’m looking at it as almost like, oh, this is interesting as a choreographic method. Because I believe you then are. I mean, because of course ballet has expression and it has social things. You’re like, of course, like, in some regard, but by centering the social in the creative part, you are then amplifying that a little bit and bringing it to the foreground, which is so curious and interesting. And we were working from material, which is essentially from Yippeee!!!. Am I

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, I used this method to make little duets in Yippeee!!!, which mostly was, for sampling Busby Berkeley material, but also other things from the ’30s. and other movement stuff. So the performers that I was collaborating with were just working with film and the images all the time until they got it was they got so amazing at it.

PETER:

But I remember watching it, so this was one of, I think this was the first performance of yours I saw Live and I did write down the date, but it would be like 2000 10 or 6 or

Lea Anderson:

2006 Yeah. 7, I think

PETER:

Yeah, 2010 that was Edits. I made it this song. So and I saw it at Sadlers Wells and it was it really was this, it was weird, but it was so. meaningful. It’s the thing I’m looking for maybe later. It had. There was so much in it. Like I was seeing so much. There was these relationships that were sort of entwined and embedded into the little duets and trios and sort of quartets and different things, that sort of emerged during the thing. That I remember. I mean, it really struck me. I vividly remember it as one of the most spectacular performances I saw of my life.. So it’s such an honor to get a little bit closer and to see,

Lea Anderson:

Oh, that’s funny you’ve seen it

PETER:

Yeah how those things really resonate at least for me, they did, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah. No, that was that was yeah, there was something really quite perverse and interesting to get sort of dancers, ask dancers to copy that kind of musical stuff from the ‘ 30s and the facial expression, because famously contemporary dancers not, yeah, it’s not famous for its range of facial expression or that your face isn’t really anything to do with the rest of your body. and you mustn’t distract, but to get people to sort of do eyebrows lifting and

PETER:

I remember the faces were extremely a characterful and like they had so much animation and drama. They contorted and strange and weird and beautiful. Yeah, exactly. You’re playing with your lips with your teeths out,

Lea Anderson:

Yeah I’m just trying to imagine all the the faces that they had to do.

PETER:

Yeah. But then let’s talk about the mash up part. Oh, yeah You used that word, right? So then we went to the collage and we added

Lea Anderson:

the collages from Hannah Höch. So you have to make, yeah, so you have to. Yes, trying to put something that’s too dimensional into something that that you’ve made into three dimensional and but keeping a really strict structure. And maybe pulling your brain into two different directions.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. And doing both at the same time as well. So I don’t know how well this translates

Lea Anderson:

No you can’t

PETER:

But because it is complicated but so you have the dance from Laurel and Hardy in the background and then we take the collage images and because they’re a collage, they’re also multiple. It’s not a single image and they’re not moving, so then we have to bring it into a time dimension as well. And exactly as you say, there’s this tension between the running, the continued running of the Laurel and Hardy dance we’ve learned, and then morphing and mashing and melding that with the collage, and to just to add the, to demonstrate the increased mash up element of it, then we added music from

Lea Anderson:

Oh Neu!, yeah To change it more. But you’ve got the ghost of it. It’s like if you keep moving it and changing it, the germ of it where it came from still exists somewhere in it. But you can, how far can you go? Like you could keep changing the music and keep adding more things.And you’d still, if you’ve been on that journey, you still have the origin somewhere inside you.

PETER:

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And it’s also something that you can work on together. Like it’s an object. It’s almost like a sculpture. Like it becomes material where we can almost stand around and look at the dance and then say, okay, but where is that from? What part of the video or from the colleague is that?

Lea Anderson:

Is that eye, that weirdy squint from?

PETER:

Yeah, or what beat of the music probably as well? Is that hitting and it’s somehow takes the dancer away from this thing that’s in our heads and it becomes real.

Lea Anderson:

Something else. But most importantly for me is that if you if you’re in the audience and you watch this, you don’t know anything about all of that and it’s not important. What’s important is this very, very strange relationship that these two people are demonstrating and it’s kind of ludicrous. And but it’s not, not playing for laughs. There’s a lot more to it and it’s complex. But you don’t really register. It’s just bonkers, really.

PETER:

Yeah. Because we can recognise are there’s something between these two people. But not knowing.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, what’s going on?

PETER:

Because yeah, that’s very clear. Like, we spoke about the secret that was important to hide from me of what’s going to come next, what images and things. And that must be the case for the audience as well, I mean they don’t know, it’s Laurel and Hardy person.. Exactly. So it’s material becomes the social almost, in a weird way, the relationship.

Lea Anderson:

No, and they don’t need to know. it’s not important. It’s important for the performers and devisers to have something that’s really going to be engaging and all encompassing that they can do something really meaningful with. And that is the hard bit is finding the source material that speaks to them. But it’s not about what the audience sees the audience will come in and think, what the hell are they doing? Is it this sort of dancer or is it that a sort of dance? Which I quite like.

PETER:

Yeah. It’s beautiful. And I often use this as a sort of like reference point in my own like understanding of dance and in how it functions for the audience or can function for the audience, of I saw Merce Cunningham Company once, and I think they were doing some chance procedure, I suppose they had randomized the music, I think, at the beginning of the show. And it’s and you can see all the movement very little flow or you know, it’s all sort of this staccato going from Arababesque to a thing. This contorted shapes. And the thing that really struck me was the expressions of the dancers, because you think it’s, oh, it’s abstract, it has no meaning, you know, it’s all randomized, but then to see the dancers struggling, actually, and negotiating the dance steps, of doing trying to get into those shapes and things, whereas I feel you’ve gone even further than that, and included the struggle of doing it together and the relationships that are built and the knowledges that are shared between people, because in Cunningham’s work, it’s very individual. Like, each person has got their counts running in their head, and they’re all in their own head of like, “O that step, that step. At least as I remember it.

Lea Anderson:

No, know what you mean.

PETER:

And this is such a pleasure to see almost the person on stage and not be too concerned with what it is that they’re doing, if that makes sense.

Lea Anderson:

Well, it’s interesting you talked about most Cunningham, because I feel really strongly that there is no such thing as abstract movement..

PETER:

Of course.

Lea Anderson:

Because everything really has, like, you read it, you read it as this person that’s ignoring everyone else around them, no matter how close they are and is purposefully doing whatever the hell they’re doing. So everything is readable in that way. So the more layered of the meaning that you can give, because humans, we’re pretty good at reading each other and we’re quite serious and clumsy and we’re also quite ridiculous. as well. So, yeah, it’s it’s nice to be able to refer to all of that. But it’s really tricky. I mean, it’s taken. I’ve tried out lots of different ways of trying to do this. And also because it’s not it’ can be quite confusing because I don’t need people to know what it is. I don’t know why people behave in the way that they do or why their mannerisms are such and but they’re all quite enjoyable.

PETER:

I know what I mean and that’s the that’s the pleasure of doing it with you. You know, we’re trying to condense this into like to get a taste or a flavor or a feeling for the experience. And you have so much wealth. I mean, we sat down to start recording and you’re like, oh, and there’s also this, I do show practices. So it’s I can see that and it and at the same time, I feel you’re still developing it. It’s still something you’re

Lea Anderson:

Because you’ve got to find more ways of… It’s about misunderstanding, a score. I mean, we mentioned dance historians and how, “how do you know what people were doing and how they danced on what, how they held themselves?”, “How do you know what people did thousands of years ago when they were except for the fact that they were human too, and so they were all dancing.” Yes. And making music. But I love the idea of Missreading to make something new and different that’s the product of us now and looking at imagery. And I’m yeah, and I really like trying to trying to persuade people not to do what they always do by watching it looking at pictures. So all these different things that you said that they’re all different practices, but for me, it’s all the same thing.

PETER:

Of course.

Lea Anderson:

You just need to make a visual score that we’re going to follow and not be allowed to deviate from. and interrogate and see what does it actually say? What does it suggest and then show it to someone and see what they. If they’re agree.

PETER:

Yes, yeah I mean, and I mentioned earlier, that it reminds me of. It’s almost as though we are channeling into the zeitgeist, in a way. I don’t know if that’s fair to say, because I mean, in all these materials we’re from a similar type. No, no, sorry.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, these are from ’30s, so

PETER:

Yeah. But the music was from the ‘ 70s.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, yeah. That was a location link,

PETER:

yeah. Yes, I see, I see Germany. No, not Germany.

Lea Anderson:

It’s Switzerland.

PETER:

Switzerland’s But but all these things, this sort of, they live with us because you speak about that Yippeee!!! Was working with 1930s?

Lea Anderson:

Yeah yeah.

PETER:

There’s of course, a calling back to old footage and stuff and you could consider it sort of archival, but we’re still living with the consequences of those things and how they are in relationship to each other. And it’s so beautiful what you just said now, how do we how do we organize that? How do we deal with it? How do we make it make something new.

Lea Anderson:

Something make something new, yeah. But that we all understand because we’re human, but with Busby Berkeley, because Busby Berkeley came from the military and from drill, like drilling soldiers. So you can see, obviously, the relationship between. So he was kind of like. looking for a job and choreography and he dealt with it in that way. So he used that model to make this dance, which I copied to make or someone else. So it’s like you’ve got these generations of copies. There are nothing, total misunderstanding of what they’re supposed to be, by all of us. To make something different, which is the same.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It’s this difference and same that’s sort of exists in tandem somehow. There’s a quality as well of, I’m often obsessed by, but what was their intention?

Lea Anderson:

Oh.

PETER:

in order to do that in the first place? What was the sort of motivation for those choices and things? And what’s really nice is we have our own intention to use their the results of whatever they were intending to do as a sort of material, and you also start to I feel as though I’m almost starting to channel into a singular intention that we all have, that is maybe less defined as we’re gonna make a show. or it’s so that you can see my face or you know, they’ really sort of practical intentions, but it’s more like, because I have to dance. Like you said, we’re humans, so then they were human then so therefore there was dance and there was music. I love this idea that to be human is.

Lea Anderson:

It’s to dance. It yes, exactly. And to have, yeah, music. Yeah. Yeah. And to draw pictures, I guess. Yeah, they’re all the same. It’s all the same. Yeah.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah, we talking. Yeah. Yeah. And I think of one of the really fun experiences of doing this today was actually when we first watched Laurel and Hardy, I was a little bit intimidated I was like, ohh, gosh, it’s actually, it’s quite a dance, you know? I was like, I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to remember the steps, get the steps correct, I was really sort of like concerned that, oh, I might be out of my depth. And what was really joyful, actually, was, maybe I, maybe it is, you know, I have danced for a long time, maybe it is that, but there was, as a second we started doing it, I was like, oh, oh, this is really joyful. It’s really easy. And you can feel it in relationship to them doing it, no longer becomes this spectacle, because it is quite spectacular, beautiful footwork and patterning and everything. their facial expressions and stuff. And not saying I was doing it perfectly, but still, I felt I was doing it well enough to feel like, oh, oh, this is, I can do this, and it’s not too far away. And it made me relate to them in the imagination of them just dancing. And even though you felt like maybe Hardy was having a hard time remembering the steps, there was still a joy, I think. I felt in what I understood of his reason to be doing those dances..

Lea Anderson:

Also, when else in your life would anyone force you to copy Laurel Hardy? for fun? I mean, no one would you and do that in the million years. It’s only because I’ve made you do it.

PETER:

No no. And I mean, and it was what was clear as well, you don’t do this.

Lea Anderson:

No.

PETER:

It’s not your way of preparing, say, for a rehearsal. You wouldn’t put the video on and do it yourself.

Lea Anderson:

No, but I’ve watched it. It happen so many times that there was a sort of germ of it in my brain that, yeah, that I know it. But I do think it’s, I quite like being in the position to make people do things that are actually really quite joyful or fun. And only because it’s part of a you’re making some work. So therefore you’ll have to do it.

PETER:

Yes Yeah. But there’s two things from that that I found it interesting is because you said, “oh, and normally, because we’re getting tired now we do some singing.” I think you said that.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah.

PETER:

And also you made a really, maybe I’ve already said this, but a really important thing of need a night’s sleep to really do this work. To settle. So there’s a great joyful way of approaching it because exactly if you were to set yourself the task to sit down and learn the steps of Laurel and Hardy, it’s excruciating, but you’re doing it in a way which is actually so generative and playful and joyful.

Lea Anderson:

And doing it with a partner with someone else. I mean, that makes a lot of difference. You both sort of have to try and get it right and one can’t remember something that the other doesn’t two different ways of thinking about things. And because it’s so county and precise and precision is really important, you can’t just sort of blur it or mess it up. You have to be in focus. It’s to get in focus. So sleep is such a marvelous thing because the next day it’s better.

PETER:

Yeah

Lea Anderson:

it’s it’s better to do it in little bits. And then see how how it goes. And then actually, because I’ve done this a lot, I’ve done this several times, I kind of know, I’ve got certain expectations from how things will go. But quite often I don’t know. I’ll say, let’s copy this and it will be a real surprise to see if the bits that people pick up on the bits of people don’t pick up on and how well people deal with it or they’re going to get really annoyed. So it’s also an experimental for me.

PETER:

Yeah, of course.

Lea Anderson:

I try something anything, it’s not working. Maybe I’ll think of something else. So we’ll drop that yeah and I’ll have a different film. So Lauren Hardy probably wasn’t the first film that I found.

PETER:

No, of course.

Lea Anderson:

But other things weren’t so. There was just something about that that people are happy to spend time with.

PETER:

Yeah. That’s interesting in itself. And it is, there’s something, you say experiment, but there’s something very rewarding by working in a way which has a kind of researchy equality where we’re discovering things together, we’re discovering exactly as you say, a nuance and things. And then additionally, which which I brought up during the exercise, I was saying how “my body is so different shaped”, but you were like, “well, that’s brilliant. I love that.”

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, because then you have to take, you know, you can’t assume that he’s moving like that because of his body shape.

PETER:

Exactly.

Lea Anderson:

You have to analyze it and then find a way of, you know, referencing that in your own movement. Which might make a different style of moving, which might have something about it that’s really, really interesting or funny or sad. I don’t know it’s…

PETER:

Yes Yeah. And it’s this sort of melding because also one of the things of learning dance and watching dance is this thing of it’s sitting in our nervous system in a way, and what was interesting was you kept on using the other foot to the one that was. And that really felt like it was an echo of from watching you have it

Lea Anderson:

Yes, yes. Yeah, I was I watched it from the other way around.

PETER:

elsewhere in you, even though in this moment you were using your brain to this, this, but your body already was like no, no, no.

Lea Anderson:

there’s a ghost, a memory ghost.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s just really beautiful for it to emerge like that. It was such a pleasant encounter perhaps with ourselves as this sort of amalgamation of each other and all the references. I mean, even for me, Laurel and Hardy were a big influence as a child, and I haven’t watched them since. So I think you asked, like, “oh, you must know this,” because I mentioned that I was a big fan, but I didn’t recognize it at all, but the second we started doing it, all its floods of emotions almost, actually, of of their mannerisms and the play we’ve mentioned the thing with the tie. And it really connects to a core part of me, you know, I don’t it doesn’t really belong to them. It’s my watching from when I was a kid and seeing that you can be that kind of playful with your body and humorous and that things aren’t so serious. It was, yeah, quite emotional, really..

Lea Anderson:

That’s interesting. But it is really, it is how humans hold. I guess when people are watching sports and they kind of move, they have sort of sympathetic movements with their and they know what’s going to happen when I don’t know, one’s got a ball and they’re going to and it doesn’t happen. We’ve got this. It’s quite complicated.

PETER:

Yeah, it is.

Lea Anderson:

how we move and how we our knowledge and experience and memories of moving

PETER:

complicated and simple at the same time.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, it’s simple. It’s what we are

PETER:

so readily. in us, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

It’s no big. Yeah.

PETER:

It was nice because I’ve been reading your book. Remind me the name. I think it’s good.

Lea Anderson:

It’s just The Cholmondeleys.

PETER:

Forty years.

Lea Anderson:

Forty years of style and design

PETER:

It’s this beautiful book with all these amazing images from the things and Steve Blake? Yes. Steve Blake the musician you collaborated with.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah Composer, and Simon Vincenzi is in it. He’s a designer and choreographer and director. and Sandy Powell was also a designer and yeah, lots of yeah,

PETER:

I will list them in the references in the notes because it is it’s a great book full of so many fantastic creative minds and the way they articulate things. But it was I think Steve Blake, that said that dance is so visceral and readily available, and that’s sort of what we’re talking about. It’s so simple, it’s one of the art forms that it’s so there, and then he goes on to say, but somehow it gets so elitist, perhaps because dancers spend so long training and then it becomes that thing. But I almost wonder if it’s not even that, but I understand where he’s coming from it.

Lea Anderson:

But it has got a strange a reputation as being sort of different and not for everyone. Whereas it’s probably the art form that everyone hears music and they tap their foot or not choose not to, but everyone dances at weddings and parties and whatever. Or yeah, or nightclubs. It’s that’s the most immediate.

PETER:

Yeah, and if if it works in the way that I feel you’re describing through this, well, not that you’re describing, but that you’ve given me the experience that it exists through just watching Laurel and Hardy. It’s in us. We feel it. We might not be able to execute it per se as well, but..

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, Who cares?

PETER:

Exactly. Then that thing of, well, it’s my body and everything else that I’m dealing with in it. Yeah.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, and the fact that Lauren Hardy, these comedians who were on making films had this background from the stage and the history of that, and that movement comes from a certain kind of comedic dancing that everyone recognised. You don’t have to, what are they trying to say? It doesn’t really matter. They’ just they’re just having fun and it’s warming or repulsive, whatever, but it’s something.

PETER:

But actually, if if I mean, we weren’t really focusing on that, but it is contextualized in that there’s some musicians playing and then these silly fools end up dancing, which is sort of used as a comic devices, “oh, how ridiculous”, isn’t it? And they almost, they tear them on, in a way, but at the same time, they’re laughing at them, and there is this sort of centering one of the central tensions, actually, with dance, this humoristic sort of, well, it’s bizarre that you would do that, but we do do that.

Lea Anderson:

And that’s if you’re playing music, that’s what people are going to do, aren’t they? They’re going to dance. It’s just normal.

PETER:

Exactly. And here we are in North Devon in the community centre and at one point I think you said, oh, was that a farmer? But it is this, what if they saw us? What if they saw us? doing these ridiculous things? The thing?

Lea Anderson:

Oh, it’s Laurel and Hardy.

PETER:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly

Lea Anderson:

It’s Laurel and Hardy.

PETER:

And they would, they would recognise parts of it because those, I mean, there were steps in it which we were saying, like, that is such, it’s almost a trope. They’re doing this walking upstairs and then taking steps back downstairs. It’s so iconic, and you feel it in you, you don’t even need to think. You’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, that. Th that cultural moment. And the farmer would have perhaps recognized those things as well.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, I’ bit the dance.

PETER:

Yes. Yeah. But somehow, it’s policed, isn’t it? It’s a sort of like, oh, but you shouldn’t do that, or that’s a waste.

Lea Anderson:

Or difficult. It’s difficult to understand. Yeah, “what are they are they trying to say?” They’re not saying anything.

PETER:

No. How could they? How could?

Lea Anderson:

Not a word is being uttered, Yeah, but it’s not meaningless. That’s the other thing that I.

PETER:

No, no, absolutely not, yeah. It’s extremely meaningful, but partly because it’s almost because there’s not a coherent meaning, it’s more meaningful to do because you’re doing it regardless. It’s like it’s like you were talking about working in Peru when you you meet someone you can’t communicate with verbally. The fact that you continue to spend time with them and try to be with them, which will include a lot more physical body language and stuff. It’s more meaningful, not more meaningful, but it has a great meaning.

Lea Anderson:

It has meaning, yeah, yeah.

PETER:

Because we know that we’re not doing the sort of easy..

Lea Anderson:

But if I wanted something that was that kind of communication, I would have written something. Or said something.

PETER:

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s not like choreographers and dances can’t speak.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, exactly. And I want to tell a story.

PETER:

Yeah, I’ll do it.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, I can just tell you. Yeah..

PETER:

I always say that to most students. So I always say, well, if you want to say that, just say it. Don’t…

Lea Anderson:

Sounds like… It’s that simple

PETER:

Karaaraoke. oh no not Karaaraoke. Charades.

Lea Anderson:

Charades.

PETER:

But how was the experience? Because you have these fantastic.

Lea Anderson:

Oh, my cards. Yeah. So, yeah, I make these little cards with an image on each one so that you can make a storyboard. So you can either copy film and try and copy that into a three dimensional space like we did with Laurel and Hardy. Or I make a storyboard, which takes the form of little cards with images on that usually share an aesthetic, or they come from one particular one particular source. And depending on what the show is at or the work is that I’m doing, or the people that I’m working with, I’ll choose cards. But I’m not always right. best to have several packs. so that you can try different languages. Quite often it’s just it’s you don’t have all the information about what the body’s doing. It might be just a hand or a a leg and then the dancer has to from their experience imagine what the rest of the body was doing.

PETER:

Exactly, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

But yeah, so problem solving rather than being expressive. Expressing yourself, yeah. And hopefully something different emerges and something with some. I like some sort of humour. Because we’re for a humorous humans.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, actually doing this today, yeah, really, of caused me to think, or to struggle properly with, what is humour? I think it’s something I’ve been dealing with personally for a minute, because I was sort of getting really exhausted of doing meditation as the only thing to do if I get I can’t sleep at night or if it’s the only thing to do to sort of calm down and get in my body and a sort of a what more humorous or playful or silly or daft, or naive, non serious? I’m not saying that meditation can’t be all those things, but for me, I was getting stuck in that mood of like, oh, I’ve gotta be serious now. And yet, yeah, humor is so integral. It’s so important, but I can’t name it, I can’t nail what it is.

Lea Anderson:

But what you just said then, I think is quite something that I think is important, but I don’t generally confess this because not many other people agree, is that that maybe a depth of feeling might come from surface, that as many. Yeah, many surface. The more you copy something, the more you the deeper it goes into you. So it’s not about something that’s in you coming out. It’s just many, many layers going in until you sort of in, I don’t know, ingest it.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. Or like like clay or something that you sort of, informs gradually. Because the idea

Lea Anderson:

Baking it.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Lea Anderson:

Changes it It’s not going that way yeah. Or copying people

PETER:

paper mache almost layering on the thing.

Lea Anderson:

Or how a child copies mannerisms and and gradually it becomes theirs or not. You take it on. rather than there’s some little germ that’s in you waiting to come out. It’s just all just clothing put on.

PETER:

Yes, exactly. And it is something about the direction, isn’t it, of we’re trying to be really precise, but we’re meeting with the absurdity of that impossibility, maybe all.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah. Well, it’s two dimensional images.

PETER:

It’s true, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

And what we, and as we said, I’veve already said, we’re physically nothing like the people that are trying to copy. So it’s because it’s compromise. There’s always a compromise.

PETER:

I mean, I don’t know why this this comes to mind as a sort of sensorial thing, but walking is that is really just falling, isn’t it? You know, you’re just catching yourself continuously. But we would never we would never give into that sensation that we wouldn’t allow ourselves to fall. We were always catching ourselves and there’s something about the the sort of, I mean, even just our attention. I can’t focus on the face of Hardy and the legs at the same time. I need to choose one. And then the rest of the body is almost doing the thing of walking, of catching myself from falling. It’s just running regardless while I focus on the face or something.. is something. Yeah, interesting about that meeting we’re always going to be dancing almost. But it’s only. It’s only when we really get into the detail of it that we sort of discover what kind of dance we’re doing.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, if we ever find it out.

PETER:

Yeah, exactly.

Lea Anderson:

Exactly.

PETER:

Yeah… I’m tying myself in knots in thought.

Lea Anderson:

I try to just set up a situation and see what comes out. And if it’s if it’s satisfactory, whatever that might mean,

PETER:

and so where does it go now? I mean, we’re so, this is such a luxury, because today we get to record and we discuss and it’s a kind of archive of a moment where Peter Mills met Lea Anderson and it got a little bit closer to what Lea Anderson has been dealing with, all your career and stuff, but where does it if we were going to make a show, you would then be watching and starting to refine and.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, so we make a show. What I would be doing is that I would probably researching it for a long period of time and think, okay, so Busby Berkeley. as time goes on, I get more confident about, I know that if we copy something long enough, something will come out, whereas I didn’t used to know that. So I prepare lots of different tasks that have some sort of connection and I call them strings. So they like strings of investigation. So each each day you might start a string. And then sometimes some you discard because they’re not really doing it for me. They’re a bit boring. a bit to something or other.

PETER:

And is it’s not only personal, sometimes it might be the group isn’t resonating with it?

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, but usually I work with people that I know are going to be up for this kind of work, because not everyone wants to do this. No. It’s not, you know, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. So people, and it’s great when there are people that I can work with that are some people are so deep saying, look, there’s a hand in the back of this here from the, there’s hand, and you haven’t been looking there because you’re busy looking at Laurel and Hardy or whatever. If we’re copying this, then somebody should do that at that moment. So if you’ve got people. So things that you would kind of can get out of control with the detail and the and then you have to look at it afresh to think, well, what have we got here and how is this going to be useful in this whole collection? So structure and all sorts of things come through just trying out a series of different tasks like these. And seeing where they go. And then there’s other limitations that are also. So usually before I start, I’ll have a, like we might decide like a simple example might be that music will never start at the same time as movement.

PETER:

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Lea Anderson:

Never and never will two things or they will. Or nothing will ever, when the music stops, the movement won’t stop. Or it will. Or, I don’t know. Or the musicians are actually copying the movement.

PETER:

Oh, wow.

Lea Anderson:

Well, yeah. So that you’re we all have very strict rules before you start in order not to fall into doing what you did last time. Because that’s really boring. And you just repeat yourself or you do something a bit, it’s slightly different. I’m not saying it stops you from being boring or whatever, but the desire is to never go down the same pathway.

PETER:

Yeah keep it alive. Because also you have costume and set and lights usually play a big role in making it harder.

Lea Anderson:

Make it harder, yeah. So if you decide before you start where the lights are. Yeah, then you might find that you’ve made it all in the dark bit or. Yes. And you’re not going to move the lights because you’ve decided that they’re there. Or that the costume will stop you being able to do quite a lot of the movement that you. So you then have to rework it with the costume. Otherwise, you just end up wearing..

PETER:

And just out of curiosity, would you work like this right up until premiere? And or is there a moment where then it’s like, oh, no, now it’s rehearsal and we repeat exactly the same.

Lea Anderson:

Oh, you would yeah, the the difficulties would be making sure that the costume was properly used. So that it doesn’t. So you wouldn’t sort of take away a massively huge, or you might cover other face completely. I mean, that’s happened. And so the dots can’t see where they are or the edge of the stage. So they might have to relearn it all by just steps alone.

PETER:

Yeah. Five step forward, five step back.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. And an emergency procedure in case someone’s going too near the edge of the stage. But because then that makes it, you’re not you’re not doing something that’s simple and easy and that dance isn’t the most the movement movement is complex that you move in your costumes in a space with people and that is part of the meaning of it that we understand. So it’s I like to have all of that. You know, people aren’t always in a bright light in a leotard. Their body’s really clearly.

PETER:

Yeah. And I mean, and you’re working with so many different designers and set designer, maybe a lighting designer a costume designer, like Simon Vincenzi, all those, and then music compositions. So there’s you’re somehow also figuring it out with them as well, I suppose.. From these initial research materials.

Lea Anderson:

Yes. Yeah..

PETER:

It’s marvelous. It’s such a play for journey of bringing alive these encounters, almost, of what happens when Hannah Höch? Hannah Höch and Lauren and Hardy meets.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

PETER:

And sort of mash up. And us, dancers and the composer and the set designer, then the audience and you know, this is sort of real, beautiful sort of We’re all here sort of vibe to it

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, it’s sort of quite complicated, but it’s also yeah.

PETER:

So normally at this point in the record, I would, I mean, it’s a little bit different because we would have paused and danced and come back. But we’ve reflected and so. but I would ask, so what’s coming up? What’s future? But it can also ask if you have anything else to sort of say. And yeah, how can people get in touch with your work? Do you have anything you want to share or…

Lea Anderson:

I haven’t really thought about this. I’ve got. Oh, I’ve got Vimeo..

PETER:

I’m sorry.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, there’s things I’ Yeah, I can things, yeah,

PETER:

I can give all your links.

Lea Anderson:

I can and think.

PETER:

You have some links. Yeah. Because you are still working. Yes. And your work is existing in many different places. You’re talking about collaborations in Peru and Finland and all sorts of things.

Lea Anderson:

Yeah, I’m doing a few things this year, but at the moment I was just sort of R&Ding and Ding them.

PETER:

But yeah. But then we tell people to at your website we’ll look at your website, your Instagram as well.

Lea Anderson:

Oh yeah, Instagram

PETER:

Instagram and all that. Jazz. This was such a pleasure to get into the weeds of it and really play so wonderful, because I’ve worked with Frank Bock and I’ve worked with Simon Vincenzi in different ways. And so and also they have episodes like this so people can see the sort of and there is a beautiful relationship. I would I don’t think I could sort of draw a complete parallel, because of course, you’re all very different.

Lea Anderson:

But yeah, we’ve worked. We’ve all worked together quite a bit, yeah.

PETER:

It’s such a pleasure, and I think also, I’d like to say thank you, and one of the things I’m really grateful for these days is how optimistic and inspiring and excited about making art and dance you are. It’s such a gift to be with you and it’s so hopeful. I really, it’s really warming. Maybe you maybe that’s my interpretation. Maybe you don’t feel like that, but it’s..

Lea Anderson:

Well it’s easy to be glum about it, but we’re only in it for the fun.

PETER:

Yes,

Lea Anderson:

I think. Otherwise we would have done something more sensible.

PETER:

Yes, it’s true. It’s true. All. But thank you.

Lea Anderson:

Thank you.

PETER:

I know, I can’t stop because I want to talk more. We didn’t mention your first startings in punk and stuff, but that would be more a biographical podcast.

Lea Anderson:

yeah, exactly. Yeah,

PETER:

thank you. We’ll see you again soon. Bye bye.

Trinity Laban – https://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/

Roehampton University – https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/study/academic-areas/arts-humanities-and-social-sciences/dance/

Deborah Hay – https://dhdcblog.blogspot.com/

Pauline Oliveros – https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/pauline-oliveros/

Deep listening practice – https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/

F choir – https://fchoir.com/

Jenny Moore – https://jennymoore.bandcamp.com/

Rajni Shah, performance artist, writer and producer https://www.rajnishah.com/

PETER:

So, hello.

Sara Ruddock:

Hello.

PETER:

Today, uh, we are dancing with Sara Ruddock, um, and we’ve known each other for a long time, I think.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, I think so.

PETER:

But I don’t remember where we first met each other. I remember you were always such a friendly, um, and warm presence whenever we encountered each other in the different parts of Stockholm, in fact, because I was rarely here in London.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah.

PETER:

So it’s kind of really nice to find myself now here, as you found yourself here in the UK, and connect with what that, what that’s done for you and your dance and your practice.

But specifically where you are: because you’re not working here very, very much at Laban, and you are creating choreographies here, and you are researching in a PhD at Roehampton. So there’s like a lot of really interesting things that overlap with my sort of curiosity and work that I’ve been doing in Sweden, and I get a chance to sort of meet that where it is with you here today.

So thank you for coming and dancing with me.

Sara Ruddock:

Thank you.

PETER:

And where are you today? Like, how do you describe yourself? Dancer, performer, person, human?

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, all of those things. All of those.

Yeah, I moved to London, like, nine years ago now. And yeah, it’s been a really interesting sort of cultural experience, discovery, as we spoke about earlier when we met.

And… I am teaching and tending to my own practice, and I really enjoy occasions like this, where I can share practice and I talk about practice and find different sort of formats or modes for that. I find really interesting.

And yes, my PhD research has been ongoing for, like, seven years. It’s been through, like, across the pandemic…

PETER:

Of course.

Sara Ruddock:

… and yeah, caring for children at home. It’s been a lot of different sort of challenges that made it more stretchy than I ever kind of had imagined when I started out.

I was interested in kind of doing this PhD research because I wanted to dig deeper into my practice and kind of unpack what it was about, or how to be able to articulate what I was doing. And not just what I was doing, but really explore through the practice, to work with practice research, practitioner research.

And yeah, the system here in the UK is a bit different than in Sweden, for example, when it comes to artistic research. It’s not such an established field in itself. Like in Sweden, Scandinavia, artistic research feels really established. Like, we understand what that is. We don’t have to justify why we’re doing it, why artistic research would be good or helpful, or useful, or interesting at all.

And here it feels like there’s a lot more work you need to do in the institutions in, like, why this would be a good sort of methodology or approach to research.

PETER:

Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

And what I offer. So I’m learning a lot from that, because I need to, you know, be articulating in a different way.

So maybe I haven’t done such a deep dive that I was sort of hoping for, in that kind of really working along with the practice, and sharing the practice, and discussing the practice with peers and with staff, that has not been that sort of research environment.

But I really sort of try to create my own way of doing the research and stay close to the field of dance and choreography. My peers are practitioners in London.

So yeah, my research is a lot about listening through the body, and listening through also activating voice and movement and vibration, and how there might open up listening in different ways; and tending to other people’s practices, like Deborah Hay and Pauline Oliveros and other artists, but then really working through studio practice.

And then sharing the studio practice through audio scores, sharing it with other people in workshops. So that became really key for me: that if there’s not the support in the institution to have this kind of collaborative research space, I need to create it myself.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

So that’s what I’ve been really researching through: this kind of series of workshops, where I’ve been sort of sharing my practice, sharing the research, and seeing what is it in the exchange that can open up questions about resonance and resistance. These are two kind of things, concepts, bodily concepts, experiences, that I’m really interested in.

But how can we think through, and with, and move with, and listen with resonance and resistance? And how we are actually, as artist practitioners, using resonance and resistance, like the interplay between resonance and resistance, as tools, as a way of being an artist, as a way of being with our practices.

And that’s why I find it super interesting to get together with other artist practitioners also, to kind of make them visible, and to articulate it, and listen through that, so that we can, yeah, speak about it.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. That’s what we’re going to do, of course.

Just to… yeah, I mean, articulation: like we were just discussing before starting, like, “Could you introduce yourself?” And it’s such, like, that’s just one of those things as well. It’s another opportunity or moment of, “Okay, how do I articulate who I am? What am I doing?”

And it’s so interesting that you say: within the research that you started, what was it, nine years? No, seven years ago. Yeah. You’ve been here nine years. So it was two years after you arrived, and you’re arriving in a new context and trying to articulate your practice within that context, and then looking for places where you can practice that articulation.

It’s so interesting, and still we’re continuing to do it, right? We find these hook words, which is so beautiful: resistance and resonance. And these different ways as well, like workshops, meeting people, and here, a podcast, to do those things. But it’s like an unfinished project all the time.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah.

PETER:

That we just keep revisiting. Yeah.

And with that in mind, what are we going to visit today?

Sara Ruddock:

What are we going to visit? We will… I will invite you into some experiments. Mm hmm.

And I have, yeah, some different kind of bits of practice or activities that I find, I’m interested in how they might open up my sensitivity and attention to my listening. Yeah.

So we will do a backwards practice.

PETER:

Uh huh.

Sara Ruddock:

It’s walking backwards. We probably do that for about 15 minutes. It’s at least 15 minutes, we need to do it. And that is also a listening practice. Yeah. It’s this kind of listening whilst moving through space backwards. Mm hmm.

Do you want me to describe it a bit more, or is that something that we do later?

PETER:

No, you can describe as much as you can now. It’s nice for the listeners, of course, to then imagine what we will do when we pause.

But yeah, I think it’s quite well established. So we’re walking backwards, I assume, for 15 minutes. It’s quite a long time in this studio, I suppose we’ll turn around and come back…

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah. I mean, you need to find pathways through the space, and the good thing is there’s just two of us here in the studio, and it’s quite spacious. And we will just keep walking backwards.

So of course we need to have, you know, we will be two people, two bodies, moving in the space. You can slow down and speed up as you want to.

When I’m walking, there’s a natural rhythm. And what I’m curious about in this practice, why I like it, is because it’s being with several different things at the same time, and it’s helping me to not be fixed on a singular thing.

So it already is: if I’m walking backwards and I know that that is, like, the simplest sort of task that I’m doing, and I need to just navigate the space walking backwards, then I have the freedom to go at whatever tempo I want to, with whatever rhythm. There’s already a rhythm.

That’s like, I will work with the rhythm. So I don’t have to think about creating another rhythm.

So that’s something interesting about being with the rhythm for me, and how we can listen through rhythm. But I don’t have to go looking for it. No.

And that is, like quoting Deborah, and also because I’ve worked with Deborah Hay and performed and adapted one of her solos, Market (2009 or 2010), in Stockholm. Working with her practice was really quite, it felt almost like revolutionary in a way for me, in how I practice as a performer generally, and how I tend to listening, or attention giving, how I practice attention giving, and how I work with perception as the material, as Deborah speaks of: the perception as the material for a choreography and performance.

And if I’m already walking backwards, and there is going to be a rhythm because I’m going to take step after step, but there’s already so much information there. I can play with nuances and subtleties of: what is that rhythm? How is it changing?

There’s always going to be the rhythm of my breath. It’s always with me.

PETER:

Yes.

Sara Ruddock:

And that’s something that is very present when I’m walking backwards, also for a long time.

And also because I’ve been doing different kinds of practices of “how do I listen through the body?” How do I listen through the skin, through the touch sense? How do I listen through my ears? How do I listen through vibration, like a really physical experience, a visual experience?

So when I listen to sound, or when I listen to my own voice vibrating inside of me, and through me, and around me, if I take away more of the auditory, can I sense more through my body?

PETER:

Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

If I also listen through the eyes, being touched through what I see. So I have all my senses with me.

And also, when I tend to practice a bit longer, I do like doing it for 20 minutes, but I will do it for 15, I think that’s enough for today, then it’s also kind of letting different kinds of listening move through me. Because I’m curious about the moments when we try to kind of perform listening. We try to get the listening right.

PETER:

Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

And when it feels like a failure, that I’m not doing the listening as you’re supposed to be doing. And I think that’s such a trap for us as dancers, performers, and practitioners: the aesthetics of listening.

PETER:

Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

“This is what it looks like to be listening in a certain way.” And then there might be all sorts of other things going on, but I’m trying to perform this listening, which is so weird. And so useful to go, you know: “No, what is really happening?”

I really want to be with what’s actually happening. I’m not trying to perform anything. I’m not trying to achieve a certain kind of listening. But can I let my listening move as it wants to?

It can be a delicious practice like that. Like: I’m moving with my listening as it wants to move. And the physical task I’m tending to is walking backwards and listening at the same time.

Then I can also let other dimensions of listening come in: what’s the present moment; the past coming in; future; imagination; fiction. How do I feed myself? Different states, different dimensions: what is coming in whilst I’m moving?

And also, the walking backwards practice doesn’t restrict the rest of my body. If I feel like my arms need to move in certain ways whilst I’m walking backwards, that’s totally possible. The rest of my body can do what it wants to do, and my voice can do what it wants to do.

My breath is gonna sound, it’s gonna move, it’s going to be present. If there are sounds on my breath, or sounds that want to come out, I’m not going to restrict that. That can be an invitation.

I can add layers, I can take away layers, I can use it as I want to. But the basic task is just: walk backwards in some way for 15 minutes and listen, and tend to give attention to what is happening, or what is coming through in my listening. So there’s a kind of listening journey along this…

PETER:

Yeah, I’m super excited. I was going to make my first question: “Okay, but what is listening?” And I feel like you’ve very well described the sort of palette through which that can live. It’s very clear.

So shall we go do that?

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah.

PETER:

And then we come back?

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah.

PETER:

Okay. Let’s do it.

Sara Ruddock:

Great.

PAUSE

Sara Ruddock:

We can talk for a little bit.

PETER:

Yeah,

Sara Ruddock:

I don’t know. That’s breaking the format of just talking at the end. But we could talk a little bit.

PETER:

We should always break the format.

Sara Ruddock:

Yes. Good. Resistance.

PETER:

Oh yeah, resistance, resonance.

So for me, at first, I was like, “Oh wow, my hearing is so frontal.” I was very aware of how hard it was to know where I was going. So this reorientation, and then focusing on something that we’re essentially doing all the time, was so crisp, so focused, in a way.

And there’s something about walking backwards which feels more like falling than, those famous texts, right, that walking is always falling. But backwards really feels like falling.

Maybe just to skip to the end of what came up for me: this thing of obstacles, or habits, like catching oneself when they’re falling, being confronted by them through this task.

Same with: my breath makes a sound, but I’m not sounding it. I’m often actively trying to be quiet. And it’s almost like an obstacle, because it’s something I’m always doing but unconsciously. It’s so in me. It’s so me.

And also just walking into walls, like literal obstacles in the room, I’m so used to avoiding that. And there’s something about listening that made me start to see the edges of those decisions that are motor… like they’re in my motor system. That was really cool.

Sara Ruddock:

Nice.

PETER:

How about you?

Sara Ruddock:

Oh, that was so nice doing it in the space together. I really like this sort of subtle…

PETER:

Yeah. Oh god, yes.

Sara Ruddock:

…just like a subtle conversation. You know, there is a conversation already, so we don’t have to make it a conversation. But just to be with that in the space together, it’s so rich. So I very much enjoy that.

And what I really like about this kind of backwards practice is that I’m going backwards and forwards at the same time.

PETER:

Yes.

Sara Ruddock:

You know, I feel like I’m going forwards because I’m moving somewhere, and it’s “forwards” in the sense of what I recognise as forwards, but it is backwards through the back of my body, and I get to do it at the same time.

And I get so much touch support through the back of my body, through the air I’m moving through, feeling the air rushing past my neck, feeling met by the air through the back of my body. It’s such a great experience, because, yeah, like you say: the frontal is what we’re working with all the time as dancers, movers. How can I balance out this dominant frontal approach?

It’s helping me to go, “Ah, I see my back.” And there’s something about how my seeing changes, because it doesn’t reach for places like I do when I walk forwards. When I move through the back, it’s like I’m leaving the space. It’s like the space is opening up in the backwards way.

So it’s more like I’m letting things come in that I’m leaving behind. The distance is increasing, and I’m catching things with my eyes as the distance increases. That’s a really interesting backwards way of doing it, and almost changes my way of being with.

PETER:

It almost, yeah. That connects to the obstacles, or habitual, things that are in me.

Doing it for so long is almost nauseating.

I feel a little bit dizzy. But there’s something in doing it that I recognize I could have always walked backwards, but I’ve just done forward so much, and then the whole thing becomes less about, it is about backwards. It’s about meeting actually those and listening to those choreographies that are internal to us that are already there, so to speak, and sort of like performing on us and exactly like the relationality is so strong and subtle and beautiful, and also codified ways of being together come up, like, you feel the second we get in rhythm and there’s a sense of flocking, like a compositional, like, woosh..

Sara Ruddock:

yes.

PETER:

We’re moving together and there’s something about the dynamic as well of falling backwards, like, it has this very release, like, woo, flow and push. And then I’m confronted with like, oh, is that habitual, or is that and then how am I composing actually? And it’s all there. It’s in me, the relationships that we have with one another, which is so interesting.

Sara Ruddock:

I’m also, like, really giving myself permission. It’s like, when I feel that rush of like, we’ve got, like, there’s like this vortex or something.. It’s starting to happen, like falling through this vortex together, and there was like sound and the rhythm was kind of locking in and it’s like, oh, this is a delicious sensation. It’s just like such a pleasure to be in it. I like, I gave myself permission to, like, enjoy this for a while. and then see like, okay, and totally acknowledging this, like, okay, this is what it is. And I recognized, you know, the how I’m drawn to it. And that’s what like the interests of resonance comes in for me. It’s like, what am I? Ah, like I was like this feels really nice. And it’s like how I can find openings of breaking that or not even like brakings maybe too strong a word, but something about the shift, like the tiniest shift to kind of open up the other potentials or the possibilities of like being with that. Yeah, that that’s like, I know like I’m in this, but I can also feel the potential for lots of other different kinds of movement, and I know that this is not, I’m not fixed or stuck in this by… [alarm] oh gosh. Maybe I set two alarms.

PETER:

Yeah, you may be snoozed, but that’s good. Maybe that means we should move on to the next. But me to add like there’s something of Yeah, it’s not breaking, but maybe it’s listening, actually.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah.

PETER:

There’s a quality of being with, like you say. Yeah. But just listening to those emergencies of like, oh, I have this skill almost or ability. And because it’s backwards and because it’s because it’s in a dance studio maybe and it’s between us to dancers, they seem those skills seem very luxurious. I’m like, my God, my body learned this. I’m so impressed that you remembered, even, that that it has that capacity to go back into those beautiful dance qualities and dynamics and the tensions and relationships. And then it makes me wonder, but could we even appreciate the forward as well? So then I start to listen to things that I’ve maybe, I’ve under appreciated as well. And there’s this constant, beautiful, opening. So definitely I agree, like, yeah, I didn’t mean to say, like, oh, it’s a habit, therefore, I’m trying to, like, negotiate, like, oh, should I go with the habit or should I go against the habit, break the habit? But more, like listening to what is there? Yeah. Yeah, it’s super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have anything else on this or should we move on? How do you feel?

Sara Ruddock:

What did it feel like for you to stop?

PETER:

It is intense. There was a very intense moment, because partly because of the dizziness as well, and then just sort of reorientating and feeling a little bit like it felt wrong to go forward. That was the strongest thing, and. And it’s so pleasurable. I also felt like.. Why are we stopping? Like, if this feels too short? Because also I was there’s a clock in the room, so I was sort of like, ” huh, I thought we said 15, but it felt like, from the clock, it felt like 30. And I was like, and then I was like, maybe you said 50″ And then I was really disappointed that it wasn’t 50. I was like, “Oh, I could have really done 50. So that it had a little that these things come out. Why, why? What were you thinking about?

Sara Ruddock:

No, because it’s like just strong experience, like lots of different sensations and kind of, I don’t know, I feel when I stop it’s like this a lot of a kind of tingling feet but mostly like the world is kind of rushing towards me. It’s this kind of being sucked into it’s like a weird, kind of sucking feeling through the body that it’s like, I don’t experience otherwise.

PETER:

Yeah. You are right, that visual preception

Sara Ruddock:

I do experience after doing this work And then I stop and it’s just like… It comes at me and I just I just sit in this sort of waterfall or something for a while until it’s sort of releases or fades.

PETER:

I mean, and that’s what you did. You went and sat down and because of my, you know, like, I’m sure you could as well, but like my initial thing is to like, break out of it and like, okay, okay, what’s now? And I host a little bit, ‘Cause there’s this weird shared hosting that we have in this type of podcast situation, but I recognize that, no, no, no. You’re taking a moment. Sara is taking a moment to sort of, yeah. And so that was really nice to be invited into that, non verbally, as well, actually, into a moment of like.. And then at some point, I was like, I feel like I need to write. And then you come over and say, “Let’s take a moment to write.” And I was like, I was already there. And then you said, oh, you’re such a good student, which I was like, yes, yes, I did it. No. Sorry, sorry.

Sara Ruddock:

That was a joke.

PETER:

Oh,

Sara Ruddock:

Oh, you know, in a very loving way, as in, it’s just, yeah, there’s also, like you said, listening to the reflections to like, you know.. No, but how are we do things and why, why it make sense to write something down? Why is it that comes up? It’s super interesting. Yeah, that’s true. Why is that there is. But there’s definitely a kind of have, bits of experience. It’s like, ah, I want to. There was something there that was interesting to me and I just want to note that. Yes. Yeah. down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.

PETER:

But I think there’s something very, because I still have that question from the beginning of like, you say, and we’re going to listen and then you describe listening and it has this breadth and complexity that you’re inviting to it. And still, I think even after doing it, I’m still in a little bit of a place of like, wait, what is listening? And in relationship to the cognitive, not the cognitive, sorry, the sort of motor structure of our being, of our physical experiencing of the world, like, what is listening in relationship to that, in fact? When it steps out of, like recognized pathways and it all meets with the pathways that we sort of have in us. There’s something so curious, it’s so fascinating and then exactly like, yeah, it need to write and then there’s even a there’s a listening to the writing that it all on tops

Sara Ruddock:

yeah, I also like listening to it’s like thrown an intuitive sense, like intuitive felt sense of like this is what makes sense in this moment and I don’t have to you know, like rationalize it or and how we work with that as dancers as well in our practices and kind of cultivate that intuitive felt sense of like, no, it feels wrong to go over here, but like, this is what it is, you know, and you don’t know quite why or it’s, you know, just giving yourself permission and the space to be able to do that in different ways and yeah, generally, I think it’s backwards practice for me. It’s like inviting that in. I, you know, I was really drawn to the wall for a while. I was brushing my hands against the wall, or like they were being brushed because I was walking backwards. It was a sense of like, oh, they have to be dragged along, kind of the wall. And then I had this really powerful sensation of my hands sort of like, really buzzing from the tactile kind of touch of the wall for a long time. Afterwards, it. Yeah, I mean, all these like little choices, or like what was sort of drawn to in the moment and there’s something about shifting that or the movement, how with this potential to move from the more kind of subconscious and through intuitive felt sense into like very kind of rational thoughts coming in and how we move through these different sort of layers as in our practices and how we can access them and appreciate them, you know, like for what they are and like how they can. There’s movement in between. We don’t need to be also stuck in one and it’d be interesting to, you’re not thinking by a hierarchy or kind of like a different expectations, like how we work, you know, yes, as dancers, in our practices, but also like, okay generally like in the world, in society, politically, was sort of, what’s the messaging around what is being valued enough and often, you know, the body and the intuitive felt senses like much lower down on like the hierarchical sort of. They sort of like, how do we advocate or kind of articulate these these knowings or experiences or trusting and intuitive felt sense and still also being able to question our choices..

PETER:

Yes exactly

Sara Ruddock:

So it’s this moment, like you say, it’s like, ah, I’m being drawn to this. So I’m like, I’m really resonating with this. It’s like, yeah, but why? Yeah, yeah. You know, I can think about, I can take time to think about why is that? And why is that so I like, I really enjoy this and why, and why does that come from and where is like the conditioning and background and history and like, ohmm, I’m I really sort of, I’m afraid a really resistant against something. And like, why is that? And why does that come from?

PETER:

Yes. yes yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

But that I really sort of use this resonance and resistance in like, as like valuable information. And I can look at that as like,. I, you know, it tells me something about. Also, I’m curious about you’re doing all these podcasts and asking people to kind of like share a bit of practice with me, and you do it. And, something about, like being told what to do or when it’s like, he’s the task, and we’re going to engage with it. and how you step into that with both resonance and resistance. It’s like, how do I find my own way? Yeah. How do I find a way that makes sense for me that it’s not me, just doing the thing, by actually finding a way to kind of like, I have agency and I have presence to kind of experience something within this frame, I need to make the frame work for me. And that kind of practice of resistance. Like that, I’m really curious about how that works.

PETER:

It’s really fun that you bring it up. It’s something that I probably don’t dwell on too much, but it’s true. And then it also, because it’s something I don’t dwell on too much, partly because I’m working. I’m like doing the podcast often. So my focus is there, just trying to get it done, but it connects to my like dance history of like, how do I relate as a dancer? Because I was thinking about it this morning and how, in a way, I’ve put myself in a very dancely role of I will come in I will dance within your proposal or practice or dancing or beside your dancing, and there’s something. very interesting for me in that because I’ve struggled as a dancer, because it’s sort of following the the choreographer has been always a little bit fraught, which is so silly to say, but I think it often has to do with it because I come with a lot of questions, a lot of resistance and a lot of, like, resonance maybe if I really borrow from you, but definitely resistance questions and, wow, why, why? And maybe there’s something in yeah, in this relationship where, like I said, like, I’m host and your host, we’re both hosting simultaneously. But there is, in that little pause where we go and we dance, there is a funny thing that sort of occurs, where I’ve gone from being the person taking care of the situation to all of a sudden, being the person trying to honor the other person’s position in that relationship. But maybe if I can. I don’t know if it connects. Now you’ve had me, like sort of gone on, a little biography, but maybe it connects ’cause when you were talking just now, I had to think of, like, there’s something really powerful about, like, you were talking about society, like, it relates to society. And I think not to be dance-centric, I really try to avoid this sort of sense, like because we’re talking about dancing and doing dance, therefore, dances is a lens through which we should all look at society. But everyone does stuff, you know? And I feel like that’s what we’re dealing with is the doing of things. On a real sort of fundamental level and exactly like, how do we rationalize and not, how do we go with intuitive felt sense? And at the same time, live within a sort of world which pushes us to rationalize these things. When ultimately, if we don’t engage with those two processes that happen, then people will just continue doing stuff physically, bodily, in the world, without investigating them. So it feels really essential then, like, actually what we’re doing is really important, because as as people dancing, you can’t rationalize everything. Like, as we’re walking, you just, it fails because we are an amalgamation of physically constructed things which have come through years and years of experience and having just done stuff. So there’s something really magical there. I don’t know if it relates back to the question you had for yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, no, I think it really brings up, like a yeah, questions around, like, or, you know, feeling that tending to engaging in some of these practices or listening in different ways or becoming aware of giving attention to my listening in different ways. The what, you know, that it might hold potential for, you know, expanding the way I listen.

PETER:

Yes.

Sara Ruddock:

Or being able to stay with sticky stuff for a bit longer or like unknowns as we, you know, whatever that might mean, you know, but that is. Yeah. Yeah. I’m curious about that, you know, the expansive, potential for resonance, the expansive potential for listening, and how these practices can change us or open up or enable, just like softening or breaking or making the listening a little bit more porous, so that I can open it.

PETER:

Yeah.. It’s so inclusive. What’s still more that you wanted to try? Should we jump into something?

Sara Ruddock:

Let’s do something for like 10 minutes.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, let’s do it. Cool.

Sara Ruddock:

Okay, um Yeah, we can we do the. We can either call it. the resonator. Mm hmm. Or we can call it the friendly echo. Okay. And, depends on what. Or you can call it lots of different things.. Yes. resonator sounds like, you know, just think of the terminators.. But it makes me smile. So it’s good. It’s useful because it makes me smile and feels less precious about these things and it really helps. So, shall I describe it?

PETER:

Yes, please. Please.

Sara Ruddock:

Let me try. We’re going to start. We’re also like a simple kind of physical task, but our starting shoulder to shoulder. It’s just. Then like invite things that’s like a bit of physical touch. That’s like, there’s a touch sense that is like going through the kind of the practice. And they can change. It doesn’t have to be kind of shoulder to shoulder the whole time, but it’s, it can, you know, the kind of moving from, like from the shoulder to the back to the shoulder to the arm, it’s like, okay, that’s like a frame that we can move within. Whilst we’re doing other things. So it’s also like, just helping to to activate a touch sense, the physical, kinesthetic sense in a very clear, direct way. We’re going to take turns. to. I’m going to invite you to sound, as in, like, voice, vocalize some sound.

PETER:

Okay.

Sara Ruddock:

And it can be any kind of sound, but you also don’t need to feel like you have to like perform in a certain way, or like fill the space with a certain kind of sound, but it’s more like an utterance, you know, like We’ve been moving with the breath and moving like in these backwards practices. There’s been like an activation or like, okay, there’s like breath and like vocalized sensation of like a breath or there’s, there’s like sound coming out of me. and hopefully feel like I’m a bit more connected to like this, like inside that comes out. We’ve activated that. And so if I kind of invite that again, it’s like, okay, I can like that can be like sound coming out, that I want to kind of taste.. And I’m kind of tasting these sounds out in this space, you know, that’s like, or it’s going to be around me because we’re close, it can be, you know, it can be quite quiet. But I’m going to be your friendly echo.

PETER:

Okay.

Sara Ruddock:

Like, whatever sound you’re making, I’m going to like sound, like taste it. Yes, okay. I’m going to be your echo. Yeah. Like your resonator. Yeah. So if you make a sound, I’m going to, yeah, try it out or taste it or like feel what f does it feel like for me. And I might repeat it again. It’s like there’s no end to like when the echo stops. It’s like it can be an endless echo, but, you know,’s some sort of like conversation in that you can make another sound or there’s another utterance coming out and I will taste it and there was a means that is kind of, I’m offering for your sound to exist in the space for a bit longer. There’s like a lingering sense of I’m going to make it sound for longer. Nice. Well, and you can listen to it. You don’t have to sound. It’s like, okay, I can listen back to it. And I don’t have to copy your sound. So the task is not to copy. Like, I don’t have to make it as close as, you know, sound exactly, like your sound. But the way that it’s also part of the practice that, you know, the sound changes as it moves through my body in my voice. So there’s something about the transformation of sound or how echoes being transformed when it bounces off a surface.

PETER:

Yes

Sara Ruddock:

You know, or like how it meets the surface and come out in the space again.. You know, it’s affected by, you, the quality of that. surface.. So the quality of of the sound coming out through me in the kind of like,, how that sounds. I will play with that and kind of but just a kind of the friendly part is like I’m just holding space for you to hear a bit of so of your sound, for a little bit longer. But it exists. Like there’s a lering aspect to your sound. And then there would be another sound coming out and then, you know, place that try that and you know, let it linger a bit.

PETER:

Okay, that sounds good.

Sara Ruddock:

That’s the invitation. And then after a while, so maybe we take five minutes or something and then and then. or maybe just a few minutes. And then we we can swap. Yes. And then I’ll make sound.

PETER:

And we’re doing this all back to back or was it shoulder shoulder once?

Sara Ruddock:

If we start shoulder to shoulder then it’s like, okay, that’s like. So there’s a back connection. space. There’s like some kind of conctionation.. It doesn’t mean, you know, so we can move through the space as we want to. We can move, you know, up and down and around and sit down or whatever. But it’s like just staying like reactivating in just another sense. Also. So there’s like outside touch inside touch.

PETER:

Yeah,

Sara Ruddock:

through the voice. Something, something that is just hmm.. layering and being in conversation and a bit more. Yeah. Kind of lay Yeah. Yeah. lay it way.

PETER:

No, it sounds great.. Resonance and resonator or the. Friendly echo.

Sara Ruddock:

Friendly echo

PETER:

Yeah. Nice. Let’s do it.

Sara Ruddock:

Okay, let’s do it.

PETER:

Yeah.

PAUSE

PETER:

Yeah, so, yeah, it was a little taste.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah.

PETER:

That’s what you were saying.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah..

PETER:

Yeah, it’s, uh.. It’s quite full, quite rich, as a place. And is this something you’ve done before as well, or? Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

Mm hmm. I think when you have a bit longer time with it and also like the.. setting it up. Yeah, yeah, of course. So that really there can be, you know, like the, yes, the sounding, but the listening is like the focus. Yeah. As in like, yeah, by me sounding, it’s also like a simultaneous listening. So it’s like, as I’m making the sound, as I, you know, if I do the practice for longer, then it’s not so much about producing the sound, but it’s I’m listening to the sound, this is coming, kind of being formed in my throat, in my mouth, in the way, the kind of enters just the outside space, how it enters my ears, how I feel it, like through the, and if I I’ve been practicing with that more before I could have worked together with another person, then it’s like, okay, I’m like tasting the sound, feeling the sound through the body and like, through the vibration and then the sound is being offered back to me by this other person.

PETER:

Yes, yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

You know, there’s something about and you can. Yeah, when you do it for longer, I experience, you go kind of past the kind of play of the sounds themselves, but more into like the what it’s to come.

PETER:

We were there a little bit.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, yeah.

PETER:

I mean, but. And also you added this, at least as how I understood it. Like, we passed over and and then I was echoing you and then we sort of did a simultaneous echoing of whatever is resonating in. And what was really interesting was I was starting to get moments where exactly, I think what you were describing of you no longer are going places, because there’s really something in making sounds and making different sounds that you go to like, and now I’m going to work with my diaphragm or now I’m going to work with my nose or. But then staying in there or like with just the smacking of the lip sort of sounds and at the end we were really with just the breath almost. And it was hard, actually, I was finding it hard to distinguish. What were sounds that we were making and sounds that were the room and this this sort of weirdness or even our bodies, right? Like what am I am I making, what is and what is not sort of, yeah, blends together? So I can really imagine, yeah, with more time and like deepening into this sort of practice. I love that place.

Sara Ruddock:

I love that place of the blurring, like you’t name it. It’s like when I, like I can barely, I like the edges of listening. It’s like I can barely hear something. I’m not sure that if it’s like where the sound is, you know, if it’s like the sound from me or you together, there’s something about being immersed in the sound or when you just barely hear it because it’s so low, the volume or like you said, you know, where is it coming from? Is it like the outside sort of murmurings of like the fan or vibrations and things, you know other other sound sources. And it’s something that I also I sing with F choir, which is a London based choir, led by Jenny Moore, who is the artistic director. And I’ll be with them for four years. And there’s something about the singing practices and singing with other people, are kind of, let’s call it chiring. Yeah. that is being immersed in the sound in the in the vibration, in the way that I no longer, I can’t distinguish my own voice from like the other person, you know, like other people’s voices and like we’re in the vibration together and I can feel that I’m producing sound. Like I know I’m making sound, but my voice doesn’t stand out in the field of vibration. and there’s something about that that I, you know, I’m curious about in this kind of resonator friendly echo practice. It’s like that’s where I can both kind of sound the sound and hear the sound afterwards, but as with sounding starting to sound at the same time, that it’s like the blending of their vibration is both like a very, like it’s inside of my body and it’s outside of my body with my sound, and it’s your sound, and I can feel it also coming in, like how sound enters my body’s vibration. It’s not just through my ear and the ear canal, but it’s like really through the skin and through my body, through the bones. and that whole range of you can really feel like a vibration in your like really bass sounds and bass frequencies and like really heavy kind of bass beats and you can like feel it in a very visceral way. Both are kind of pounding beats, but also like a vibrational, visceral vibration in the body. And the voice is so cool, that I find a way that it’s kind of how he works with the vocal cords and like all the vocal faults in the body and the air and coming out of the to kind of how produced a sound and yeah, being in that vibration. And it’s like a microcosm of the, it’s like with just two people it’s like we’re in this little vibrational space together and it’s an interesting space to listen to and listening to the the edges of when a sound ends.. I think Pauline Oliveros’ is American composer created the deep listening practice, you know, ask questions about like, you know, what is the edge? Like when was the edge of the sound or when does the sound end you know exactly, yeah. Because it’s also like in my memory. Yeah, yeah. So it’s also like in my memory, in my imagination, in my felt sense, it’s like, there’s like a lingering sense of the sound, even though I can’t the sound is not ringing or vibrating like in the air. still, but it’s like vibrating in me in the kind of immediate kind of aftermath of feeling.

PETER:

I actually noticed that with the first dance that we did of Walking Backwards, like I was immediately struck by, I am seeing the past, which is kind of what you were describing, probably with the sort of moving, and then when we stop the sort of everything moving towards, which had been going away, and sort of this change of movement. But because we’re listening and we’re walking backwards, I was very aware like the sounds have happened. There’s something about that they have happened. And one way or another, and especially because you bring up the deep listening practice and all her work, it begs the question of, is listening a verb? Is it a doing word? Like, do we do it? I know it sounds stupid, but like, there’s something in the activity and exactly what you’re describing now about being in the choir of, are we making sounds? Like, is there a creative act to listening? And if so, what where does it exist? Because it’s of course, counerintuitive. Like, there’s a sense like, well, you’re not creating anything by listening. It’s it’s a passive thing, you know, almost. And also, it’s not something you can’t you cannot do as well. We can’t close our ears like birds can. Like we don’t have ear lids. We are always listening. So and yet, I think there is. It’s obvious, there is a space of creativity, making, of of art, maybe. I’m struggling for words.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, but I’m really interested in this kind of creative aspect of listening, like the same, because the way Pauline Oliveros describes it, it’s like, yeah, hearing is like a physiological thing. If you hearing is available to you, you know, as a person, it’s through your auditor system, hearing can also be like a vibrational sense if you’ a deaf person then, you know, you can hear in different ways, but if it’s through the auditory system that you are able to perceive, you know, sound, then hearing is happening, that is a physiological thing, but listening is something that I can direct, and I can be creative with, because listening is giving attention to something. And there’s something about the quality of like how… the connotations around listening, that is helpful, I think for the sense of listening through the body and how I give attention. It’s like at a certain quality kind of to listen to sound. Yeah, yeah. And it’s like I can practice that through the body. But also that I can you know, thinking about, like you’re in a you know, in a busy kind of crowded space, maybe in in a bar or a club or like that’s like an hour, like a social like a lot of a lot of people talking and you can really direct your listening to the one person you’re speaking with. But while it’s super loud around you, that’s an amazing ability, skill to be able to go, like, I’m zoning in, honing in on just your sound, your sound. And I can like direct my listening.. Which means that I can I can become aware of my listening. I can have agency through my listening. I can have the capacity to change my listening. I don’t have to be stuck in a pattern of listening. I can notice my listening habits. I can notice my listening patterns, what I’m drawn to, what I’m listening to, what I’m not listening to. When I stop listening, when I start thinking about, you know something else, instead of actually listening to what a person is saying or what the conditions are or what the environment is like, what is the situatedness of like this present moment? Can I listen to that or am I busy with other things? You know, why am I listening to that are thus, I feel like, you, from engaging in deep listening practices, is really I think the empowering sense of like I can listen, yeah, like Pauline says, like it can be like a focal listening. I can listen to detail. I can send my listening. It’s like, ooh, that particular sound, like either like there’s a soundcape or like sounds that happen, like environmental sounds, like in the space that I’m in, or like in music, I can direct my listening to just one instrument, one voice, one sound that is far away, or that is close. I can listen to my breath. Yeah. Or I can choose not to listen to my breath and I listen to the clock over there. And then I can’t hear my breath. Yeah. Because my attention is over there. And that’s super interesting. Or like a Pauline says, you can listen to like the global, you can listen to try and listen to like everything at once.

PETER:

Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

And the range in between of like, listen to several different things. Can like, you know, at the same time. It’s, like a really cool experiment. Like I’ve listened to these three things. I listen to these three things together. Yeah. I’m directing it into one place. And then being creative about that. And yeah, Rajni Shah, who is a performer, and kind of performer philosophy, a scholar, researcher, and works a lot with listening is, yeah, I was supposing the question of like, what what what if I can be changed by my listening or what does it take to be changed by my listening? There’s a something in that. It’s like, okay, I’m listening. But what does it take to be changed by my listening? As in like being transformed by it or like open up or something shifts within me? Because I listen to what another person says or what the situation is or like how I give attention. It’s actually, it’s, you know, work and it’s like a choice and there’s agency in like how I can go, oh, you know, there’s space to be like the openness for that, like the the availability in me in not. And there’s something there where the quality of resonance, the resonance is not about kind of the direct self- mirroring or the self-reflection of like that is just confirming my kind of strongest sort of, I don’t know, ideas or beliefs or preferences or something about, oh, I don’t recognize this but if I stay with it a bit longer, I stay with it and I listen to it and I try and stay open to it, it might change or open or shift something in me so that I can, you know, relate to the situation or person or whatever it is in a different way. So that’s like the, yeah, it’s definitely creative. Listening is definitely a creative practice. What has the potential to be a creative practice.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s nice to be reminded of the hearing and listening distinction that you can make. It’s really powerful. And I mean, and you’re working within a dance context, you’re working within a dance knowledge as well. And of course, then there’s questions of what is listening in relationship to dance? And I think what’s really interesting is, I think it really presents quite an interesting consideration or like a definition of dance, maybe, where you were speaking earlier a bit about like listening, being interested in listening as a performative act. Like, how do we? Or what changes in that performativity of listening, of like directing our attention, as you say, and there’s something in the performing of dance or even the act of dancing where you perform an awareness or a focus or an attention towards some conditions of the bodily experience, which you don’t get elsewhere and it’s not about production or it doesn’t have to this part of dancing, this shift of a awareness, isn’t solely about production. It’s not about producing a sound, like to be heard or to be to be listened to, or producing a movement to be a certain way. It It’s a shift of understanding those bodily conditions and so on. It’s really fascinating, like something about. Because dance isquite embarrassing as like a task, right?

Sara Ruddock:

In what way?

PETER:

In way. In the way of we allow ourselves to do very strange things. And when it’s performative dance, we allow ourselves to do strange things in front of other people. I mean, even social dance, if we cast aside that as nonformative, then we’re still doing a strange activity physically, and there can be a sort of weirdness an embarrassment. It’s sort of comes to that. But the sort of brilliance that dancers bring often is this confidence to do it regardless of any embarrassment that sort of might exist in that social committing to being attentive to a physicality or a way of being in front of other people, which you don’t allow in other situations. And yeah, it’s interesting that you’ve honed in on listening, maybe as a methodology to maybe touch on that quality that exists in dance somehow..

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, no, I think it’s, yeah, it’s interesting what you’re saying. I definitely think that a kind of training, the listening capacities, you know, my listening capacities as downstairs and like really listening through the body that is like, it’s never also just through my ears, you know, like listening is the practice of attention giving to me for me. And there’s so much about listening through touch that really kind of helps us in being touched by sound, being touched by the experience, being touched by them. The sensory information that I’m with as a dancer, and performer and with other people, other performers, and what it’s like to be listening, like with the audience, if you’re in a kind of performance context. What is it to listen to the situation, the atmosphere, like the environment that I’m in? What is it that I’m giving my attention to? What am I listening to? What are the filters that I’m coming with? What is like the performative ask or something as a dancer like, well, what is the, if I’m the choreographer myself or working with someone else’s vision and we’ collaborating on things, it’s like, what is the filter that we’re listening through? So these filters are also super interesting. I find as a performer. What is it? What’s this sort of? The practice that we’re listening through, as a filter and how that sort of changes the way that I access my body and relationality in my body, the way I’m being with other people and myself in this qualities or like the filters of this practice, the tasks that I’m in, what’s the universe, that we have created, that we’re inviting the audience into experiencing? And when I hone those, you listening qualities, capacities, so that I’m able to access them differently then I’m inviting to different experiences, you know, like an audience seem to. Okay, so this is like the kind of, and as we know the kind of kesthetic empathic capacity of human beings as we see and recognize movement equality, through mirror neurons, and the whole kind of cognitive neurological system of our bodies and how we kind of feel through another person’s body by seeing it visually. And also by touch, of course, by in a dance performance context, it’s like this is a visual mating point. It’s like that’s the transmission that were with the energy, how we can feel the energy and the space in the dancing moment. But there’s something in that’s like, okay, we train our listening capacities, we train our attention giving, so that we can also invite into different kinds of listening. Like we invite the audience into different kinds of listening. Yes. It’s like, what is the quality of this kind of listening? Yeah. Or what is the. So it’s encouraging. I think it’s the potential to encourage like different different ways of listening. Yeah. Then you how you guide and direct and invite into a space where you’re listening that. You direct the attention to what we’re listening to and the filter that we’re listening through and the kind of space for listening, how we set it up.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

So there’re also like performers, both as kind of, yeah, it’s audience, you know, I practice listening. And it’s and we can, yeah. I performmers in like invited different kinds of experience of this.

PETER:

Yes. I feel like, as as an audience member, because exactly as you say, like immediately, if you think about listening as an activity, the audience are the ones that are sort of central. Like, very quick to go there, but I feel like the more I’ve danced, the more I’ve investigated and and put time into these kinds of practices and this type of work, as a dancer, I have I’ve improved my ability to be an audience, and it is this sort of capacity to listen. And also you do when speaking in these terms using filters as a way lenses through which to articulate understanding and perception and those mirror neurons, whatever’s going on when we are in contact with dance, it is such a similar world to music, which makes so much sense in a way. Why dance some music I’ve had this sort of like long history, because there is a there’s a very clear relationship if you think through the lens of listening as an approach to articulating one’s understanding of what dance can do and be and yeah, it’s fascinating. It’s so cool.

Sara Ruddock:

Yeah, it’s interesting that it kind of you, how the visual, the visual listening.

PETER:

Yeah.

Sara Ruddock:

How I practice the visual listening as a dancer and as an audience member.And like,

yeah. Because I guess the simonym would be like seeing, watching, but

Sara Ruddock:

Yes, yeah,

PETER:

yeah. Looking. But I think there’s something there’s something about listening that is embodied. Yeah. Very quickly. Especially when you hear music, you hear sound, it feels like there’s less filter, whereas with dancing, but it exists. There’s science, right, to back up that when we watch something, our neurons fire, as if we are learning the dance in our own bodies, that empathetic nervous system that we have. We should bring it to a bow.

Sara Ruddock:

Let’s make a bow. What’s the color of the ribbon?

PETER:

Is there anything you wanted to say or like, this was really pleasurable? We didn’t get into the details of what came up in our last little dance, but there was so many great things, so many great images and qualities, and the same with the walking backwards. But this has been such a pleasure. Is there.

Sara Ruddock:

I agree. Yeah, do you have it’s it’s been really fun.

PETER:

And if people do find it and listen to us dancing and talking and thinking, aloud and want to get in touch with you and your work. How would they do?

Sara Ruddock:

Yes. Well, you can make contact via my website, Sarah Ruddock.com. At the moment, I’m in the thick of writing at my thesis for the PhD research, so I’m not giving a lot of workshops outside of our teaching here at at Trinity to Laban and at the moment. But I will.

PETER:

Yes.

Sara Ruddock:

come back to sharing more practice, I will come back to performing and making work in a different, in a different way. But yeah, I’m in London.

PETER:

Yeah, getting in touch if you’re interested. So excited to see where this research and work, where it goes and how it continues. Yeah, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Sara Ruddock:

this is been great. Thank you so much for inviting me.

PETER:

No, thank you for bringing us here. This was great. All right, thank you.

Sara Ruddock:

Thank you.

1. A Choreographer’s Handbook By Jonathan Burrows – https://www.routledge.com/A-Choreographers-Handbook/Burrows/p/book/9781032629018
2. Chrysa Parkinson – https://www.uniarts.se/english/people/co-workers/chrysa-parkinson/
3. Bojana Cvejić – https://khio.no/en/staff/bojana-cvejic
4. Guido Orgs – https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/4847-guido-orgs
5. Matteo Fargion – https://burrowsfargion.com/
6. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are By Alva Noë – https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691188812/the-entanglement
7. William Forsythe – https://www.williamforsythe.com/biography.html
8. Lisa Nelson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nelson
9. Tim Ingold – https://www.timingold.com/
10. Both Sitting Duet (2002) by Burrows and Fargion – https://vimeo.com/361765765
11. The Unison Piece (2025) by Burrows and Fargion – https://vimeo.com/1103206051
12. Francesca Fargion – https://francescafargion.co.uk/
13. Mette Edvardsen – https://www.metteedvardsen.be/bio.html
14. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, by Simon Critchley – https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2002-infinitely-demanding
15. The Tyranny of Structurelessness, by Jo Freeman aka Joreen – https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
16. Morris dancing – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance
17. Jigs Workshop 2025, Sutton Bonington – https://themorrisring.org/event/2025/jan/jigs-instructional-2025
18. The Ancient English Morris Dance, By Michael Heaney – https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781803273860
19. Cecil Sharp – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp
20. Fee Lock – https://www.morrisfed.org.uk/resources/videos/hastings-jack-in-the-green/500-word-summary/#
21. The Artist is Present (2009) by Marina Abramović – https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3133
22. Rambert School – https://www.rambertschool.org.uk/
23. Burrows keynote address, Postdance Conference, MDT Stockholm (2015) – https://vimeo.com/391825806
24. Trisha Brown – https://trishabrowncompany.org/
25. Michael Jackson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson
26. Rewriting and Science Fiction (2021) by Burrows and Fargion – https://vimeo.com/689350293
27. Les Dawson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Dawson
28. Norman Morrice – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Morrice
29. Rambert Dance Company – https://rambert.org.uk/
30. The Royal Ballet – https://www.rbo.org.uk/about/the-royal-ballet
31. Kenneth MacMillan – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_MacMillan
32. Rosemary Butcher – https://rosemarybutcher.com/
33. Scott deLahunta – https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/persons/scott-delahunta/
34. Claire Godsmark, dancer and performer for Lisa Vereertbrugghen and Claire Croizé.
35. Dr ‘Funmi Adewole Elliott – https://www.funmiadewoleelliott.com/
36. Jonzi D – https://www.sadlerswells.com/about-us/supporting-artists/associate-artists/jonzi-d/
37. Robert Hylton – https://www.roberthylton.info/

PETER:

So, hello. Today we are here, we are dancing with Jonathan Burrows. It’s such a pleasure. I think you’re a huge influence on myself in my career, but I think equally you’re just a huge influence on dance in general.

I have known of your work for a long time. As I was just saying, I’ve been working very much with your Choreographer’s Handbook, almost as a textbook in class. I’ve seen your works numerous times, and I feel very privileged to be here, so thank you for having me.

And for anyone who maybe doesn’t know who you are, or where you are at the moment: how do you introduce yourself today, for this moment?

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, I would normally say… First of all, thank you for coming down, and thank you for those kind words.

I would immediately want to clarify that the kinds of ideas that are shared in A Choreographer’s Handbook, and in the teaching that I do, are all collective. They all have collective origin. I like contemporary dance because of its generosity. And whilst I do try to credit all these ideas that I’m using, that have come from another artist, at the same time I like the fluidity of sharing ideas that seems to be a very present part of contemporary dance practice.

Yeah, I would – I do – identify as a choreographer, but I should add to that that I’m in a phase at the moment where I’m caught between two feelings about choreography.

The first is that I still really like doing it. I get a huge amount of pleasure and focus and cognitive and imaginative exercise from my practice of choreographing. But at the same time, I’m slowly arriving at a position where I suspect that everybody who dances is already choreographing.

And I was talking to Chrysa Parkinson about this recently, just a couple of weeks ago, and she quite rightly cautioned me not to use that statement to accidentally erase the identity of the person who is a dancer – not to say, “Therefore you are also and automatically a choreographer,” because that would be to lose aspects of practice which belong to the dancer herself.

And so I’ve been thinking about that since Chrysa said it. But my reason for – I think when I say “everybody who dances is already choreographing,” I’m aware that the job description “choreographer” remains. I don’t think that will go away. But my arrival at that concept has been through trying to examine what are the things that I feel are tangible and pleasurable when I choreograph, and then to try to observe whether that’s true for other people, and where it’s true and how it’s true.

So I’ve been working for two years with the Serbian dramaturg and theorist Bojana Cvejić on that idea, and we’ve also invited a collaboration with the neuroscientist Guido Orgs who, interestingly enough, is himself a trained dancer, though he now researches as a neuroscientist at University College London. And he has a similar sense that dancing is choreographing – the way that he would put it, I think, is that the same parts of the body–mind are active in both activities.

PETER:

I mean, it’s extremely interesting, of course, with Chrysa’s work – with her advocacy of the dancer as author and what is their material – because arguably that’s a similar argument to what you’re making.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yes, but I agree with her that you have to be careful not to accidentally remove the importance of the role of the person who identifies as a dancer.

I think also my position has come about by realising more recently that, actually, all the work that I’ve done with the composer Matteo Fargion is co-authored. We may, at various times, take upon ourselves undiscussed roles, depending on what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, but nevertheless, the longer we’ve worked, the more we’ve felt able to accept a position of co-authorship.

And so I suppose what I’m saying is that I’m not very often in a situation where I could say, “I am the job description ‘choreographer’.” In fact, I’ve pretty much actively avoided it.

PETER:

Yeah.

Jonathan Burrows:

I’ve never felt very comfortable with that.

PETER:

So maybe I can ask – we’re already speaking about what you’re busy with, I get the sense – so maybe I can ask: what do you feel you are doing? Because you spoke about feeling as well, which is such a – I think in dance – such an interesting place, maybe, or wording or direction.

So what do you feel when you’re choreographing? What is that, so to speak, in relation to this – I don’t want to say “crisis” of identity – but this pondering around identity?

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, I think it’s complicated to land upon what that sense of feeling is. But I would borrow the term “entanglement” in the way that the philosopher Alva Noë uses it in his most recent book The Entanglement.

In that book he has a chapter specifically on dance, which is an area that he’s been working within, actually, for many years, with the choreographer William Forsythe, with Lisa Nelson, and so forth. And there Alva Noë uses the idea of entanglement to describe the ways in which dancing is always entangled with ideas, images, preconceptions about “the choreographic”; and the choreographic is always entangled with what we might describe as the intuitive or spontaneous aspects of dancing.

For me, the pleasure is exactly in that interplay between what my body understands physically in an intuitive sense and what my body understands somehow, or experiences cognitively, in terms of memory and anticipation – so the experience of time while dancing: what do I remember happened before, and what do I anticipate could happen next?

And so I don’t know if I’m right, and I would be very hesitant to share this, but I’m going to risk it because maybe it provokes somebody to have a clearer impression. I have an idea that when I watch a dance performance – whatever the subject, emotional field, atmosphere, tone, cultural specificity might be – I’m always engaged in a playful awareness of my own sense of time.

PETER:

Yeah. As the – well, not the spectator, but…

Jonathan Burrows:

As a spectator. I mean, it’s there obviously when I do it as well, but there’s something deeply human about that.

And of course other art forms do it: film, music, and so forth – I mean, possibly even writing. But there’s something about dance, because it also contains this very evident spatial awareness, that I think heightens the sense of triggering my own perception of myself in time.

Or, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold would put it – to very loosely paraphrase – my body “in and through the world, with the world, in time”.

PETER:

Yeah, because a lot of your work – that’s unfair, but a lot of your work that I’ve seen – deals with time quite centrally, as a texture or as a place, maybe. You’re very rarely using large spatial compositions. It’s usually at a desk or on a chair.

And the rhythm and the timing, the repetition, the way that it moves my – or the audience’s – attention through time, I guess, is somehow fascinating. Because I would sort of echo a sense of, when I’m watching dance, there’s a quality of thinking, ironically…

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah.

PETER:

…that is sort of encouraged, or almost provides this space of drift in the mind.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, but in the body as well.

PETER:

Yes.

Jonathan Burrows:

It’s a kind of embodied cognition. I don’t know if that exists as a term within cognitive science, but…

Whether I would have done that had I not met a composer who is an artist that I just resonated with immediately – we started working together immediately – I don’t know. But obviously I’m going to work with time if I work with a composer and we’re both creating and performing together.

I mean, I can perfectly see that there are… I would never recommend the way we work to anybody else. It’s not a methodology. It’s just what we’re able to do because of who we are, who we are in relation to each other, and the ways that we relate.

And working at a table is also partly just a financial consideration. We’ve rarely been able to afford studios for long periods of time. We work slowly, somehow, when we work, so we took to working at tables. It’s extremely limiting and that is also frustrating.

But I’m now gradually getting to a point where I think there’s something also interesting about the comparative work over the years, all within a tightly enclosed space of performance – but I would hope that imaginatively it’s not tightly enclosed. In fact, the opposite might be true.

And I’m also getting much older, so it’s much more comfortable for me to sit on a chair.

PETER:

You said “slow” there – when you work together, you’re slow. What do you mean by that, if I might prod you there?

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, I mean, the first duet that Matteo and I made – Both Sitting Duet, which was in 2002 – took us six months.

And over the years we’ve been getting slower, so that the piece that we premiered in May this year in Oslo, Zagreb and Stuttgart took us two years to make. I mean, that was partly because it was a difficult project – we ran into difficulties, which were brilliant difficulties. I mean, now I really like them, but if we hadn’t managed to come out the other end of the difficulties, I would have been more depressed than I am.

PETER:

Yeah.

This – I just made a piece for babies, so people under the age of 18 months.

Jonathan Burrows:

Nice.

PETER:

One of the things that I found really interesting and captivating was the sort of slowness, or perhaps even the quality of being with them, regardless of knowing what they are getting, what they are dealing with, or what’s truly their culture, so to speak.

It’s a beautiful continuous work that one had to do. We toured for the whole spring, so we had something like 30 performances and they were three hours long, so the babies and guardians could come in and out and do it at their own pace.

But interestingly, they would stay for quite a long time. We would have some who would stay for an hour and a half, seemingly actively focused, and we did a very slow performance. We had to really resist moving towards children’s “something to keep the attention constantly”, and instead go with something slow.

I feel as though, by allowing time, giving it a chance and staying with the children, their pace, their focus and those things, it’s somehow very generous. There’s a sort of…

And it reminds me of some of the qualities in the way you speak, the way you articulate your thoughts and your work. There’s this openness which I think is provided by the questions, often. I don’t want to say you contradict yourself – but you pull into the fold ambiguity, which allows us to commit almost and stay there a little bit longer.

Because the guardians that were really problematic were the ones who didn’t give it a chance. They would deem that it wasn’t entertaining enough for their child and leave before they recognised, “No, actually, there’s a tempo here, there’s something here that the children could engage in.”

Jonathan Burrows:

I mean, I should say we don’t perform slowly. We perform really quickly.

PETER:

No, it’s true.

Jonathan Burrows:

It’s just that the arrival at the performances is slow. And we do make versions of pieces, or pieces that nobody sees, because they don’t arrive at the place of recognition, or something.

The questions thing is just: I do actually remain genuinely interested in watching people dance and choreograph. I mean, I’ve become skeptical sometimes about the cultural machine of contemporary dance, mainly to do with the claims it constantly – I think it’s required to – make for itself, which seem out of proportion sometimes to the subtlety of the interaction that you can have as a participant or a spectator.

And the ambiguity, as you say – it’s often not an experience that you can pin down or say exactly what happens. And, I mean, of course some people find that frustrating. They would prefer a strong narrative or whatever. I don’t. I feel really happy in that slightly ambiguous space.

PETER:

But you do it very clever… cleverly – but you do it very cautiously. You do manage to keep us with you when we’re watching. And maybe it is that sort of, “No, no, this doesn’t capture where you’re going,” and actually going for it. Maybe it is the fastness, like you say, but it really is super engaging, I find.

And it provides such a great access to exactly what I feel you’re describing: of being with dance and staying in that ambiguity, that strangeness, that weird place.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, I mean, it’s not about – I mean, good choreography is not about manipulating the audience. And neither is it about “challenging” the audience. I think that’s a mistake.

It can produce extraordinary work – sorry, I speak too strongly, because I’ve seen… I’ve been challenged by dance performances. But I find myself more interested in the idea that choreography is about helping us all to stay together in the same room/space/time and follow through whatever that duration is.

I don’t like the idea of “choreographic tools”, because I think there are too many methodologies, and as soon as you’ve found a tool it often becomes redundant again: it was only the thing you needed to solve that moment, or whatever.

But at the same time, I think, strictly speaking, applying yourself to choreography – or even more so composition, musically – is about introducing things in a way and at a pacing that allows everybody, as best as possible, to follow and doesn’t leave people behind.

And that takes time and experiment. You have to try a multitude of different ways, and every piece that you make seems to propose its own journey through that process of finding out how to hold together the threads of what’s happening, whatever they are – whether they’re emotional, rhythmic, concrete ideas or whatever.

With the piece that Matteo and I made this year – it’s called The Unison Piece – it was only 30 minutes long. It had a very simple premise: we just decided we’d always done everything in counterpoint, and we should make a performance where we did everything absolutely in unison.

So I drew upon some research which Bojana Cvejić had very kindly shared with me over a period of time, and in which I’d been involved, about questions around why unison is complex socially and politically within contemporary dance. I mean, obviously because it is something that can be coercive. But at the same time, it’s also at the heart of dancing: “I do it with you; I invite you to do it with me.”

So the piece with Matteo is an investigation into the joys and difficulties of doing something together. And I think it’s resonating with people because we’re at the moment of a kind of intensifying of a neoliberal agenda and an individualistic agenda.

But the piece itself – the way that Matteo and I work is we tend to pass things to and fro, with very long periods of silence and no conversation. I passed him a text and then he passed it back in a brilliant looping form, and it was really great, but I felt there was something missing.

So I held onto this for, I think, two months and was trying to introduce more things without losing the pleasures of this very minimal looping structure. It got to the point where I was spending 12 hours a day sat at this table, doing it over and over again, and my 16-year-old daughter came down and she said:

“Please, will you stop? Please, will you stop doing this old men’s cult performance?”

But I did eventually manage to get it to a place where I thought it was resonating more. And then, of course, Matteo and I made the mistake of getting overconfident – we overloaded it with too much and then it really wasn’t working.

Then Matteo’s daughter, Francesca (Francesca Fargion), who’s worked with us for many years, sat with us and in 20 minutes she cut half of the text that I’d written. Literally half. And then we did it again, and what she’d done was: I was trying to give too much information, and she rendered it into a lyric.

Actually, the first performance of it was slightly an accident. We were in Oslo and the Norwegian choreographer Mette Edvardsen, who has a bookshop there – beautiful space – said, “Will you come and do a showing?” We said, “We’re not finished yet.” And she said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Just come.”

So we kind of pulled it together, and a hundred people turned up, and then we realised that it was finished. I think otherwise we would have struggled on for another year.

That’s just to give you an image of the kind of daily practice that goes into trying to arrive at something. And I think at any moment we might have thrown it away and given up.

PETER:

Yes, yeah.

Jonathan Burrows:

And it was quite a surprise when it resonated with people. But that’s always the case, I think. The idea that you can ever “learn how to make a performance” is misguided. I find it’s becoming, sometimes, more difficult.

PETER:

More difficult to make a performance?

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah. Well, I mean in general – socially, culturally, politically – because I think we’re all feeling a bit knocked in contemporary dance at the moment.

There really is a feeling that the ways in which we’ve sustained ourselves with a sense of purpose and confidence are getting harder to navigate.

But I think also that the minute you start thinking you know what you’re doing, you find out that you don’t. But I mean, how good is that? There’d be no point doing it otherwise.

PETER:

Yeah, no, exactly.

I saw the video of it.

Jonathan Burrows:

Oh yeah, from Stuttgart.

PETER:

Yeah. You have it on your website, and in it you do also include a little bit of a nod to the worry of the unison, right?

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, we do.

PETER:

There’s comments of marching and where it can be used in a negative way, and yet it exactly has that quality of a joy of being together, being with. I think you mention it, right? There’s a sense of yes, we’re trying to be together, but also we’re failing – we’re failing at that. But still the joy of trying is somehow spectacular.

We were talking about Swedish folk dance just before this, and in there there’s a sense of repeating almost the same step over and over again, but there’s such a joy in trying to get there – and it’s so hard, actually.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah.

PETER:

It’s not simple at all.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, I do experience it in… I was doing traditional English dance since I was a kid, but I now play traditional English music – well, actually, even more a form of traditional English music from where we are now, here in Sussex.

I think it was partly realising that that experience of doing things together in traditional art forms is a central part of dancing somehow. I think that informed the piece.

And it was interesting because there’s movement in the performance in The Unison Piece as well. We’d never videoed it, and then, when we were rehearsing it before we performed it for the first time in Oslo, the only space we could find was in Dansens Hus, in the dressing room. There was a mirror where people would do their make-up.

We have two electric guitars, and they’re lying on a flat surface next to each other. For the first time, in the mirror, I could see Matteo doing the movement. I was very touched by it, because I had said to him, “If you do this, you really have to do it every day until, when we do it together, you’re not thinking and I’m not thinking – it just kind of dovetails somehow.”

I saw how much work he’d put in, and it was very touching – something like, “Yeah, we’re doing this together.” It was a beautiful moment.

Because I’m standing next to him, I couldn’t really see what he was doing, and I was all the time nervous about the movement we were doing. Then I looked at the mirror and I went, “Ah, that feels nice.”

PETER:

There is a sort of relinquishing, a sort of giving over to the dance.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it.

PETER:

There’s also something extremely ethical about these approaches – also what you started with, right? The “dancing is choreography”. This sense of being in the trouble of it, for want of a better word – the participatory nature of politics, maybe – that we are engaged continually in the difficulties of power and structure and hierarchy.

Because I think, in my MA, I was focusing on ethics. It was an artistic MA, but still, that was the curiosity. I was very fond of Simon Critchley, who does this “infinitely demanding” ethics, and then I’d look towards choreographed situations.

There’s this sort of trope that if it’s choreographed, it’s more authoritarian; if it’s unison, there’s more domination involved. And then, of course, we’re very well aware of – I forget who wrote it – but The Tyranny of Structurelessness, how domination can obviously be a part of improvised situations and informal structures and things.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yes, that’s right.

PETER:

And so ethics invites itself in that way of almost holding the two types of freedom at the same time, while you are dancing and choreographing simultaneously.

Jonathan Burrows:

That’s very interesting. I think, if you choose to enter a shared activity like that – especially if you’re making the same material, whether that be singing, playing music, dancing – then it’s vital that you and anybody else in that space feels able to stop or walk away at any moment.

That way everybody has agency over their own relationship to the decision to enter into that collective space, or space of collective doing.

PETER:

It’s those openings that you kind of provide conceptually, often, in your performances – openings of, “You might be seeing this, this might be the truth, but it also could be something else.”

It’s the same when you go to a dancing situation and there are openings of, “Oh, I could do it my way,” or “I could leave; I don’t have to be trapped in that space,” so to speak.

I’d love to know – since when I came back to the UK after being away for so long, I started doing, now I’m not going to know the names and stuff, but Morris dancing in Cambridge. And I went to a workshop in the middle of England (Jigs Workshop 2025, Sutton Bonington), and there we arrived and the teachers, I suppose, were telling us how in these traditions it would normally be that you would dance one or two dances and that would be it. “But today we’re going to do ten,” or something – and of different traditions as well, you know, two from this tradition, three from this tradition.

I couldn’t help but wonder in that workshop, of course, what are we working with now? Are we working with the dancing, or are we trying to become a sort of virtuoso Morris dancer, in a way, out of having this big library of…?

Jonathan Burrows:

There’s a wonderful new history of Morris dance in England, (The Ancient English Morris Dance,) written by a man called Michael Heaney. It’s such a pleasure from start to end.

There are a few conclusions he arrives at. One is that it was always a fluid and changing form. Women were always a part of it, and then “disappeared” for a moment and then came back, and so forth. And that it’s not a ritual – this was a misunderstanding of the early collectors like Cecil Sharp.

I was talking to a dancer and caller called Fee Lock from Hastings not long ago, and she said something which really lingered in my mind, in relation to contemporary dance as much as folk dance.

We were discussing the possibility that the English Morris could be protected by the United Nations protected status for intangible heritage and so forth, which is something that’s being discussed.

What Fee Lock said to me was:

“We disagree all the time about what is traditional and about what is Morris dancing – and the disagreements are the intangible cultural heritage, and UNESCO can never understand that.”

And I thought: how brilliant. It’s not something that you have to agree upon; it’s something you have to go on negotiating. That thought of hers has really redefined “the traditional” for me.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it is so complex and beautiful. I once was invited to score a Marina Abramović piece – we had it on video, it was part of our education – and we would score it.

I sat down and I was like: “Okay, she’s right foot first, left, right, standing poised, her head forward, looking, moves…” – you know, every detail, trying to get every bodily tension and muscular structure, or dynamic, maybe. And then at some point I just was like, “But that’s not what she’s doing.”

Jonathan Burrows:

Right, yes. The analysis slowly erased what she was actually doing.

PETER:

If I could write her score – what was in her head – it was: “Sit down”, or “Walk”, or “Remember” what she’d practised, what she’d rehearsed. Very different, in terms of the intentionality of what it is.

I was lucky enough to go back to Rambert School, where I studied, to give them a “Fresh Friday” – a sort of freaky Friday moment where they can see what kind of careers are possible, mine being a sort of unconventional one, I suppose.

The exercise that I have been obsessed with for five years now is: I invite everyone to not dance. I say, “Don’t dance, but if you feel as though you were dancing, do something else.”

So, you know, they’re coming in and they’re telling me, “I’m injured – my hip, my leg, my knee, my shoulder,” and I’m like, “Oh, I think it’ll be okay,” especially with this first exercise.

But the fascinating thing that came up was really the speaking – it’s the intention, it’s the intent for why we were doing it. What are we doing?

I often feel that – you spoke (in your keynote address at the Postdance Conference, MDT Stockholm, 2015) about how the motor system conflates Trisha Brown and Michael Jackson; that they live in the same place (in the body), but the approach is very different. The intention of Michael was very different to the intention of Trisha, and how we grasp those and hoard those, I think, is somehow built into these feelings we have around what we enjoy doing.

Because my question maybe, if there is one in this long string of thought, is: your work – because you’re working with Matteo – it could be music. I mean, it is music, it’s beautiful, but it situates, if I understand correctly, most often in dance contexts, or at least maybe that’s my understanding of it.

But there must be something that comes from you speaking about contemporary dance and your frustrations. So I think my question is: how does the context, how does the intention, play a role in the work?

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah. We often actually say that the work that we make is music, first and foremost.

But then again, twice – including recently – over the last 30 years we’ve tried to introduce a more strictly musical piece into an evening of work.

PETER:

Like Science Fiction (Rewriting and Science Fiction, 2021).

Jonathan Burrows:

Like Science Fiction. Not a long piece. In both cases when we’ve tried that, there’s been a pushback: “This is not the context for that.” And that’s been frustrating.

But then again I would probably argue that we’re not musically virtuosic enough that we could present our work as music within a music context. So probably we’ve always been interested in working outside the frame of virtuosity and allowing that to give us permission to arrive at conjunctions of materials that are unexpected.

To some degree, we fall into a category of English performance – or even English comedy – which deals with failure. That’s not something we consciously pursue, but, you know, Les Dawson’s piano playing is… it’s not an influence, but that idea that you can resist virtuosity has always been of interest.

It’s not like we’re deliberately “not virtuosic”; it’s just that we’re not! So dance has, in a way, given us somewhere which can tolerate that.

But at the same time, Matteo is slowly becoming a better dancer, and I’m slowly becoming a better musician. Also the pieces have their own virtuosity, because of the speed and complexity of the embodied thought processes in them. They do take a while – you can’t just get up and do them. We do take pleasure in that, but it’s not a conventional virtuosity of playing an instrument, or the notion of “the good dancer”. But if you wanted to perform in one of our pieces, you would have to be prepared to work three months or six months, and you’d have to do a little bit every day, because that’s just how long it takes.

For some people that’s intolerable, and I perfectly understand that – that’s not what they want to spend their time doing. But I have a really deep pleasure in slowly accumulating an embodied knowledge of, and memory of, something until I can do it, and then do two other things at the same time. I love that.

And there are plenty of other art forms that draw upon those kinds of embodied skills in ways that we never question.

I think that in dance, at a certain point, because of this fear of “the choreographic” as being limiting or authoritative, we perhaps have lost something of those pleasures of slow practice – of arriving somewhere you wouldn’t have arrived otherwise. But, you know, you should do what you want to do. I like doing it. If you don’t, do something different.

PETER:

Because that was sort of my question. You come from quite a virtuosic dance training, right?

Jonathan Burrows:

Well I was a bad ballet dancer – but I got away with it.

PETER:

You couldn’t have been that bad – it was 13 years or 12 years!

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, I know, but the thing was that The Royal Ballet, when I was a student, was being run by Norman Morrice, who was the man who had taken Rambert Dance Company through into being a contemporary company.

He had seen what I was trying to choreograph as a student, and so he invented this role for me of being an “apprentice choreographer”. When I arrived into The Royal Ballet, in a way, the people whose job it was to rehearse the pieces and stuff… they didn’t quite know what to do with me, because I wasn’t at the technical level of some of my peers.

But then I was very fortunate because the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan started to give me small things to do, and then that increased into bigger things. And then, when somebody gives you confidence, you get better at what you’re doing. So I became good at doing what I was doing. And I actually enjoyed it.

PETER:

Because that’s the thing I’m curious about: it’s lovely that dance has this porousness, this ambiguity that allows us to take something like you’ve taken – this practice of “rehearse, rehearse, rehearse until it is in your motor system, in your body”.

That’s something so beautiful with dance. But was that something you were enjoying then?

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, actually, to be honest, something that people don’t often realise about ballet companies is that they’re very, very busy and you work really hard. The repertoire is quite big, often, and there are many performances. So you perhaps don’t always rehearse things as much as you could do.

Because I was technically not as proficient, I tended to go away into a corner and practise until I could keep up with the others. So that became a habit.

Also, in a ballet company, when somebody gets injured half an hour before a performance; a member of the staff comes up to you and says, “So and so is injured, Can you do their part?” And you’ll go, “Well, I normally do the other side, but yeah, okay, I’ll try and figure it out.”

So you would go on in front of 2,000 people not having a clue what you were really doing and have to be absolutely alert. Even though ballet is seen as the opposite of improvisation, I never improvised as much in my life as I did in ballet.

So, yeah, it was those things that combined to send me in the direction I went in – and then also the influence of Rosemary Butcher, who by then I was already dancing with. The Royal Ballet, to their amazing credit, once even gave me time off to go on tour with Rosemary Butcher, which… I think they understood that I needed to be there.

Her work, although primarily improvised, had a level of – how would you say it – cognitive detail that she demanded through a very long process of constantly fine-tuning the approach to the improvisation. Which I don’t really use – I’ve never used it directly in what I do – but it’s always been something I could draw upon somehow.

PETER:

Yeah. So beautiful.

Is it silly for me to ask: what are you busy with now? Because I haven’t actually asked it – I assumed earlier.

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, I’m continuing with this research into the felt sense of choreography, and I’m waiting now to hear whether I have academic funding for it – but it will continue anyway.

I’m tentatively beginning a slow process of research with the dance theorist Scott deLahunta on the ways in which we language dance in practice. This has crossover with what Chrysa Parkinson is doing.

And I have been writing emails to my long-time collaborator Matteo Fargion suggesting an idea for a new performance, but so far he’s not given very much response. I just keep casting the line into the water, adding details until either it grasps his imagination or, more likely, he’ll come back with a better idea.

I’m not entirely convinced enough by what I’ve been suggesting to him to suggest it to you. But each time I reject it, it keeps boomeranging back in a way that I then get briefly excited and send him another two-page email. That’s how it’s always worked.

PETER:

It is these moments of excitement and joy, right – that sort of play of it all.

And your research, this thing of the “felt sense of choreography” – I see it through the lectures that I’ve listened to and also in the performances. You bring up very much the living with a body that speaks, that has a choreography involved in it.

How do we dance with that? How do we live with that? How do we continue?

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, that’s right.

PETER:

It’s a strangeness that exists in dance.

I often quote you – I think you’re quoting someone else, so I should probably look it up. I mean, you often are in A Choreographer’s Handbook – but you speak about electric guitars, and you say it actually in another performance. Now I’m rambling, but…

Jonathan Burrows:

Oh, I do, yeah – I can’t remember what my own quote is now…

PETER:

But the thing of people…

Jonathan Burrows:

Oh yeah. What I observed was that – I mean, you can tell my age by the metaphor of the electric guitar – but when people formed bands, it tended to be because they’d heard a record, right? And then: “I’d like to play something like that.”

Whereas in dance, we often enter into dancing before we’ve actually seen a performance, and that’s probably how it should be. But it is, if we then want to make a performance, a funny way round – that’s what I was trying to point out.

PETER:

No, because it’s an oddity with dance. I also agree.

I remember, I think maybe to mask the fact that I was a young boy doing ballet, I would tell people that I was at a disco and I pointed at the guitarist, but I was so small my parents thought I was pointing at the people dancing in front of the guitarist, so they took me to ballet school.

So I even have a sense that that was my trajectory as well – that I learned to enjoy dance through dancing, and in fact I wanted to play the electric guitar.

That was the feeling of it. But the role of the spectator and the role of the dancer – there is this very strange relationship.

Even for me, I’ve always felt there’s a quality of “audience” with dancers. You try to provide a space that they could experience something. There’s a possibility, as a dancer, to witness your own dance or to be…

Jonathan Burrows:

That’s right, yeah. I think it’s actually, even neurologically or neuroscientifically speaking, there seems evidence that we are activated by watching somebody dance – even to the extent that there was an experiment recently (I can’t remember who conducted it) which followed this question: to what extent are we already learning movement patterns when we see somebody else execute them? The copying that begins in the child developmental stage.

The joy of that is that if you’re making a performance that it appears the audience is disliking, you can at least rest secure in the knowledge that, even if they hate it, they’re learning it. Which I think is brilliant.

But I think you asked me what else I’m doing: I am interested in the idea of practice and daily practice, and the ways in which you can attend to the thing that you’re doing – especially when you don’t have money to gather together, to be in spaces. Many of the kinds of spaces which were artist-led have been erased by finances and more glamorous infrastructures that become bureaucratically dominated, rather than artistically led.

I try to take a stance that everything that I do in the day, that attends to what I think I am as an artist, is equally practice. So even if I’m playing English folk music, and then I write an email, and then I think about a piece, and then I rehearse something, then I have university supervision, or whatever – and I do include workshop teaching in that.

I have more and more of a genuine pleasure in those kinds of gatherings together in a workshop. It seems to me that there’s a lot to say which is negative about what’s happening within contemporary dance at the moment, but there is a sense in which the dominance of performance, hierarchically, has been slightly softened since the pandemic. I think we are realising that all the ways in which we gather together are necessary.

We’re doing it because we need to. I love watching what people do in workshops – the way they engage and what they come up with – and I think many of us are involved in activities like that. There’s a certain heart of contemporary dance that lies there.

You could say people would argue that that’s exclusive – it’s “just the people who are part of it”. But there are many of us. Many, many, many of us. And young people still seem really drawn to it.

I often just wonder if contemporary dance, like traditional arts, offers somewhere to be together doing things with other people, outside of a realm of commodification. This happens all over the world, all continents and all cultures. There seems to be an engagement.

It’s not a perfect art form, and there are many reasons to criticise its past and present, but I think there are also many positive aspects. I certainly feel like I’m still enjoying and benefitting from them. I don’t know about you.

PETER:

Oh yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

I feel, somehow – I keep saying this and I recognise it becomes worn out almost – but it’s such an honour to have had dance in my life. I truly believe it. It has provided me a way of being in the world which is so joyful.

It does come up against, exactly as you say, the commodification of life itself: we’re either consuming or we’re being consumed; there’s this constant productisation of our being.

Ironically, exactly as you say, the dance “industry” has that tension – it’s trying to hold this beautiful practice we have, which I wanted to describe as: it’s unlike a play or script where there’s this authoritative text which we all bow down to.

We come together in a kind of muddle. We gather with this diaspora of diverse experiences and influences into the studio – this empty studio that births a relationship, which then continues onto the stage.

This podcast itself is exactly that. We didn’t have to meet; we’re not being paid – I’m not being paid – there’s no money involved. But I’m so curious and invested in these encounters that I want to do it.

Ironically, that’s what I wanted to say: of course this does make it a product as well. This could become another part of, or extension of, commodification of dance.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yes, that’s true. I’ve heard other people say that to me. I think my wife Claire Godsmark said that to me recently – not to forget that it also becomes a product.

PETER:

Yeah. I think when I was young, because I was trained in “expanded choreography”, my critique at the time was very anarchic – sort of critiquing everything.

“Yes, it’s expanding what dance can be, what choreography can be, but then it’s just making it a product somewhere else; it always has to be sellable.”

What of the dances that escape that? What of the…?

Jonathan Burrows:

Good question, yeah.

PETER:

But it’s beautiful that you – as you say – there is a daily practice of playing your instrument, going to the football field (maybe you didn’t say that, but these external activities) which inform our practice, inform our thing.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah. I think of them as parallel practices. They may not all be shared, but they all inform, in some way, an attempt to understand the confusing but delightful overlap of everything that happens and that you feel when you dance.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. And I think for me the struggle has been: how do I honour those things and give them respect?

One way has been to try to produce little stages. This is very fresh – I was only thinking about it recently: when do they fail? When I go out and record myself looking at stuff – this bizarre dance-like activity of naming the things I see while I walk through the park, for myself, for no one else.

Then you listen back to it and you think, “What am I doing? How am I spending my time like this?” And yet, if I can find a way of staging it – even if it’s just staging it for myself, taking care of it and putting it in a notebook or putting it on my website – then I have it as a sort of archive for myself.

But yeah, it’s a beautiful, fraught relationship in the midst of it all.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah. I was thinking of something that my friend Dr ‘Funmi Adewole Elliott said to me recently. We were talking about style, essentially.

It was in relation to hip-hop, because I had been accidentally immersed in hip-hop dance through Jonzi D and working alongside him, and also the artist Robert Hylton, whose PhD I was supervising at the time.

‘Funmi Adewole Elliott used this description:

“It’s about the body attitude of the form.”

I think that’s a really extraordinary, precise articulation of the relationship between the feeling – the body attitude – and the form, the choreography itself.

Even though krump or popping or breaking are improvised dances, nevertheless the body attitude of those forms defines itself through the doing.

In that sentence, in that instance, there’s a cultural specificity but also a general specificity. So this idea of the “felt sense of choreographing”, or “the choreography already within the dance”, I think has something to do with this meeting “body attitude” and “form” – which is such a good way to put it.

That seems to include the emotions, the psychology, the physicality, the memory, the expectation, the desire and so forth – but also the body attitude of the form, moving towards something which can find its own definition, either collectively in relation to what other people are doing, or in relation to a field of inquiry, which is how experimental contemporary dance has developed.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah.

The form, the body, the thinking… I don’t have anything intelligent to say, I’m afraid. But it does make me – I’ve been reading a lot of Catherine Malabou and her work on plasticity.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, there’s some kind of connection there.

PETER:

Yeah. There’s this ability that form can include, in itself, its own destruction. I think this is what she…

Jonathan Burrows:

Yep. Arrival and destruction.

PETER:

Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Like I said when I emailed you: “Is there an assignment, or is there a thing?” I’m not going to ask you to now produce one.

Jonathan Burrows:

Oh yes – something that somebody could… You were suggesting I might have something I could suggest that people could do.

PETER:

Yeah, or we could do.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, but I think, I don’t know – I think everybody knows what they need to do.

PETER:

But I love that. It’s so great.

Because I think that’s the thing I wanted to provide: exactly like you say, you’re already doing it, or the access to do things is extremely close. Maybe these conversations can be a prompt in order to go to those places – or not, as you say.

So maybe we leave it here, and we leave them with a silence and wish them luck in their world and lives.

[PAUSE]

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah. Thank you for your thoughtful questions, but also observations. I really appreciated listening to your ideas.

PETER:

Yeah, it feels very sporadic, and I’m hoping in the listening back I will feel more confident with my naivety, but…

Jonathan Burrows:

Well, feel free to rechoreograph the discussion – choreograph it in any order that you find more conducive and helpful.

PETER:

But it’s clear you’re doing loads of workshops. You have a website; I will link everything, and I will also try to transcribe what we’ve spoken and I will list the references. So I will ask you for spellings and things like that.

But also, people can find everything you’re doing on your website (burrowsfargion.com), which is – I want to say it right – burrows and fargion…

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah – Fargion. F-A-R-G-I-O-N.

PETER:

…dot com.

Jonathan Burrows:

And there’s a link to the work on Vimeo. Since the possibility of streaming, we’ve made it a policy to make the work we’d like to share available to anybody who wants to watch it, and they’re in full – they’re full pieces rather than edited pieces…

PETER:

And they’re very watchable. I’ve been watching them all week trying to recap. They’re extremely enjoyable.

Jonathan Burrows:

Oh good, well, thank you for saying that. I mean, you don’t have to watch the whole thing. I’m just saying if you watch 10 minutes and it’s enough for you, go and have a cup of tea.

PETER:

Of course, like everywhere.

But yeah, thank you so much, and I hope people find your workshops and find your work.

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, thank you.

PETER:

Thank you. Nice one.

1. Choreographic Devices 4 https://www.ica.art/live/choreographic-devices-4
2. ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) https://www.ica.art/
3. Rose Choreographic School https://rosechoreographicschool.com/
4. Martin Hargreaves (Head of the Rose Choreographic School) https://rosechoreographicschool.com/people
5. Sadler’s Wells East https://www.sadlerswells.com/your-visit/sadlers-wells-east/welcome-to-sadlers-wells-east/
6. O baby performance by PETER https://stillpeter.com/o/
7. Johnathon Burrows A Choreographer’s Handbook

PETER:

Hello. Today we are dancing with Lorea Burge.

Lorea Burge:

Burge

PETER:

I will write it down. So it’s in the description. Yeah, we met at the choreographic devices at the ICA. You’re in the Rose choreographic School. I reached out to Martin to see if anyone of you would want to dance with me, and I’m super grateful to dance with you. You’re working with sound and different things. We’ve movement and things that aim super curious about and like, have started an interest. I mean, I started in musical theater, so I know I’ve had singing and stuff with me, but, yeah, they seem more present, but you seem to have gone really deep and I’m super excited to see that and to join you in that. But how would you introduce yourself for people today, where you are, what you are?

Lorea Burge:

What am I? I would say that I’m a choreographer and dance artist, but I actually find that, for some reason, I find that term a bit difficult. Like to say that I’m a choreographer because actually I don’t make that much choreography. Yeah. um. So maybe I’m like engaged with choreography, but I don’t know that I’m a chore. No, I am a choreographer. I don’t. God, it’s hard to know.

PETER:

But But it is so common as well. Like, I think we should do a real research into exactly this thing of like, how do I define myself?

Lorea Burge:

claiming titles? Yeah,

PETER:

not choreographer, dancer, dance maker, things.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, but one thing, yeah, the thing that I just looked at before we started was a term that came up in this interview that I did with Martin, as we were talking about my practice. and he, over the course of the conversation, and in response to a lot of things, I was saying, kept saying that the term like socially engaged practice. And that made a lot of sense to me, so I’m going to appropriate that term now and like use that as something to describe my practice and who I am as a person probably as well.

PETER:

Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah. I think with all of the work that I doing with sound and with activism, and outside of the art world, which is also very important to me to remain connected to things outside of the art bubble. There is a. I guess an interest in going following paths into sort of new or alternative ways of being. and with sound, I think that’s of kind of another element of bit of like putting our ears to the foreground.

PETER:

Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

and like, following our ears as a drive for creating material.

PETER:

It’s really beautiful. and really well, articulated. I mean, it’s almost on a utopian practice. I would say Yeah, socially engaged and also sort of reaching out and speculative. And I mean, and what I was describing with my own, like forays into sound, it really is a sense of discovering utopias and places to dance, which are somehow have been beyond my world. Like they are somehow a new world or a different world. Yeah.. So cool. Was there anything else that you wanted to add to your.

Lorea Burge:

To my introduction.. Yeah, maybe that, like, I’m. overall interested in sort of more DIY approaches to creating and exploring. Yeah. And that also feeds into my life more broadly as well. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sort of. interested in desire and curiosity over ability or skill. Yeah.

PETER:

I’m so glad I brought my high tech recording studio. Now I’m joking. We’re recording from an iPhone. if you’ve ever wondered. Cool. So let’s go straight into it. Like what do you like to do today? What are you busy with?

Lorea Burge:

So… Because as you said, like these spaces are very well insulated, Sonically, there’s actually been a bit of a problem for me in like in my research. Not necessarily a problem, but it, yeah. I had the thought just earlier that actually, maybe it would be nice to start but I just going for a little walk through the building, a silent walk. Oh, yeah, nice. for 10 minutes. we can go together but not speak and just like just listen listen to all of the sounds that we come across. And then I thought I could take you through some of the movement, sort of warm-up tuning exercises that I do with people to get into this world. Yeah, which are more with the body and movement.

PETER:

Nice. Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

Thinking of like the body as musical instrument. And then maybe it does take a lot. I have like all of my gear. Okay. here and like potentially we could have a little play with some microphones later. But let’s see how we get on with this.

PETER:

Yeah, that’s cool. So we can say, like, we’re at Sadler’s Wells East Studios, maybe.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

That’s why it’s so insulated. It’s a brand new studio, and it’s a brand new building. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a lot of people here. It feels like quite a happening space.

Lorea Burge:

Now it’s starting to be, yeah.

PETER:

Okay. So when we walk around, we’re going to hear probably, yeah, the building and what it’s doing, and then and then we’re going to do sort of this tuning. You call it? It’s nice. Like, I think of the orchestra as it sort of begins to start to play or the guitarist twanging their strings and changing the tightness of the strings. So we’ll play with that, and then we’ll play with some of your technical gear, I guess that’s what you meant by stuff. Yeah. Microphones, loop pedals and stuff like that, is it?

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, and it all goes through Ableton as well.

PETER:

Ah, cool. Cool.

Lorea Burge:

It’s where it gets a bit more complex. Yes.

PETER:

Yeah. Great. I think that’s pretty clear. We’re going to go for a silent 10 minute walk. Tune up our bodies like they’re musical instrument, and then start to play as if we’re in a recording studio with all this equipment.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, I guess like compose some sound live. Yeah.

PETER:

All we’re remembering the lo-fi nature of this book. Okay, cool. Then we’ll pause and we’ll come back and we will tell you about what happened.

Lorea Burge:

Great.

PAUSE

PETER:

Okay, so we’re back. Uh. Amazing. Like’s so many things. I think we should just, um try to unpack it all and then, like, go through, yeah, some of the experiences we’ve had today and like, what is brought up for me, what is brought up for you. Yeah. How was it like to do it today? Like, I mean, I guess it felt like giving a class in a way. Like you were like condensing a lot of material into like a short session. But we went for over an hour.

Lorea Burge:

Was it? I have no concept of time.

PETER:

That’s good. Right? No, I mean, I mean, and when we started, we said we were going to were doing the walk. We had the warm up tuning, and then we had the like electronic music. And now we even added a sort of last thing of like rhythms with different body parts. But let’s go through them then. one at a time. The walking for me was like extremely powerful, like there was this sense that you know, I mean, we also had like some social interactions. Where it was that thing of, should we break out or not? And then there was more subtle ones, like the person behind the desk. We clocked eye contact and I felt like. I felt like a ghost. Like she was there was a sense of like, what are you doing, walking around the canteen, sort of cafe area? Yeah, but the thing that really captured me was this sense of, like, these sounds are always happening. Like, even when we’re not there to hear them, like the sound of the stairwell and the air conditioning and then the kids in the street and the music playing and then disappearing and all these shifting landscapes er soundscapes around the place. How was it for you? What did you find?

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, I… It’s always really nice. I find it quite, like, meditative to do this. precisely because of what you say, that all of this is always there and it’s just about kind of offering offering the space for that to come to the foreground of your attention.

PETER:

Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

And. Yeah, I can get quite not existential but. It can feel quite vast. Sometimes if you start to really try and like hear as far away as you can. And like sometimes it’s quite amazing if you really like take the time to do that it’s it’s amazing how far you can hear. Yeah, yeah And it makes it makes me realize like how kind of how restrictive we are normally with what we listen to and what we hear. and our surroundings and it’s the kind of it’s a real, it opens up my ears and as a result, it opens up my body.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s really, that’s a really interesting movement. I mean, when we’re walking, it’s we’re not we’re not thinking about moving per se, but like, definitely where I put my body becomes like, super heightened. And that placement. And you continued in a way into the studio, like the two exercises sort of like blended into one, where exactly as you’re saying now, like we came into the studio and our way of tuning up the instrument was like to listen inward, like to the flesh, the liquids, the bone of the inside of the body, and then like the surface, the skin, and then the room, and then eventually the universe, like, we got really far away, right? Like, planets and everything. And, yeah, I lose my trail of thought, but there was something about place or something. that it’s all coming together, right, in a sort of like in that body, right, that positionional, even though it’s always happening. And am I right in understanding like, we have socialized ourselves to only hear certain things. So when we do these practices, we’re sort of undoing a lot of like social conditioning.

Lorea Burge:

Definitely. Yeah, definitely, I think, yeah, we we restrict ourselves to our immediate surroundings and this is asking a complete opposite and actually kind of inviting the idea that we are constantly in relation to everything in a way. And for me, like hearing and sound is really, it’s a really tangible way of understanding relation.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And in there is like this relation to one’s own body. Yeah. Because I keep connecting back to what you had said right in the intro of like, um social engaged.

Lorea Burge:

Socially engaged work.

PETER:

And like I was connecting it to sort of a utopia. And it is like, we’re always amongst a sort of like another world, which doesn’t prioritize the person speaking, but it prioritizes everything sort of equally. Like it’s it’s like it’s there and the body is always. like, touching with all the relations that it’s relating to, we just maybe don’t recognize it or we’re not conscious of it. Like we socialize ourselves into only being aware of certain parts of our body or certain parts of our experience, right?

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

In that way, like, it becomes socially engaged, like it becomes like a a utopian, a utopian, a utopia of a sort, like another world.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

Because I definitely felt like a ghost.

Lorea Burge:

That’s really interesting.

PETER:

Right? Like I was in a parallel universe wandering around the building and passing by people doing their lives and stuff, and allowing their sounds to infect my experience, so to speak.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah. I guess there was an in the walking as well, there’s an element that I didn’t really go into and we didn’t really do as much, but there’s. To be to let yourself be guided just by by sound as well. Yeah. Which kind of can go into that more as well. So where you go is just the drive is like what you’re hearing. And then going towards or moving away from a sound.

PETER:

Yeah. No, exactly, like, because once we were in the studio, you invited this continual movement thing. And at the first at first I thought it was just walking, because we had just continually walked, but then I quickly realized that no, it was continual movement of every part of our body, right?

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

And there is something, because we’re listening simultaneous to allowing, like, an automatic writing of the the flesh, that it starts to find its own pathways, and own directions and desires and positions and qualities and textures. It’s really, yeah, it’s a really nice space to sort of Miranda. No.

Lorea Burge:

meander

PETER:

meander., yeah. To wander about in, and what did we do after that? Like, did it did it then go straight into the three?

Lorea Burge:

After, yeah, after we went into the galaxy and brought it back, we. We went into the three of making moving to make sounds.

PETER:

Exactly.

Lorea Burge:

Moving, trying not to make sound and moving to make sound, but not making sound.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s really clear and it’s like, well defined and you took us through them all together. And this is the part where we were warming opportuning, I guess as well still. That’s what I’m calling it. But yeah, like trying to make sound, and it wasn’t vocal sound, which was like really nice to separate from, because we’re so familiar with using our voice to sound ourselves into existence but to like. like, feel hear the sound of, like, the movement in and of the body, and then to try and do try and move, but not make a sound, which is after, like, hearing so much, it feels like, this is ridiculous. Like, it’s not possible. Even at that point, like, you hear that your sleeve just, like, slightly move if you move your arms in the air and then this last one, it for me, it had this really powerful invitation into how accidental sounds are. Like,. Yeah, because over the others, like, even, like, I tried to make a sound with my hand and it doesn’t come into I don’t want it to come almost. Like, there’s something very happen stance or, yeah.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.. For me, this is, like, you’re touching on something that is, like being a huge element to deal with. Like it wasn’t necessarily like something that I was started this research being like, I really want to think about this, but it’s it’s been very present from the very beginning, which is frustration around like the the kind of impossibility of of this task as well, sometimes, of like to think of, there is a kind of absurdity that I’m also that I find quite seductive in this idea of like thinking of the body as a musical instrument because it’s like really like realistically like the pitches and and tones that it can reach are not that vast, not that varied. And like, yeah, and as you say, like sometimes you think that you’re you kind of imagine that you’re body will make a sound when you do a certain movement and it doesn’t or it makes something completely different or you’re trying to do something and like nothing comes out or you’re trying not to do something and so much comes out and there’s this kind of um frustration of impossibility that it was like something that I’m constantly like dealing with.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It’s really at the heart. I mean, right from the beginning, actually, I wrote because I took a note after our walk, just how improbable and probable everything is, like, how, like, um we go outside and we hear sounds, which are so random, like, there was there’s no, like certainty that it would happen and yet, at the same time, there’s no other sound that should have happened at that time and exactly, like, I go to do something and it sounds completely different. And then, like, with the, maybe you can even, like, go to the last task where we’re making sounds for the other persons movement or trying to capture and amplify them. And that, like, sensation of like, I think I’m gonna make the sound with my mouth. And it comes out completely different to what I’m hearing, and this, like,. Yeah, just the remarkability, like, how remarkable it is that we are here and these sounds are here with us and we’re able to hear these sounds. Like, it’s for granted. We’re quite high up. And I had to think about, like, if this building hadn’t been built, we’re just above the floor, like, hovering, like, and the fact that we can stand here is, like, sort of improbable, like a very strange, like, and we’ve only just met and, like, that we can do these things, like, it’s really remarkable. It’s quite bewildering how relaxed we are with like the the sort of like. coincidental, like just happenstance chaos that we’re actually amongst, in a way.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s sort of. And these for me at least would be interesting to hear what you think, but like, these practices create a different temporality for me or like put me into a different temporality where, like, yeah, this thing like floating instead of floating. Yeah. It’s kind of. accurate to a way of the way that I often feel when I’m in these space. Like in studio, in like kind of choreographic processes generally, I think, in studio processes generally, there is there can be a feeling of like time kind of stopping. But I think when you’re in particularly in practices where you’re bringing your attention to another sense, it shifts something in like time and space for me. Which relates a lot to, I guess what I was saying I don’t imagining or testing alternative ways of being like this this for me is I guess to like link it in to kind of politics or values and like kind of anti-capitalist like approach. and slowing down time.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s also super absurd.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

Like you say, this… Yeah, this like. alternative ways of being sort of existing, but the absurdity only really exists because there’s this normative frame that suggests that we should be in a temporality and a, or mode or a sensorial relationship to the world of a specific type and yeah exactly when we go into the studio and we do these practices, we somehow, well, we break those things. And they’re so simple and almost stupid, like, they’re not smart in the way of like, as in they’re really close, like they’re. They’re not a technology, that is really delicate and hard to like configure for it to work. The happening all the time. It’s just a shift of attention and we’re able to be in that beings.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

Surely, yeah, crazy. But like, to bring it to the political, like, what are your thoughts of this place? Like, I mentioned at the beginning we’re in Sadler’s Wells. And we’re really dealing with the place and the sounds that it has and the people that have access to it and then we went outside and we see the people that are commuting past or transversing across and beyond. And then there was even like a child on his and their parent or guardian, sort of like I was assuming maybe the child had wet themselves and they were there, like trying to clean up and the bicycle was with them and there was this frustration, but on both sides, and yet clearly a sense of like patience and endearment and they were in a completely different tempo to other people, and there were these like masculine voices and these feminine voices, some, sometimes feeling as if they’re being reduced and there’s a lot a lot of different things. So, yeah, how do you feel about this place? Because you spoke about DIY and wanting to.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.. Yeah. It’s… It’s the first time. For me, it’s the first time that I’m like, in a kind of longer relationship with a big institution. Because, yeah, I’ve until now, I’ve done existed much more in kind of more DIY spaces. And it’s so different like for me it’s a.. It’s so complex. Like, it offers so much, and, like, I have thanks to this, I have like access to so many resources like this, you know, huge space to be in.. And Yeah. And like a network of people. But it’s. I find kind of working within an institution like this, like very can be very like restricting. Because there’s institutional processes, ways of doing things that you have to follow protocols that are there, that they’re just like don’t always align with a creative practice. And like, you know, even walking us walking around in silence, like within an arts institution, people were still kind of feeling a little bit on edge. It was like, because there was something we were doing something slightly slightly out of the norm. And like, it still kind of like looked at in a way that like maybe at other was sort of, DIY art spaces it would be more accepted yeah. So you’re also kind of still dealing with like what’s what’s what do we have permission for? And what do we not?

PETER:

And yet what can we create permission for as well. And the way this studio itself is so insulated, like we had to leave the room to hear more. Or like, just to give ourselves the opportunity to allow in those sounds.Cause I don’t know if I could have imagined them, ’cause when we started to expand the listening outside of our body and into the stadium and outside, into London, I don’t think I would have captured the resolution that we did by actually going outside. Cause in here, it’s so quiet. Like, it’s quite impressive, actually, how, like, insulated it is, and there’s a window open.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

So you can, like, walk towards a window and start to hear, but you come away from the window and it really fades away very quickly. Yeah. It’s. It’s a very interesting space to be in. And what does that permit, and what does it exclude?

Lorea Burge:

I was going to say, like, exclusive is a very, like important word in talking with this because I think you know, these there’s so much money that has been thrown into this place and I think there is from the people that create these spaces there’s maybe an idea that the more the more expensive it looks. Or like the more like the more money again, the more money they put into it to create the kind of most high tech window or da da da all of this stuff that better it will be for those that come in, but actually what that often negates is like what that does to the people that will not immediately be coming and like it creates I think it creates these more like hardline barriers and borders between inside of the space and outside and you know thinking of like even like where we are like this whole area has been like massively gentrified and like all of like the local community around here, there’s actually a lot of poverty and. Yeah, I think there’re like trying to find ways to like, they want. They have this idea that they want this space to be really, like porous and anyone can come in and stuff but I think just the facade can be offputting to many.

PETER:

Yeah. It’s like you can come in within a certain, like like code of what is accepted behavior in this space, which is so interesting because in a way what you’re practice is inviting is in a way like a code switching, like trying to allow for other codes to sort of like emerge that bring about new awarenesses and so on.cause if we could go back, like you brought up that word frustration. Yeah. Like, and I’m just curious, like. Did the practice come out of the frustration or are you finding frustration through doing the practice? Like, like Where does the frustration come from?

Lorea Burge:

I think the frustration was like. It’s not that I started with frustration and developed this practice. Because of it. But it’s it’s more that like it became it became very evident to me, like the second I started practicing with these ideas that I would be dealing with elements of like impossibility and frustration and like, and that kind of interests me. I think. So I also sit in those spaces and to like not run away, not run away being, oh, this doesn’t work. So I’m going to just do something that does work.

PETER:

Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

But actually, then what does it mean to stick in the things that don’t work? And like, how do we navigate that and deal with it and like find find a pass through it.

PETER:

Yeah, exactly. ‘Cause I think what capitalism has really tort us and like, like the codes that it promotes are ones of like finite conditions, even though it’s like a mechanism of infinite growth, it codifies and bureaucratizes everything into products that can be sold and exchanged and put on the market is brandable and so on, whereas and what it does it it means that it leaves out a sort of codification of things which are more porous and lack the ability to be a concise or captured in some way, and it’s so interesting, like the very first thing you brought up was, we’re gonna do this practice in the studio, but it’s really frustrating being in the studio because it’s so quiet and we have to go outside. So, like, already sort of recognizing the capture of those structures and the way they segregate and exclude and include different things. For a place which is more chaotic and more inclusive and more speculative and creative, one which I think I think that the struggle is like, how do we imagine that to exist? Like, how do we codify and believe in it when we’re so indoctrinated by capitalist logic of rationality almost like, how does it logically fit into our world and have a positionionality or like a name or a thing. And yet we know it, right?. And it’s omnipresent and I mean, maybe utopia’s the wrong word, because utopia right, it means something that is never achievable. Yeah. Whereas what we’re speaking about isn’t unachievable. It’s just repressed.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, it’s like changing the logics.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. And the frustration, I can imagine is that tension, right? That fight constantly with, like, legitimizing, staying longer, or being quieter, so you can listen, or allowing the noise and the rupture to sort of speak and enter into the Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

And for that to be another form of like, communication as well. It does not require us to then speak to it. like that we can receive. information just through listening.

PETER:

Yeah. I’ve always been interested in like the sharp inhale that, you know, like, when, when maybe it’s a big group of people and someone has something to say but all they have in terms of articulation within that context and that specific moment is that hhhhh. And if there isn’t, like, if there isn’t the conditions to hear the ends shot inhale of, like, the potential for articulation to start to find itself. That voice is lost.. And it’s those like subtle listening tours and staying longer. I mean, then you spoke about how you like to bring your working life outside, like a non-art spaced work into the studio. Like, there’s also a sense of frustration there. How can you marry art and life, in a way?

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, this is this is like something that I’m wondering. for a long time. And, like, some people I speak with, some artists that I speak with about this, they say that there is no distinction. their life is art. And everything they do is done through that lens. And I don’t exist in that way. I realized that like for me, there there is distinction and there is separation, and I find that separation really useful.

PETER:

Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

Because it. it grounds me, and I think. And, like. I think. I’m. The reason why I like, like to have jobs that have nothing to do with art or, like, and get, you know, social circles that are not with artists and is because it all of that information that I get there is what is what is how then I kind of expand my relationality to the world that then feeds itself back into my artistic practice and my art into the studio. But to see it as art for me is a kind of. I think there’s something about. Maybe this is not directly an answer to your question now, but, like,. I can find. Sometimes I find, like, the sort of labeling of, like, well, everything is art, quite pretentious. Or like it adds a level of pretension and sort of. almost snobbery to things that like. as if like everything needs to be seen as art in order to have value. Yeah. And like, actually, no, like, not everything. Like, things have value without them being attached to art and um Yeah. Sorry. I don’t. Now I’m kind of lost.

PETER:

No. No, I had to think of like how art has the ability as well to exploit the everyday, to exploit. And to extract, you know, from our lives. Like, if everything is art, we run the risk of becoming commodified and nothing we stop owning our own life because it becomes always something to give away or to share or to sell on the art market. I think it’s very hard to separate art and the art market when we simply speak about art, because what it sounds like you’re talking about is the possibility to be in these art institutions and in this art world brings and not to be there, and to have that separation, brings a sensitivity, right? Like a sensitivity to that relationality that you speak of. Because without. Yeah, but if we assume art is all good and it doesn’t have any flaws, we run the risk of it becoming dangerous.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

And by being skeptical and trying to hold onto something more ethical or something more integral to your experience, then we don’t allow art to somehow run away with our lives in a way. Yeah.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

Yeah. But yeah, that gets. Now we’re like. Would you said your work feels very existential, which is so beautiful as well. Like, then it has to, it doesn’t have to, but like, it ends up seeming to, at least for me, meet with these conditions of work and labor and

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, and labor like labor is a thing that I’m very like. interested in and busy with in my work generally, I think, as well. Like, when I when I view things and when I perform things, I’m interested in in the process of labor being quite explicit and visible. in a way for access, because for me, it’s kind of like remo removing the magic of art making and being like, these are the steps that I’m taking in order to get to this point. Yeah. Like, you can come along with me on that journey and then then go, do it yourself.

PETER:

Exactly. Exactly.

Lorea Burge:

And like, it’s sort of like taking it off its pedestal a little bit.

PETER:

Makes it egalitarian. Yeah. utilitarian, perhaps. Maybe we don’t want to go into that world, but, like, no, exactly. And too often art does the opposite, right? It becomes about skill and prestige and why why I deserve to be doing this rather than someone else, and promotion and cause.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah..

PETER:

It like, to be a good artist, and there’s such a paradox in it, because we know the material is extremely accessible and quite simple, I mean, in a lot of ways, yeah, the tasks you’re working with is listening and considering the sounds that the body makes, not just the voice that it has, but the sounds that it makes. And then considering, how would you amplify that and allowing that and that’s a very.. Yeah, beautiful. And of course, you’re extremely skilled and you’ve been working with this for many, many years, so, like, I don’t mean to belittle your work and your skill and your experience. But it does say something about how society treats those types of qualities and those types of people and bodies and experiences or even natures, right? Animals and creatures..

Lorea Burge:

Yeah. Actually, when I with this like listening practice, like, I always think of like animals, like dog, like dogs and other ones that have their hearing is astonishing. Like they can hear so far away. And so they are like connected to things so far away from them unaware and like I think it’s that openness that that um I strive for in this.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s very cool, very cool. I think, I mean, hopefully we’re still recording, yeah. Was there any other things that you remember or that came up that you want to mention or talk about? Oh, I guess there was we haven’t really spoken about that after the the three stages we went into being more in relation, like to each of us instruments and thinking about live live composing.

PETER:

And we even I think, I said, we made a concert. Yeah. I always say this..

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, that was that was the first time that I’ve kind of done that leading on from leading on from there and without any amplific microphones in space are just doing it really no. So it was interesting for me to to test that out.

PETER:

Yeah. How did it feel? Like, what was it, as you expected? Did you want me to be more on the beat? Like, in your rhythm or.

Lorea Burge:

No, no. No, when I talk about rhythm, I think that doesn’t need to be. Yeah. One, there’s no one way, I think. It’s really nice to see like, how do like do people respond to So like, and different people sense or meaning of composition and sound. Yeah, how was it was it for you to do that?

PETER:

It was really generous. Of course, I mean, they had those little questions of like, am I doing it right? Would you like me to be more in sync?” But I got I got the vibe. You were very generous. And so I felt like I was in tune enough. But you really reminded me of, like, sometimes I think of art making and art consumption or watching as like this process of creative exchange, and that that the fact that to compose in this way, we were having to listen to each other, but we weren’t having to directly conform to each other. There’s such a beautiful sense of collectivity, which allows for an openness of conditions, like the rules are continually being negotiated and made between us. Like, I would make a sound and there’s no. There’s no sense of like, oh, wait, you didn’t go with my sound or things, right? It just adds to the tapestry and the complexity of the composition, which was really exciting. I mean, and even at some point, I think I was playing with the curtains, with the the slidy things at the top.

Lorea Burge:

Oh, yeah. The rail.

PETER:

What’s it called? The rail. And you were hitting the curtains on the other side or playing with the fabric and because mine was more mechanical, I was like, oh, shit, did I make an instrument? Am I now not using my body as the instrument? And I got really, like, lost in, like, where is the instrument? And where is the player of the musician?

Lorea Burge:

Yes.

PETER:

Which is such a beautiful question, because like, if you apply it to music, it’s really like, oh, yeah, what is the difference? Like, are the hands of the instrument player not also part of the instrument? Yeah, like, without them, the instrument doesn’t sound. But yeah, I was relating to your interpretation of the curtain and I was like, oh, and mine, but I felt like they had their own space. And it’s also, sorry, I had so many thoughts about that part. Like, also that thing of, like, being able to drop something and continue with something else whenever, it’s so, like, I I really love it. And at the same time, to continue with something and, like, allow repetition and play and so on. Yeah, it’s it’s it was a very rich playground to sort of be in relationship. Yeah. Because even though we weren’t composing for the previous things, I was still very aware of the sounds you were making, because

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

You can’t make a sound and not have it part of the collective, which is so powerful to sound. And why sometimes dance feels so individual,istic, right? Like, ‘Cause we you you could potentially do it and it doesn’t affect the room. Like, we could. But of course, if you really listen, it’s always affecting the room. Maybe that’s what you’re kind of like.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah. Yeah, and I also wonder where there’s like, in terms of like how we relate as instruments, like when, for example, like when you. you do just like a movement improvisation where you’re like, thinking about being in relation to the other, but that you’re just concerned with moving. Yeah. I’m just wondering now, like, what if it looks much different from what we did, which was like we were not thinking about, like, moving, but thinking about making sound. Exactly. But in order to do that, we have to move. So.. Yeah, I just I was like, when we were doing it, I I was thinking, I wonder what this looks like from the outside to do. Like, and if it’s if it’s very noticeable that there is a difference, like of attention and Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like also from a kind of viewer perspective, like, we are concerned with listening, but like, in order for that to come like, does that just like automatically translate to a viewer or does the viewer also need to be told to put their attention on the listening, you know?

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve started doing listening, sounding practice in a performance I do for babies. So, like, younger than 18 months old, and the reason it came out was because they make sounds all the time and I sort of had this sense, like, because their attention is 360 all over the place, wherever, at one time, like, they’re not looking at the dance. I was wanting to, like, do something which allows the performance to continue in their experience, regardless where we are.Cause they’re also very small and maybe the room is 10 meters, 15 meters and we’re really far apart, but that we can still be in relationship to each other. And so I had this I developed this sort of like sounding movement practice, and exactly as you say, like, at some point, I was like, less interested in the movement and more interested in the sound, but of course, I had to move to sound. And because the baby hasn’t yet started to like define things, like important, more important than others. Like they don’t have yet the same type of representation that we have around things. that they’re like a lot more inclusive of everything. So it doesn’t really answer your question around like, would an audience break the code of dance watching and listen to the dance, but I know with babies, they’re already kind of doing it, and that’s why I found them really exciting to do, because then they don’t have to be too concerned with trying to reed educate the audience, to’cause that also feels manipulative sometimes, like, if you want to just watch, then just watch. Or should should we have called this a concert rather than call it a dance performance? Right, like. And I think that’s sometimes our difficulty. I mean, I think, did I read on your website, you do call yourself a sound artist in some part, right?

Lorea Burge:

Yeah That’s a very recent. Is it? That’s a very recent term that I’ve Yeah, I still feel like I get major impost syndrome every time I say that, but yeah.

PETER:

But do you find the context help and like, how do, yeah, how does it yeah, how does it feel to be working as both sound artists and dance?

Lorea Burge:

I mean, I think, like, one of the initial, like drives that for working with sound for me was thinking about access and like. There’s something in, like, seeing live music, that is, like, incredibly ex It’s like maybe, maybe one of the, if not the most like accessible art forms that we have because I think. Yeah, it’s just so many people experience music. And I really like the kind of low-key energy, atmosphere that you get at a gig where you can you can experience the art, so the music without having to be necessarily like fully present and focused on it. And that’s something that I’ve always really liked and I’ve been curious about like finding ways that I could do that within dance because one of the things that I mean, I love dance, like what I’ve chosen to do, but like, um one of the things that I don’t like about it is, but maybe this is more about theater context. Like often I think people feel, I think there is a kind of skepticism or like anxiety around going to see dance, that people feel like, I don’t know if I’m going to get it or like, and there is also kind of a lot of codes around the way that you watch it and that you have to kind of be focused fully on the thing and I’m, yeah, I’m curious about moving away from that. And that was what the initial thing that made me want to start playing with sound is to see if I could get some of that lowkeyness into this form.

PETER:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t have an answer. I don’t know why I’m still in the world of dance. If it’s just happen dance, you know, like, “Oh, this is where I found myself or if, it actually makes more sense to bring my work through that lens, but like the I feel as one thing that I fail dance offers me is that it often relates to the experiential. Even though you’re right, like music has such a rich tradition of allowing for an experiential witnessing or spectatorship, which dance has been captured by the sort of proscenium arch and forward facing stage, even though those codes are really fun as well, right? Like some people make amazing things in those. But most a lot of dancers I’ve met, like the reason they want to dance is because they enjoy dancing. It’s less, I rarely hear people saying that they want to. dance because they love watching it. Yeah. Like, I think Jonathan Borrows actually wrote it in his choreographic handbook, like, the guitarist learns to play the guitar because they enjoy listening to music. Whereas the dancer learns to dance because they enjoy dancing. And I do believe like some of the richest parts of dance are through experience and that’s why that feels like like a trope, maybe, or something, and that dance as an art form, then hopefully can lend itself to a more participatory spectatorship where listening is more included or readily available. It’s definitely a stage or a place. Dance is where the code can be super dramatically different, and you can invite an audience to listen to your dance sooner than not listening to it. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m now. wandering around in my talking. Yeah. But I also. I think what listening to you and doing your practices invites to me is and maybe it’s that frustration thing, is the sort of desire to sort of dream of like where dance could exist. Parallel or in other ways, or these practices, this relationality, the sensitivity, where they could sort of exist in the world, in other other amounts and so on.. It puts a question mark around art as a sort of industry and condition and label.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah.

PETER:

And that’s really powerful just to we can still be there in the studio. We can still go to art events and things. But to have a little bit of dupability, a little bit of doubt around it, for me, allows for an opening that maybe other parts of the world that maybe I haven’t even named and recognized as places to be in relationship with things. Can open up for me.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah. That’s really nice.

PETER:

A little bit waffly. Yeah. It’s but it’s I’m really. Yeah, really privileged to come into your practice and, like, get to noodle around a little bit with you.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah, it’s really fun. Yeah, as I said, like, I’ve been doing this, like, alone for the most part. So it’s only recently that and I’ve not done it much at all but have like invited other people in yeah and to start to think of because I think ultimately like want to be doing things more with others and in collective and Yeah. It’s just financially, that’s always difficult

PETER:

Yeah, yeah.

Lorea Burge:

But it’s been really nice for me to like, to test those and to test those ideas out with others and find ways to also articulate the things that I do kind of intuitively. Like, to put words to it to be able to out others to experience a version of it to.

PETER:

And hopefully this does that a little bit. Like that’s my intention is to sort of to have these opportunities, these exchanges, these collectivities, and then try to make it even a broader collective that this recording could stay on online for as long as I can afford, but that a larger collective can engage in some of this collectivity that we’re experiencing from doing the practice together, and that maybe it could continue as well into, yeah, further collaborations and stuff that people can reach out to you perhaps and things. I mean, especially just to before I ask you about how to get in touch and stuff. like, ’cause we we hadn’t talked about anything that we would really do today until we were recording. Yeah. And I think it’s, it’s important, or it’s not important, but it’s nice to recognize like these invitations through these episodes of the podcast is really to say and invite a collectivity that people can listen and imagine or even try and do some of these things and have their own relationship to our relationship to it. And yeah, perhaps even come and see you or talk to you or follow you somehow. So how would they do that?

Lorea Burge:

How would they do that? Um.. Um, I have a website.

PETER:

You do. It’s an amazing website. It is It’s actually a really nice website.

Lorea Burge:

Thank you, which is more kind of like a sort of portfolio or something. Which needs to be updated. But that’s just my name. loreaburge.com. And then also, I, the stuff that’s more up to date regretfully is Instagram. So that is actually a very easy way to see the things that I’m doing. Because I use that mostly for work stuff. yeah. Yeah. I don’t have any. shows of this coming up for now, I think. I’m doing I’ an improvised performance at an event called Roadhouse Next Friday in Leeds.

PETER:

You’re right. I’m not sure I’ll get it out at this time.

Lorea Burge:

I can be one for the past. I did a show in.. But yeah. No, I don’t have anything booked in.

PETER:

But I will I link it in like the description online and on the website and stuff. And also, we haven’t actually come up with many references during this. There’s a few things that we mentioned, of course, like Martin, Hardgreaves.

Lorea Burge:

The Rose Choreographic School.

PETER:

Exactly. Sadler Wells. And I will linked them, but maybe also if you have any references that come to mind that you would like to share, we can also

Lorea Burge:

Add those in

PETER:

link them those in great. Yeah, I’ll have a link. Just to enrich it and also, yeah, I’ll link to as much as your stuff as I can so that people can connect with you and relate to you.

Lorea Burge:

Great..

PETER:

Further. And maybe we do another one of these and we’ll see why your practice is in. Yeah. In the future.

Lorea Burge:

Yeah You can do it one with a little tech.

PETER:

Cool. Thank you so much.

Lorea Burge:

Thank you. It’s been really nice.

PETER:

Yeah. Bye, everyone.

Lorea Burge:

Bye.

1. Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary dance
2. Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
3. Micheal Kegan Dolan https://teacdamsa.com/about/
4. Rite of Spring Fabulous Beast – https://youtu.be/jsRKugYT03c?si=aI0dO4iS4AjEmNn3
5. Agnes and Walter: A Little Love Story Created and Directed by Neil Paris
6. Laban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_von_Laban
7. Dartington college of arts
8. Steve Paxton ’Small Dance’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oWA1sWMlOk
9. Alejandro Mexican Sharman
10. Morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance
11. The Corby group is Deep Roots Tall Trees Dancetheatre https://www.deeprootstalltrees.org/Activities/
12. The group in Brighton is led by Yael Flexer https://www.flexerandsandiland.com/brighton-classes
13. ‘Course E’ at Shawbrook 2007 summer school for aspiring dancers in Ireland led by Fabulous Beast (Micheal Kegan Dolan, Neil Paris, and Philip Feeney)
14. London Coliseum https://londoncoliseum.org/
15. Family Constellations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Constellations

PETER:

Hello, today I’m here with what do I say? Neil Paris or Neil Smith?

Neil Paris:

I think you’ve just said You’ve just said it both. I’m kind of both really, but I suppose, yeah, you know.

PETER:

Neil Paris is professional name.

Neil Paris:

Paris is the professional name yeah.

PETER:

When we know each other from the origin, like of my career, I was still at school when we met. I was still at Rambert. Wow. Learning to be a dancer and finding my feet in the world, and aspiring to be doing what you were doing, right then with fabulous Beast. And you became the. I don’t want to say father figure, but you were the person who took care of me throughout that period of my life, entering into a company, and performing on the biggest stage I’ve ever performed on in the West End with a full size orchestra, The right of spring, a massive, a massive production. And you had been there from the audition to the sort of summer schools that Michael Keegan Dolan had me come to and attend as we got to know each other. And then for the R&D, the research with the Mexican shaman, Ajandro, and then into the rehearsals and so on and we often shared a room, we shared a dressing room, we were there through it all. So 16 years later, I’m in Cambridge, you’re in Cromer. It made sense to reach out to you.

Neil Paris:

It’s lovely.

PETER:

And I mean, and also after Fabulous Beast, we did have some contact.. I got to work with you as you started to develop your own work.

Neil Paris:

Yes, yeah. You were right there at the beginning. Really, right at the very, very in section of that kind of first time it came out of my head and into a space and you and Julia came along and acted for me. which was. Which was wonderful. And also I was thinking it was a lovely kind of exchange the deal was you and Julia could also then have the space and it was, yeah, so it was it was instrumental

PETER:

yeah, because I mean I was finding my feet still after trying working as a dancer and then trying to figure out, okay, how do I relate to what is in me and what that means and what it means to be in in or with dance. But anyway, this is about you. So if people don’t know you, how do you how do you introduce yourself? We were talking a bit about this earlier, but maybe today, what would you how would you describe yourself for? what are some of the key points that you’d like people to know of you?

Neil Paris:

Gosh, it’s always so difficult. What’s my title? I suppose. What do you say, dance and movement artist? Or is it a movement and dance artist? I don’t know which one comes first. Most of my work now is with people who haven’t had formal training or it’s a long time since they’ve done formal training. So a lot of the people I’m working with now are certainly over 50, possibly over into the 60s, 70s. and a few younger now It’s little bit more intergenerational. And I’m really, I guess, concerned with giving them an opportunity to move, to really explore that side of themselves, that maybe as never really fully been explored, or has been in some cases is laying dormant for a little while, I give them the opportunity to express themselves through moving physically and as part of that, finding ways in which I can help them with more freedom, with ease of movement, with safety, with, and then building on solid solid skills. So that hopefully the skills enable the freedom, which enables the skills, which and to see themselves as dancers..

PETER:

And it’s still rooted in where you came from as a dancer and as a maker.

Neil Paris:

Yeah, I think so. I think because before Fabulous Beast, before I’d gone to Laban, I’d gone to Dartington college of arts, which was very much about, which was a theater ranking course. But it was theatre making in a social kind of in a always had that kind of social context, so it wasn’t really about being able to enter the industry and to get an agent. It was about how how do you have a stay with things, with people and create something? And I think that’s grounded me into into what I’ve done since really, I think about it. It’s. And the work with the intensity of the work with Fabulous Beast and being surrounded by such extraordinary performers and people. has, yeah, has kind of embedded itself. I think I’m really quite committed still to ensemble and group that specialness of what it’s like to be part of that group, that find that language of movement or they share that and you share the rhythm and you that’s still, I think it’s still quite an important part of what I do, yeah, and it’s all. It’s all still in there. you know.

PETER:

And so now what I ask is usually, what are you busy with? What are we going to do today? And we’ve already done what we’re going to do mainly, but maybe you could still introduce for the listeners before we open it up into how it felt and everything and our reflection. Just what it is that we did today. Okay. I have my opinions, of course, but I’d love that you.

Neil Paris:

Well, practically it’s an online class and it’s called No Big Idea, NBI, it’s become known as. And it started off 10 years as a in real life, in person class, which I kind of set up for myself as much as anything, so I would move regularly, and invited a few people I knew to say that you’t come and take part. And these were all, you know, essentially kind of non-dances. So we would meet every week. Sometimes we’d make pieces. and then in COVID, obviously it all stopped, but then we just tried putting it online. which meant that people from France could join in and people from London could join in and people from Corby. And it never went back. It’ never really gone back from being online because the group didn’t want to lose those new people. Yeah. So yeah, so today is an hour and a half of, you know, a fairly structured session or structured warm-up, but then it moves into an improvisation breakouts, a bit of a chat. improvisation 2.

PETER:

do you want to maybe just mention what was the focus for today? Because it’s quite specific, and maybe you could even mention some of the exercises we did.

Neil Paris:

So. kind of that the Yeah, there is this, if you think of what you mean, like thinking from, actually talk through the way it works.

PETER:

Yeah.

Neil Paris:

Okay, well, the way it works is that it normally have what we call a dance track. So it’s just a fun track for people to just begin to move. It’s also that and it’s also to like, it’s that threshold moment of like, okay, you’re leaving your I know you’re in your your bedroom, your lounge or wherever you are but this is the moment that you transition into your dance space.

PETER:

Yeah.

Neil Paris:

So we have that and then there’s a very comes from the Fabulous Beast days of kind of yoga-based warm-up. Which is really useful online because it means I can absolutely make sure that they I know that I’ve prepped them. Yeah, because when you’re not in the room with them, you can’t you can’t. And then that moved into four layers today, which was something I kind of, I’m not sure I think I made it up, but it’s just basically the idea of that very subtle impulses within the body. trying to get ourselves to listen in very carefully to what’s already happened to what’s already happening.. Saw a lovely video recently. Someone sent us to Steve Paxton just before he died doing what he called Tiny Dance.. And it was just him stood still in nature. But obviously, so it’s that thing of just acknowledging that you’ve got all of those things that are happening. and that develops into then connecting into the physical body, which is your muscles and your bones. Articulations, and then we look at moving into space and then we connect with each other. So it’s just those….

PETER:

Four layers,

Neil Paris:

yeah, and it’s called four layers.. So we kind of starts here and it moves out, out, out, out, out, out, out. But then as you were saying, how do you then main, but then it’s about what Kate, when we’re moving. Oh we want to stay connected to all of those bits. And part of it is hopefully, you never need to make a move up. If you’re there’s something. try to get people away from thinking about what their movement should look like, because I always found for me, if we were discussing, I said, I could cut my head off and not be intellectualizing. I what I think the move should look like, or what’s. How can I be more moving from the body?

PETER:

Yeah.

Neil Paris:

And then act more consciously, because unconscious movement. that’s limited. So how do you find little structures that you can then bring your consciousness to? So you can know that, oh, my arm’s my arm isn’t fully extended. Or I’m doing the same things all the time. So we use that and then we moved into a couple of tracks that we’ve been using where it’s now developed where I was like saying to them okay here’s your first improvisation. It’s a solo improvisation, so it’s just you on your own. for them to explore however they want, maybe. And I introduced the idea of imaginary partner today.

PETER:

Yes.

Neil Paris:

So sometimes I’ll add an idea into the first improv. Maybe there’ll be images with it. It depends on perhaps what has happened more recently. But today’s was, yeah, just imagine there is someone in the room with you and… how that can affect your. So you’re not alone, even though you are alone.. And then we go into a breakout. And essentially, I’m kind of looking from the moment we start to dancing to the moment we go to the breakout, there isn’t really a break. I’m interested in that kind of how do you not. Because the place that you get to after the rotations and the place that you get to after four layers, you’re kind of already how do we just continue that all the way through? So for them, it can be like 45 minutes of fairly concentrated movement. And the breakouts are really in their break. And the idea was they used to be like, now think about what you’ve just done. Make some notes. But now people just have a chat. And it’s just that they have the drink and some water in. And then we come back and then today those people that you were in the breakout room with, you have a duet with them.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, that was nice.

Neil Paris:

Same tracks, but there may be something like for you and Helen you got into that discussion of sea, of coastal inland and that then informed informed your duet.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then we we had a dance at the end.

Neil Paris:

Yeah, and then another little breakout just to give people an opportunity to, because I think it was something you were saying earlier about how the difference was when someone is dancing on their own and when someone is actually working in a pair, that dialogue gets going and I think I’ve really found that. It’s not just a break, actually, it’s let them have that dialogue and also say, God, thank you, that and to say thank you, I really enjoyed dancing with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. thank you for that that was and for them also to realise that sometimes I think I’ve heard them think they haven’t got much to offer and oh, it’s so great watching you, Neil. It’s all right. I find like if I partner them.. I love working with them, because I’m like,Oh, my God, Sue, what is that that you do? Yeah. What is that? And I can’t. It’s not in my book, What is that? I love the way you do that. Yeah. And it’s genuine. Yeah. And so hopefully people get to really appreciate that. Actually, they are really good.

PETER:

And quite simple. Just arms in the air, but there’s something that we’ve what she’s doing,

Neil Paris:

yeah. And I think they’re and it’s that thing about, I think I’ve always talked about it. If you’re connected to your movement, if you’re connected to your image, if you’re connected to whatever you’ you’re connected somewhere to it, and it shows. Yeah, that you know that there’s something going on. So we had the breakout and then we have often have a couple of tracks just to kind of dance out, which is the opposite of that

PETER:

at the beginning.

Neil Paris:

You can leave all of this stuff we’ve just done now and get on for a day and a warm down to finish.

PETER:

No, it’s great.

Neil Paris:

That’s how it’s pretty much how we do a session.

PETER:

But that’s great. And so now, we’ll we’ll pause and there’ll be a break before we start reflecting. And it just gives people at home the opportunity to imagine a little bit what we did, perhaps even try something, maybe they have the opportunity to stand and to be with some of the words and the things that you’ve put into this room Yeah, so we’ll come back in a minute and see you there.

PAUSE

PETER:

OK, great we’re back and this is now I mean the problem is Neil we are reflecting all the time anyways.

Neil Paris:

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Always reflecting.

PETER:

But this was wonderful, to dance with you, to be in your practice and let you say, to remember those times and it was an intense year two years of dancing together and dealing with very big things, which I’m still dealing with. And so yeah, to have the opportunity to be back in the studio was really a special..

Neil Paris:

And. Likewise.

PETER:

I think. I mean, maybe you can say a little bit because, I mean, it’s your practice and you already described it in great detail. But maybe because it was me and you dancing, some of those things came up for me, so the sort of digging and peat. I want to say folk. So like what we did with Fabulous Beast, there was this sort of rural Irish of course. homage and paying attention to and privileging since it had been such a repressed and colonialized culture, for want to a bad word. And at the time, it wasn’t a really fully conscious of that. But being here now and having that time to rethink, having seen kneecap, you know, this summer and reengaging with some of those stories and remembering some of the things we were doing, which was about trying to get back to something more authentic, something that’s more ourselves. So I’m just curious a little bit of that experience because for me, images of farming, of toiling the field, and I have to think of my my mum’s father’s side was all farmers. Oh, really? sheep farming, crop farming. And there would have been laborers, of course. Yeah, yeah. At least what I know of my great grandfather. And so those traditions are in the family, I was just reading about how he moved away from that, and into engineering. And then you see how then my mum moved into nursing and became a professional and then how then I became an artist and a dancer, But there’s that lineage in that history and those types of that class struggle in a lot of ways. and being back in the UK, in the Fenlands, in Cambridgeshire for me but, coming over to the coast to Cromer, to see you. I am sort of thinking about of this place, of these people, these people that were overlooked and lost to time, to power struggles and so on. But what is that is there a folk nature to the work for you still or it is about the people as well.

Neil Paris:

I think so in as much as I suppose in as much as it is about the people that I’m working with. I don’t wouldn’t say there’s anything particularly linked to the folk scene or the folk dance structure that we have in this country as such, but I think in as much as it’s from it’s from the people, that I’m working with. I would say, yes, it is connected into their.. Because I suppose if I’m… Yeah, what is folk dance? I mean, dance, folk dance is dance with folk. It’s dance with people. Exactly, right. And you think, well, all dance is, folk dance, really, because it’s dance with people.. But I suppose it’s, you know, it’s got a kind of a genre that you imagine and not even Morris, but just even the particular rhythms that are used in the music with it and there’s that as we experience as a kind of intimate ground, there’s a kind of yeah, into the earth.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah.

Neil Paris:

Whereas I suppose, you know, contemporary ballet is up or ballet’s about leaving you. folk feels like it’s about getting into the earth, which is I think fed into where Michael was working and and his you know, especially thinking perhaps with his ballet training, I think it’s all about this. And he wanted to get down. Yeah. And the amount of time we are.

PETER:

From the up to the down.

Neil Paris:

We were either talking about rooting and getting down. But I just think it’s interesting to what you say because I grew up basically in a rural environment. out here in Norfolk, you know, 8, 10 miles outside the city. But actually, all my, I’ve got, I don’t know any lineage that’s linked to the land. All of my family are kind of urban in terms of they were working in factories, yeah. Shoe operatives.

PETER:

And your name, of course, Smith.

Neil Paris:

Smith is someone who makes. Yeah. And, you know, my dad was in factory and his father was a plasterer and all of his family. So they were very much an. although I know I’ve come to realise, I grew up rural, my background context is urban.

PETER:

I mean, when we’ve been talking, we talk a long walk, along the beach in Cromer, and it’s so weathered and a sense of nature and also Helen brought up the waves of the sea. But we were talking about, what do you call what we do? And you were saying how that struggle of calling it dance or what style of dance are we doing? And exactly me bringing in that sort of easy into a conversation, of course, by bringing in the word folk, but of course, exactly as you say, that’s a genre, almost or a style.

Neil Paris:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER:

And yet, there’s something, maybe about the tradition of dance from the folk. Tradition, maybe. There seems to be really important. The fact that you’re gathering these people and it’s not a big idea. It’s not. It is just to dance.

Neil Paris:

But don’t now we’re talking about it, I think this is perhaps one of the shifts with. If we’re thinking about I’m gathering the people with no big idea, but I think from what I understand of the origins of some folk dance is there was a big idea to it because it was about this ritual element to it, ceremony and they were connected to seasons and acts. So there was a function, I think, a lot from my understanding of it is connected to the function of those dances in those days when. And I think in some cultures it still exist, but not so much now it’s become more of a decorative art form, but it had its root in, this is the dance that marks the end of the harvest. This is the dance that’s going to bring a dance for this, which used to exist so much more in our society and those kind of things of have gone and it has become a it’s not functionless, but the function, it’s not got a sign of a social function as such. And I think finding any kind of dance that still has that. social function. And that’s why I said what I would do is it hasn’t it hasn’t got a social function outside of the people that take part in it.

PETER:

Yeah. No, I get that. That’s. And it’s nice that you bring it up. And of course, I can pay homage to these ideas of toiling the soil and stuff. And of course, there was also those dances that would have been work dances, labouring dances, or labouring songs and rhythms and that sort of get borne out of the work of the machinic work or sort of the hammering or the marching or all these sort of associations with labor. But you’re right. Yeah, that element of for a purpose, for reason. And of course, when we did the rite, family and heritage was sort of the core central feature of the research we were doing. Looking back at our ancestors, looking back at our families. And of course, I’m already, it already comes up and I have to think of, you know, how we have like a family a family tree of dancers as well, people who have influenced us and I think what was really rich in that work was exactly how we being influenced and affected by who we are and where we’ve come from and and like so many ways, it truly affected the dance, for me at least. I mean, especially I had that solo, which came directly from the the family constellation work we did.. So it was so relatable to this idea of who we are and where we’re from. So I apologize for bringing that in placing it on the work. But that we were doing today, of course. But it’s. It’s still. There’s still echoes. I mean, you have the yoga practice in there and there. So it’s hard to get away from it really.

Neil Paris:

Yeah. And I think. I mean, partly of using that yoga practice it is so effective. Yeah. It’s just a I mean, I can’t. And yeah,. For all of you of the things that happened in that time and the things that took away, I think learning how that practice is really effective. And the people people that I do with, if I leave it out, they always want it back. And But yeah, I mean, you can’t not be influenced by that experience. Even some of the, you know, like most experiences, you learn things you don’t want to do. And I think we probably all learn that that’s not the way I want to do it. And I think that idea of, like when I left Fabulous Beast and I made Agnes and Walter, which you were part of that, really early, early thing. I was very much not wanting to repeat that create that environment that we eventually kind of found ourselves in which didn’t feel healthy, was intense, but I was interested in trying to. But also with Agnes and Walter, I was working with someone who was 69, someone who was 79. from the community. I thought, well, I can’t subject and there was something in me that’s like it doesn’t have to it doesn’t does it have to be this way Could you make a really lovely piece of work without what it felt like the pain? I think there was a certain amount of sense of, you have to suffer in order to make something. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there are elements of truth in that. Yeah. But whether it was. I was questioning that when I left. Yeah. And I think, amul, it seemed to me that you were mentioned, the history of the Ireland as colonised. They did suffer a lot. There was a lot of suffering in Ireland, and it was a lot of it was, as I was at the hands of England and you know, it colonized it, it punished it. And that felt like it was a bit kind of endemic in what we were doing, you know So I was interested in, could I not working in that way? And I think that working in opposition to what I’ve been through is still an influence that that carried me forward.

PETER:

And I mean, and it was such a powerful experience. I mean, and there’s so many things that clearly still are precious and lingering. But it was massive. It was such a big project and it was the pinnacle of all that work that fabulous beast had done until that period to sort of surmise almost and try to make this piece and it was a great hit. It really really made a mark, I think. So it’s sort of it’ss a strange relationship where we sort of find ourselves within the industry as well, like, and how it pushes certain agendas and certain needs. And one thing that I think is really remarkable, because you spoke a bit about how when we come in, we play the sort of get in track, just the song to start dancing. Yeah. And I don’t maybe you didn’t say that, but I had this sense of like. I’m a professional We know how to do this, so I should already be ready. But I felt the difference between what I was doing before then we did the the yoga mobilization and then the layers. By the time I’d gone through that, the world that I was available to was just vastly different. And it’s just astonishing how little is needed to dance and exactly as you were saying, you started doing these little classes and this practice in a way, for yourself to be able to dance. It’s really. It’s so little that it’s needed, but it’s so much that comes from it. It’s really powerful stuff. you know,

Neil Paris:

I’m now just thinking again, back to everything that you know, the training that we went through to create the right and the training that I’d been on with that company for the four or five years before that, you know, and the first thing in the morning was on your mat.. In silence, cross leg going forward. Now we start. So there was an intensity right from the beginning of the day, which. So what’s the other way is, well, we just bring it in, you know, the lightness that can so maybe maybe that is also a little bit of that element of play and lightness is really valuable as well. So let’s just start with a bit of that and then. Yeah. Because I’m really interested in that as well. When you, it’s like saying I was like my cousin’s 50th birthday and we’re all just up dancing, and I love those social party dance environments when everyone just kind of gets up and oh. and you look at it and everyone loves it. But virtually everyone gets up But you ask them to, do you want to come and do some stuff? They’ll Yeah. And I was talking to my uncle about this and he said, “Oh, he said, I remember, I remember it was a good party for grandma his mum, my grandmother. And he said, ” oh, it was down there all of a sudden he said, ” you got up. And you were doing some kind of surfboard type of thing. surfing thing. I said, what, I? And he said, he said, I remember going, “Is that Neil? He said, “Because normally, I was I wasn’t I didn’t get involved in anything like that. Yeah, yeah. But he said, ” that was the. And I was like, “W, you remember that?” So there must have been a moment, but all of a sudden I thought, i must has said, I want to I want to do that. And I guess that was how it I’d never heard that story before and I must have been quite young because he said he was still in the forces at the time. Okay. But I think that thing is something important of as professional dancers, it’s not always target focus, but you know you’ve got to get there’s a show that we’re making and in our case, there’s going to be steps and there’s gotta be learned and you’ve got to learn it but embody perform it. So there’s that whole thing that’s got to be. So the kind of thing that can come out of people having joy… And that is a creative tool. how do you do you create from a joyful place? Yeah, yeah. Which. And it brings a different energy into the room.

PETER:

Absolutely. And. No, no,

Neil Paris:

I’m I’m still trying to that question of how do I create something for you? Just from pure joy?

PETER:

V. Maybe also to think, I think what we are tip toeing around as well is very interesting or like, what dance is, especially since we’re coming from, I mean, fabulous Beast is a dance theatre company. it was. And or or you could say physical theatre or whatever you want to however you want to label it. But. dance does hold something different. Thinking about, I see you were saying, those folk ritualistic practices, where theatre tends to be about narrative as a way of reflecting, quite ordered and structured. And those things definitely exist in ritual and dance practices, but there’s also something beyond comprehension that sort of made available in those dance moments, in those moments where it’s too untangible to really nail, beat to beat, what is trying to be portrayed. Narrative wise. And that blend almost, that fight, that struggle to demonstrate, where those moments for pure joy, emotion beyond conclusion of a sort of story or something can sort of emerge. And I had to think about, yes, there’s, there isn’t that desperate struggle. And to think about what would are the dances have been, actually, would people have been able to have danced when they were fighting the British, fighting the English. Are people still able to dance in Gaza, for instance, right? In such strife, unimaginable strife. There’s something that seems so detached from what we’re doing. And yet, Helen, in the discussion, which I thought was really interesting, because you were saying, oh, they break out and they just get a break and chat, right? It’s nothing. But it wasn’t. She said to me, she says, “O, today, I have to go for a dentist appointment.” which is a form of strife. She said, “Oh, I’ve got figure this out, I’ve got to get to the dentist.” But then she mentioned how her cat came in the room and started doing the movements. And so, even though she was talking about her date, she was actually also talking about reflecting on the dance as well. And then we spoke, I spoke a little bit about the earth and things like. Images that had come up for me and she started to dig into this trauma was maybe too strong, but like, upset that she had around the erosion of the coast of a certain part of this coast because of a power plant or something like this. And her devastation to be losing that habitat and what that means. And it was not political. Does that makes sense? It’s emotional. She wasn’t she wasn’t really creating a sort of rational reading of this is what we need to do. We need to lobby this and this. It was really, I was with those waves and how they move and how the land is just being destroyed and changing. And I had to think, yeah, we start with joy, but also it allows for so much. That’s dance space.

Neil Paris:

Yes.. Yeah. And I think hopefully making sure that there is some enjoying or starting from a light place, does it set a time where if stuff does it emerge, which interests me work in physically working with dance and also I’ve experienced work working with voice. You can’t always predict when something is gonna touch. So maybe that’s that’s also also part of it. I’m also conscious that the people that I’m working with, they’re not professionals, they’re not.. I haven’t bought their time. Because from the industry side, the things, you know, we were paid, we were bought. We were supposed to be there at this particular time, and you were supposed to do your eight or nine hours of whatever we were doing, and you applied yourself as a. So there is a slightly different relationship there between someone who’s coming voluntarily, and they’re not signed a contract.

PETER:

No, no, no.

Neil Paris:

But if it’s interesting, yeah, the way suddenly, yeah, there was this thing for her, how.. She was. Yeah, she’s really angry about her.

PETER:

Yeah. You know? I mean, it’s quite the thought experiment, which we probably can’t get into to imagine if we had done everything for the right of spring that we did, but without contracts, what would have emerged? Actually, Without the. I mean, maybe there still would be a massive performance in the things. But to imagine that there wasn’t that tension of professionalism and contracts and owing and hierarchies and things and that, because some of those things we did were just spectacular. I mean, from the meditations to the yoga, to the sweat lodges, to the rehearsals. And exactly as you were saying just before we started, you know, so much talent, all in one room. It’s it’s it’s a phenomenal thing to sort of have paid witness to. One thing that I was thinking about, you were talking about the breakout rooms and I was thinking about, especially the last one, where we’d danced for our partner and got to watch them, and you were sort of touching on this, this quality that I think is so interesting we’ve dance, where it almost the experience gets heightened through conversation when when it meets a person and starts to find some articulation in the world, even though we know it’s never fully the words never fully capture the whole dance. Just like now, we’re trying to capture something that will never fully be able to do. We know that we would always have to go and dance again, but yet trying and giving word which sort of appreciate her, give time and strengthen and hold and believe it. It’s a very interesting relationship. But I’ve really felt like that, or I can imagine as well that that sharing after provides that space as well.

Neil Paris:

Yeah, it’s. I, yeah, I really agree with you on that. And I think it’s something that I’ve I’ve come to value a lot more over time. And I suppose also as the groups that I’ve been working with, because I’ve been lucky enough to work with two groups consistently over six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years. So I’ve seen them all develop. It is about, okay, so now how do you develop that verbal language to kind of articulate what you’ve seen and how that can really support and feed the other person and grow the dance the next time. Whereas I don’t think I would I would have probably just kept people moving. No, deliberately, I remember the earlier days I’d be like, yeah, I don’t worry about it. But then it’s like, okay, now, how do you describe as part of the sorts of part of their development as movers is that the more you can observe to see But it’s really valuable, because then. people feel when you say to someone else, I just love I loved the way you did that.” And they say, if I’m in the room with them, they say to me, “I just love that, you know, thanks.” You realise you still want that approval for all that approval, praise, affirmation, as a mover, and I think for some. Some perhaps someone like Helen, who you worked with, he’s probably in the latest to the group. Okay. She’s not been with us, well over a year now. And her movement ranges is expanded, but it’s restricted, it’s limited to some degree. So for her to then get back A to get that for us, but also for you to look at it and go, actually, the way you did that. It reminds me that it’s not all about.

PETER:

No, because her movement was just so beautiful. She had these I mean, and it was interesting because I was emphasizing on how the viscosity that sort of slowness of her waves gave me such more of a powerful understanding.

Neil Paris:

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

PETER:

Of the movement of the tides and of the waves, then my sort of explosive whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh interpretation of waves. And it just enriches that conversation that we’re having with this material, with this. And I mean, what’s really central in everything you’re doing? I mean, and also you’re working Corby and stuff, which we haven’t really even opened that you’ve been doing for so long. Is this sense of community and building a community and being together? And yeah, I know this is very much that, but it feels so important in your work. And even though, especially in the Corby work, if I understand it right, there is a performative element. The coming together and finding a commonality to sort of to do something together seems to be really rich and important for your work.

Neil Paris:

And I think it’s important for the people who come to do it. The social is for these people, the social, is as almost as important sometimes than. No, it’s not as important. It’s an important part of their whole coming on a Wednesday evening. Yeah. They know each other in a different way because they’re dancing with each other, they’ve moved with each other and they’re part of a group. You get that kind of they’re part of a like we call, we kind of call them a company now, but they’re a part of that group and I think it’s really important to them to be part of it. And so being part of that community, and now with with the Corby group, like we traveled down to Brighton earlier this year to work with Yale Flexes intergenerational group. And so they’re now hopefully beginning and Yale came up and did some work with them and they’ve worked with another artist. So introducing them to other dance artists and trying to get. They’ve been hoping to see themselves as part of a wider dance community, you know, you see that you’re part of this is part of a whole national thing. They know about the fact that there’s other groups, but how do you then get get them, give them the opportunity to see themselves as part of a much bigger community of people that are you’re not the only people who like to move in this way. Because Corby like a lot of towns surrounded by, you gig a chance class, you’ve got a step class, you’ve got a ballet classes. You know, you’ve got, you haven’t got anything, like. Look, we do. Yeah. You know, and like what you’re offering, there’s not really anything else like that. But there are more people doing it who are of a like mind. Yes, yeah. who understand or a like body, even. Yeah.. You physically. When we took them to Brighton, they went to Southeast Dance. She dances in a fairly new purpose built dance centre. So you go in and whereas we working over the chore, which is fabulous, because it’s big and we’ve got cold space, and it’s wonderful. You know, they’re going in there, and there’s a class already going on. we’re in there in 10 minutes and

PETER:

Yeah. Wow.

Neil Paris:

Here are your lockers. That experience of being.. So they went there, so very different, and then they met this other group, similar ages, but they and Bright, so. Some of them clearly already had a previous practice. Yeah. But they had. sounds really tough. But you know, they looked like they came from Brighton. They had a a whole cosmopolit and the kind of. But they came out and they went, “We did all right in there, didn’t we?” I thought we held our own..Cause you bloody dead. And they did, and now they’re like,Do you know what? We’re all right, aren’t You know, they’ve had that opportunity to look look at themselves against other people who’ve been dancing as long, if not longer. Well, I think we’re quite good up. Yeah. And that seems quite important for them now to see themselves. There’s part of a wider community that they can. conside they’ve only got me to keep saying, you’re doing really well. I really love what you doing. And of course, I do, but it’s just me. This class is in, I mean I don’t really have a style, but… Or I didn’t think I did. but I think I possibly have, and I think I’m encouraging people with the. I think I’m beginning with the exercises that I’m doing. I think basically, I’m trying to encourage you to experience what I’m experiencing. But you’ve only got one person to keep. At some point, you want to go, like, test yourself mainly. They’re doing that, you know, they And they’re wanting to perform and they’re wanting to share what they do. Yes. Not so much this group, but because I ask them, do you want to do performances? I’m like, yeah. Okay. They want to share what they’re doing. They’re proud of it and they value it. And even if they get small audiences, they still want and I think they also want to now they want that. They understand that there’s that different journey from your creation to the kind of choreographing or the collating to the editing. to the the rigor of their okay well. Yeah. We need to get this ready for performance. and I think they’ve they’re appreciating that journey now.

PETER:

And it’s I mean, and it’s it’s admirable, isn’t it? Because we know how difficult it is actually to move towards a public facing thing. Like, we struggled, as I said, like with, how do we call? what we’re doing? What is this? And exactly as you say, like, it’s my style, it’s what I enjoy. But yet we know dance history, we know all the words, and yet still, there’s a difficulty and it’s similar. It’s very similar to then putting that on a stage and sharing with society at large, a larger community, and hoping that they might join our community or share in some part of that what we’re going through, and so on, I have to think about how when there’s a crisis or when there is yeah, when there’s a crisis in oneself or in the world, we go to a place to get help. You know, we go to the doctors, we go to therapy, we go to There are places that are for crisis and our world isn’t about crisis, it’s separate. However, listening to the people talking during the class today, in the dancing today, it starts to make me think about how having a community that can also absorb crisis is also really important and how that that we can we can somehow be together through crisis as well. It doesn’t happen to be something that you disappear and come back to, and the fact that you’re working with people, you were talking about people needing hip replacements and stuff. and that you can be in that journey with them losing potentially range of movement or flexibility or possibility of certain access to types of activities and that as a group, and with the scores and the dances that you’re doing, it includes those changes and the shifts in a community. So when we get depressed, when we aren’t in mourning, when we have a loss, when the world hasn’t allowed for something that we’re there for each other. And so that’s why also I’m thinking the fact that your group wants to take that to a stage is really, it’s really brave because there’s something very precious about having a familiar space a place where you can trust that you can be together regardless of what you’re going through, or whilst you’re going through things, and that it’s not like work where if something tragic happens, you lose a loved one or something, you know, that’s common thing of, oh, go away and then come back when you’re better or when it when it’s and it’s as if as if it doesn’t matter, as if it’s somehow can’t be a part of that community. And as if it can be solved as well. Like the loss of a loved one could be just sort of resolved neatly in the therapist’ office and then you’re back to normal in six weeks or back to your…

Neil Paris:

Your productivity levels are not back. But you’re right, working in this way is ultimately hyper should be really flexible. It’s like you can work with work with what anybody brings. That’s really the all they can work with whatever they bring. And if someone is there they should always be a way of you know, adapting what we do, what they do. Yeah, because certainly some people do come and say, you know, this is really give me a problem. You know, physical thing, you said, well, okay, just don’t just. Just don’t do it. But I had someone a few weeks ago and they have got some, and I think they’ve got some fairly serious history of depression and. They are fairly new to the group as well. And they kind of had come and mentioned to be. I said, I think I’m like, I’m on on the bit of a slide again. Yeah. Is like, OK, well.. That’s fine. Yeah. But it was interested in Peter, ’cause, you know. I think not even so long ago I’d have been, okay, we’ll just do exactly what you want. You know, you want to sit down? Yeah. But I was actually more like Bullet. I encouraged you to do to take part, do take part. And I think before I’d been much more on cautious about that. But I said, just however you want, but. And she’ got through and she had a she said, I’m so glad I did it. Yeah. I didn’t stop the directory, but I think… That being part of that community, knowing you can still come to it, you can still take part in it, and you can be accepted and… Wherever you are when you or you can step away from it. That’s the other thing. It’s a bit like, well, if you want to step away, that’s fine. That’s okay. There’s no. I’m not, we’re not going to go. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t realise what you’ve. You know, we’re working to a performance. You trying and. I think you almost have to have that approach doing this kind of work because people have lives and they’re very unpredictable. And crisis comes at different times. and perhaps perhaps working with an older community, we’re noticing, like some people have got friends are real and that’s happening more regularly and you think of that’s I think that kind of openness also somehow breeds a.. I think it’s a kind of a reciprocal thing, whereas suddenly they almost are they are really committed to the group because they know they’ve got the community that the community will say, yeah you can. It’s okay, you can’t come. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Come back when you’re ready. Yeah. That’s fine. We’ll still be here. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, we can absorb your crisis without making any reference to it. We’re not suddenly going to turn this into some kind of therapeutic session.

PETER:

Yeah.

Neil Paris:

It will be therapeutic, but we’re not gonna gonna turn it into something. I’m not gonna turn it into something. It’s not mine. It’s not my skill set.

PETER:

No exactly, I was at Rambert teaching at the school I trained at, and so many students came up to me before class, which is good, so I’m aware, but we’ve sort of my knee, I’ve done some in my knee, my hip, I’ve done something. And the things I was teaching didn’t require anyone to do anything that would harm themselves. Everyone would be able to sort of adjust to what they needed, at least that was my intention. So I tried to explain that, but it really occurred to me, you know, if anyone has a physical, different abilities or struggles, there’s what place do they have within these context? How can they continue dancing and things? It’ And it’s really, it’s really important to Or maybe not important, but how do we appreciate those kind of coming together and dancing, which allows for that, in a way that’s why, for me, perhaps, when people are asked, oh, what’s your dance style or what’s your thing and and it’s frustrating because if I were to be prescriptive, then I wouldn’t be able to be so inclusive of different types of bodies, hopefully, and different types of physical ability. I think. too grand. And that’s not any shade on people who work with style, I think you can do that in very mindful ways as well.. But how how you create openings that remain open is very difficult thing. But when it happens, when you have a community that can give it a chance and stay there and keep on pushing themselves and be with the changes and the shifts and the things, and still, yeah. it’s quite something. But how was it to dance with me, Neil?

Neil Paris:

Oh.

PETER:

How How was it for us to be together? I mean, this was marvelously. Some of the stamping, and the sort of, the lunges and the shapes and the I it was so beautiful, and to be in relationships with that it was really fantastic. I was quite. I was quite surprised. I was really happily surprised to find those connections and stuff. But how was it for you?

Neil Paris:

I mean, it was it was great. It was slightly, it was. It’sdd, isn’t it? Because it’s like 16 and a long time has gone. And I think I’ve noticed this with other people that have worked with that suddenly your back to them as long as you’ve had a good relationship with them, it just feels like, well, yeah, no time at all as part of.

PETER:

Yes..

Neil Paris:

I think what I felt slightly restrictive was that I knew I was I was kind of still. I still had an eye on the the session. And I think if it hadn’t have been have been even numbers and you hadn’t had to work with Helen, I think our experience would have been very different. And at one point I was thinking, right, the two of us are going to be doing the same thing. So I kind of stuck in the background a little bit and allowed myself to. But they were flashes there when there were just moments I clashing, oh my God, there he is. There’s he’s training. There’s your frame and that took me right back to like when you were in the workshop, when you were in Course C, when you were in and just also. It was funny because at one point I got really inhibited because I was like, oh, it’s proper dancing.” That kind of, because that’s naturally in your body still.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neil Paris:

And I hope it’s okay that it’s within your body.

PETER:

Yes,

Neil Paris:

in your fifth and everything that you naturally fall into Whereas that’s not part of my natural vocabulary. But, yeah, I don’t know, I was thinking, I’m actually. And I think I was reflecting on how I must have felt when I used when I was.. When we were working together, I was a fabulous beat. And I don’t I move better now than I did that.. And I’m, you know, 16 years older. Yeah, but I’m moving in. I think I’m moving in better now. And I had moments where I suddenly felt myself tighten up a little bit.. And getting square. Yeah, like,Ah, come on. And I think,Oh, this is really odd. Is it just because Pete’t annoying? And you’re suddenly in like, suddenly that strange dance hierarchy kicked in because you remember, you in favor Peter, I was coming in from the theater, the kind of theater who’s done some intens dance practice and I was amongst all these conservatives are trained. So I was always wanting to twice as long to learn the steps and always wanting.little flashes, little flashes of that came back. But yeah, I mean, and you’re and I didn’t remember you just that ability for you to flick. change, change, change, change. Yes, change, change. Which I’m much better at. But I still don’t have. And that was a That was his marvelous to watch that and go, Oh, look. Look at that, look at that. He’s gone from this to this to back to this, and it’s the legs and everything, and, it was Oh, that It was lovely to watch.

PETER:

so sweet for you to say it. I mean, and you’re right.

Neil Paris:

And also, actually, yeah, just going back to you. Now, have we been discussing how you were very young? Yeah, dancer when you came out when you had a lot of kind of energy that was in lots of different areas in terms of the questions that you had around and the questions you had around this. And there’s actually a maturity You’ve still got all the energy, but there is a maturity there now that wasn’t naturally there.. When you were coming out at what do you say?

PETER:

21, I think.

Neil Paris:

21 And you’d had that actually with Rambert that was. Your artist was there we all saw and then. And that had a kind of. I would never say it had a wildness to it, but it had a. used the term last night you were saying about radical. You had a radicalness in your movement as well. And that was less. It was less. Yeah, you’re older. And it was, oh, we’ we’re both older, aren’t we?

PETER:

It is nice. It is nice. I mean, and Michael actually said to me when we left, like, if you could just ground yourself. And I never fully understood what that meant, but it is a curse, what you’re talking about, the thing of having technical training, because there’s a beauty and a stylistic quality that you have. That, yeah,. It’s not that I’ve been ruined, but I’m.. I’m I’m puted for the same shapes, and they’s forward so readily into the body. And I can control it as well. And maybe that’s also hopefully that’s some of the maturity is that I can choose now when I allow it, when I don’t allow it, and that it’s not just, I am when I’m dancing, I am this. And I think that I’ve really, in a recent years, really started to enjoy is choosing whereabouts I’m going to dance. and play. And yeah, I can yeah, I can go from one world straight into another world. They’re all sort of there, and still, like I said, when I came in and we did that sort of quick warm up, and then going through your practices and getting into the improvisation, I felt like, yeah, a huge shift and opening into worlds, which weren’t there before. Definitely before we started dancing, but I’t always readily available. So for me, it was just so beautiful to sort of be in dialogue with all those things, all those different places. And it’s so kind of you to speak so nicely of my movement.

Neil Paris:

Oh, no. I mean, it’s. It’s.. Because they are the slight irony is, for those of us that don’t have that kind of body knowledge that you have, will, even now, we not searching for it, but I know even when I’m moving in here, I tend to like, you know, I tend to like fluid flow. But I know that I need, I know that also, I kind of sometimes the aesthetic bit comes in. and you’re like, well, straight, you know, where is or it? Where is that? extension? Where are the extensions? Where is where is your weight? And those, and I have a much greater appreciation. I think I always had an appreciation with technical. I always understood why it was necessary, like, you’re going to just..

PETER:

knocking me out.

Neil Paris:

You’re gonna, you mean, you can die. No but you’re gonna’re gonna get hurt, but the more it’s gone on, yeah, the more I have. I’ve also appreciated the feeling of it. Yeah. Yeah. The feeling of knowing I’m pretty much. This feels nice. It feels right. And I think at one point I was like, I’ll keeping up with him.

PETER:

You were.

Neil Paris:

I know. And so there was this, like, I felt there was a parity and evenness, which I guess if you look back again when we first met, there probably wasn’t a parity at all, technically movement wise. And also as you kind of said, I was this old member of a company who’d kind of been charged with,

PETER:

taking care.

Neil Paris:

Kind of taking care at one Yeah, I suppose.

PETER:

That’s how it. I mean, in a nice way, that’s how it

Neil Paris:

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And so there was the, but here, they felt like actually just that’s true. We just we just dance artists now in the same room. Yeah, true. And that was a really nice really nice kind of a little moment of going, yeah, there’s that’s yeah that’s this level now.

PETER:

When you come home and you start speaking to your father in the same the same level, this strangeness to that.

Neil Paris:

Yeah, because you know, you’ve done so much since then, you’ve got this whole other..stuff going on.

PETER:

Yeah yeah, But it and yet still it resonates with me so much that time. It’s still.. It’s so central. And it’s funny, isn’t it? You can’t really erase a past. And like technical training, you can’t just get rid of it and there’s I often find myself in so not arguments, but conversations around what is needed with technical training and stuff and I am such an advocate for like if you can find beauty and nuance and quality and texture within your range, that’s there’s no necessity for you to be a brilliant technical dancer with super range and possibility and virtuosity. And yet, I get it as well. Like you say, there is a joy to learning that step or to having the possibility to extend, to a certain degree. And like the cautious mature Peter is now sort of saying maybe there is a balance. There’ There’s a measure of those things. Even though I’d love to imagine dancers being this thing that is boundless, that has no commitment to a certain regime, that anyone has to potential to engage with in some way, regardless who they are, where they are, maybe even just the extent that dance is such a big phenomena in the world, you have a relationship to it and that in itself is already a paramount to what dance can be and how you are being creative with it. Even if it is that thing of “I could never do that.”

Neil Paris:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER:

And it’s beyond what I could do. That’s too, whatever, and distanceant. But that’s that’s a relationship and sort of mediating those things. Anyway, now I’m trailing off.

Neil Paris:

No, I think I just want to the loo, actually a pause, but I was going to say, if something that just propped up to me when we just you were then talking about that, if you can find beauty and you can find this and find texture. And I think some of the things that I realized is what I’m doing now a big word. It’s really experiential.

PETER:

Yes. That’s lovely.

Neil Paris:

What we’re doing should feel good for you as these people that are working with my session is ultimately, it should feel great to do this. And I don’t mean great endorphing high pump. because that’s a whole other thing and that can be manipulated so that people can leave a session feeling like, wow. It should feel fantastic to be moving like in the first layer, when what you’re doing is just tuning in. If you can find, if that feels great then that feels great. And the fact that you find your extension, it should feel great, hopefully, before you’re worrying about when it looks like. And I think working with the people that I’m working with is I want you to. It should feel good to do. Ultimately, it should feel good to do. It might not feel so good when I’m nagging you about your elbow or your wrist. But you’ve asked me to do that, which is what they’re doing. Neil,

PETER:

could you look at that?

Neil Paris:

We really want you to.. We want some more corrections. Oh, really? I’m like yeah, yeah, I think we need to get back. Okay. So then it’s like, Jill wrists. Jill wrists. Roz, up. Stand up. Yeah. You know, but they seem as though they’ve got to the point where they’re like, yeah, I want. And you know, talking about that’s how’s the thing is, knowing how embodied your training has been, you know how long it takes to unpack it, to undo it. And for some of these people, they’re getting that they’re going, oh, yeah, wrist, wrist. But it’s their natural.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah

Neil Paris:

it’s their, But hopefully there’s interest and an experience and fascination with the fact that you’re becoming more aware of that. Just you, you know, and that bigger picture thing of, like, your body isn’t fixed. Our bodies aren’t fixed at any point in our life. Elements of it will be fixed, but you can change it. You can change it. And there’s an empowerment there. You can be empowered to change your body. And even if. Even if it is just that you learn that that is that’s extended and not that. In my grander scheme of thinking about what is the value of dance, what is it, the value of movement is like, well, you can change your body. It’s in your in your power to change it. And this is a way you can do it. It’s not necessarily going to the gym, but you can do it. But the way I think movement and dance works is it’s so holistic in terms of it should. It’s working on you’re the way I’m trying to work with the imagination, the power of your imagination, your body, and then also your ability to express the fact that you can express yourself. You don’t mean an audience to thank you for it. No. But hopefully there’s value in just expressing it in a room.

PETER:

No I’d love that.

Neil Paris:

And then, to a partner in the room. Yeah. And then to the group. And then when you’re ready to an audience. Because a part of me in my romantic thing is like, there’s a group of people out there who want to see this. Yeah. They will thank and I do say this to them. I said, they are going to thank you for this. We had to the thing we did a couple of weeks ago where, yeah, three hours together, cross arts, musicians, dancers, painters, poets, put something together, invite an audience. I only even like half a dozen people. But the point was really, that the group knew that they were going have to put something together, so we did. And it was one of the dancers’s neighbors that’d never been to anything like this before in their life. and it was just they did the slot of things. He said “I was really moved by that?”.. And, you kind of anyone says, “No, I don’t know why.”. I found that really moving. And that’s that thing that, you know, the romantic, it’s like, yes. That’s what kind of sound can do it as well. Yeah. But there’s no, there’s no, there’s no like lexicon. We’re not using words. We’re not trying to paint a picture. There is a group of people moving, and there’s sound, but in that someone is being affected physically. Yeah.

PETER:

And I love it because I’ve had such amazing experiences. I’ve loved dancing, beside you at Fabulous Beast. And intermittent time, all this time dancing with you and the memory of being in those places and those experiences and carrying those with me in every improvisation.

Neil Paris:

Yeah,.

PETER:

And then to do it again here, the experience is just, it’s overwhelming, it’s such a glorious thing to have and to have had. So thank you so much.’s

Neil Paris:

Peter its an absolute pleasure to be dancing with you and a girl guides up.

PETER:

It’s a beautiful girl guide hut.

Neil Paris:

So we’ve We’ve gone from the Coliseum stage. Yeah. There a girl guide hut.

PETER:

But then then before that, we were in yoga retreat.

Neil Paris:

Yeah But that’s also part of it is that this is the, you know, if you’ve got a reasonable space,

PETER:

yeah, you can do it.

Neil Paris:

It’s the connection with the movement and the music and the person that you’re with and it should hopefully, for these guys, their bedrooms isn’t there.

PETER:

And that’s also the purpose of the podcast is that I can come to Cromer and go to a girls’s guys hut and capture a little bit of that. And if not share it with thousands of people to have it as a memory that is sort of of this moment in this time. And if people do want to sort of reach out to you, is there How would they go about that? Where do they go?

Neil Paris:

probably have the email me because I don’t have anything out there online at the moment.

PETER:

Well, then I can put a contact. Yeah, put it on by all means,

Neil Paris:

yeah. Yeah, and Pete, it is amazing that you’re here at this particular time because I’m like a transitioning point from one role to another, and the fact that you we’re having this conversation and I’m having to try and articulate what it is, it’s really helpful that people helping me to articulate what it is that and to talk about these experiences, because they were. They were. They were fabulous.

PETER:

They’re fabulous, fabulous beasts, yeah.

Neil Paris:

They were, and… Yeah, to talk about them with you and to be in a position now are enough times are lapsed though. I can talk about them. Um. in a kind of moderated way, so much has been processed about them that I can talk about them with joy as much as I can with either regret or awe.. The things that that weren’t so good, but clouded a lot of that experience for quite a while. And I think that’s moved on. So to be able to connect back with you who was we all knew at the time. That’s why we were there to look after you, because we knew that a lot of people were coming into quite a difficult environment. So to be able to sit and laugh and yeah laugh about those times and really talk about the valuenesses. It was wonderful.

PETER:

If I can only return some of what you gave to me, yeah, like you say, it was fantastical. And there’s a sadness a sense of loss for me of what could have been of what was in a lot of ways. But more than anything, there’s a richness and that we can live with it together and continue to. That’s fantastic.

Neil Paris:

But you have to remember, you brought in an energy that you, there was this 21 year old, 22 year old, and I think most of us were in our 40s by then. And you brought this in and it’s like, oh, my God, look at that. Look at that, look at that exuberance, and that conviction that you had about,cause you had conviction in your feelings about… They were questions that you had, and it seemed like there was quite a lot of struggle in the questions about, what is dance? What is this? What am I? What kind of what kind of artist am I? And you seem like you were going through all of that, but to witness that like, there you go, that’s the future.

PETER:

Oh, thank you, you. And here we are in the future.

Neil Paris:

You brought all that, and you brought a lot of challenge to us in the old heads and it was yeah, if you remember, you remember that. And obviously, you know, what happened in the constellations and stuff was extraordinary and. yeah. Taking aside where it went, again, to have, when I think back about going through a process like that with Alejandro, and what happened in that constellation, and the context of it is still quite mind blowing from there.

PETER:

Yeah, phenomenal. Phenomenal.

Neil Paris:

And it’s. You know lot of the time, we can’t explain that. No. No, And it was because I think, as we were talking yesterday, but I think because of the kind of person that you were, you didn’t question what’s happening. No. You didn’t question the sudden of your body was starting to do this. You just allowed it, I guess, to happen. Yeah. You had no idea what was the context, whereas some of us did but then that’s. somebody else probably would have blocked it and stopped it. True, true. I think a different kind of person would have blocked that could have easily have. But you didn’t, because.. I mean.. Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m projecting.

PETER:

I’m just glad you remembered it, because never forget for me, it was so crazy and I’ve tried to explain what happened in that room, in what I embodied or what what I felt like I embodied. And then you remembered that specific constellation, because there was, what, 30 of us all doing constellations. I was..

Neil Paris:

That was.. You know, that was also one of those moments where you’re thinking, “Why is this constellation? You know? And I was always very, very like, “Yep, great, we do it, but there’s God, I’ve never done this before.” And how does this work? And then all of a sudden that one was just like,…

PETER:

Yeah, this is crazy.

Neil Paris:

But then that’s also why you were there, not to the constellation, but, like, that whole process. There’s a reason. And for all this this kind of faults and difficulties. He saw something. He just couldn’t handle you.

PETER:

Oh, I thank you, Neil.

Neil Paris:

And that’ss what we were all worried about, because you knew some of us knew me, you can’t handle it in these two… These creative energy. He’s a creative energy. He’s questioning. There were similarities, you see, because he was a pusher. He pushed back against the system. That was a lot of his energy was about pushing back yeah. And there was a similarity that I felt that you were questioning the system that you were in. You’d have been through this Rambert training.

PETER:

And the childhood of dyslexia so yeah.

Neil Paris:

You both had this so maybe there was this kind of he saw something that he recognized. I don’t know. but it was just when I didn’t think he could handle it. I’m glad he took you on.

PETER:

Yeah, I’m I’ glad my contract lasted at the end. Thank you, Neil. You. And, yeah, we’ll continue.

Neil Paris:

Yeah, yeah. Dance again sometime.

1. Choreographic Devices 4 https://www.ica.art/live/choreographic-devices-4
2. ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) https://www.ica.art/
3. Rose Choreographic School https://rosechoreographicschool.com/
4. Roehampton (University of Roehampton, London) https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/hanna-gillgren
5. SKH fka DOCH (Stockholm university of the arts) https://www.uniarts.se/english/
6. H2 Dance (co-founded by Hanna Gillgren and Heidi Rustgaard) https://h2dance.com/25-2/
7. Heidi Rustgaard (co-founder of H2 Dance) https://h2dance.com/heidi-rustgaard-biography-and-cv/
8. Martin Hargreaves (Head of the Rose Choreographic School) https://rosechoreographicschool.com/people
9. Guy Dartnell https://www.choreographiclab.co.uk/guy-dartnell/
10. Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema (Weak Dance Strong Questions) https://vimeo.com/383037271 (https://burrowsfargion.com/)
11. Fest en Fest (festival founded by H2 Dance) https://festenfest.info/fest-en-fest/

Sadler’s Wells East (London, overlooking the Olympic Park) https://www.sadlerswells.com/your-visit/sadlers-wells-east/welcome-to-sadlers-wells-east/

PETER:

hello. Today we are dancing with Hanna Gillgren, and we met in January.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes.

PETER:

at the choreographic devices, number four, at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where you were there as a part of the Rose Choreographic School, super exciting. But we didn’t really connect there, we connected more when I invited you to participate in this podcast. And it’s been really exciting, actually. dialoguing and learning a little bit about you already. We have this connection where I come from, the UK, and I’ve had my career in Sweden, and you’ve come from Sweden and you’ve had your career more or less here in the UK. And also, we have like, a lot of affinity, maybe around working at universities as well, you’re at Roehampton, and I’ve been at SKH in Stockholm. So a lot to get me interested and intrigued to know what you’re working with and from what I’ve already heard. It’s super exciting. But if people don’t know you, how do you introduce yourself? I’ve missed out H2Dance. Of course, you’re big.. The company, yes. Your big contribution.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes. Yeah, I um How do I introduce myself? Probably as a choreographer. Performer, which is how I started, which I’m doing less now and perhaps a little bit less interested in, but still very much part of my practice and practicing, and making a lecturer. And I really enjoy this idea of how education pedagogy you can feed into, choreographic process and the kind of collaborative learning, for everyone. I love that. And yeah, that maybe would be, and who am I? I’m yeah. People, like, my son would now say that I’m English, more English than Swedish, but I’m not sure. I’ sort of try and claim my Swedishness, even though I left when I was 18, and I’ve been here for, like, more than 30 years, but it’s an interesting one.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good summary, and people will find out more about you. Yeah. in the podcast and online and stuff.

Hanna Gillgren:

I mean, the company, perhaps I should mention an age to dance Heidi Rustgaard, a choreographer, a friend of mine from Norway, we set that up in 2000. So we worked sort of collaboratively for 20 years on touring production, community work, teaching, kind of duet work between us, and that really fed my practice and what I was doing and then we just now doing our sort of own practices separately at Rose Chorographic School, which is also something really. interesting to work together, but not making together, like, actually sitting.

PETER:

In the same studio.

Hanna Gillgren:

Together yeah in the same studio, but working on different practices, but still sort of similar, but and then. kind of supporting each other’s work in a different way, which is great.

PETER:

Yeah, I mean, when I I mean, because I saw that you were both in the Rose choreographic school, I assumed, actually, that you’d perhaps still be

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes.. And there was a choice, actually, Martin (Martin Hargreaves) said, you can both you can do it if you want to do it together, you also can. But I think we were at that stage where we were both interested in going off solo for a bit and see what that is.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hanna Gillgren:

Because, yeah, I think we have sort of our interest a little bit was dividing anyway and then yeah, there’s obviously there’s a different process, different the whole relationship behind working together and apart. And taking decisions or just how you want to be in a process. So that was really, it was great. And it’s great because I still feel we’re working together but not intermashed. We don’t have to agree.

PETER:

Yes.

Hanna Gillgren:

We don’t have to come to kind of compromise. We can just like, okay, you do that. I’ll do this. And it’s okay. We can still kind of feed in and.

PETER:

And like you say, how you describe your practice, like dance as a pedagogical and performative and practice, it’s so collaborative anyway. So it’s always funny. I tend to work alone, like as a solo author and stuff and yet all my pieces feel collaborative. And I think there’s an irony, actually, that’s why I tend to call myself PETER, and I call all my pieces, PETER, because I think it’s sort of absurd to imagine that I made this alone.

Hanna Gillgren:

Exactly.

PETER:

And that it actually is performed alone as well. Like the audience are even so much more so much a part of it. Anyway, what are we going to do today?

Hanna Gillgren:

So today we’re going to do a practice, which I call the voice circle. It’s a kind of voice and movement practice, where either the movement kind of instigates the voice or other way around voice goes with the movement, or instigates the movement, and it’s come from some work I did many, many years ago with Guy Dartnell. It’s a theater maker in the UK. Now lives in Spain, I believe. and basically one, it’s usually done with several people, but it’s just the two of us today, which is also great. And one person will start generating any any movement, really that comes with with a vocal sound. Then when that person is ready to give, transmit, it does, and we kind of jam together for a little while, kind of find it as a duo, when then the person that initiated sort of moves away and today we’re also going to play with recordings. So I will then, if I start, I will record the vocal sign in a loop machine. So I’m sort of interesting at the moment in looping repetition, insisting, staying with something, and see what that does. And then you would then carry on, transforming the sun and the movement, and when you feel ready to give back to me, you give it back to me, with g together, you record the sound, so we’re layering vocal sounds. in the loop machine, creating a sort of sound score, I guess, or some sort of sound sound for us us to then, maybe when we’re done kind of a few each, maybe five each, we will go off and sort of jam ready and transform and stay with whatever the last thing was, and then kind of work on staying with and see when transformation happened, but also what happens between the two of us in that kind of negotiation moving together. Yeah, and the sound. So, yeah.

PETER:

Yeah, it’s really nice. I’m so sound has become really important to me at the moment, so I’m so excited to do it. But I think it’s relatively clear, like, so your start or someone starts, and they start to feel movement and whatever sound comes with that, and then we start jamming, and then at some point, it gets passed onto the other person. And for us, we’re gonna put that you’re gonna put that into the loop, or the person who started or put it into the loop. And then you return and you take over, take back the thing as it is, so it can transform. It’s no strictness of it has to be maintained. Even though there is an interest, obviously, around like what is what is the center maybe or the thing that holds? Yeah, it seems really beautiful and we just go for as long as we feel as.

Hanna Gillgren:

We go for as long as we feel. Yeah. Yeah.

PETER:

Do you ever do this alone, but with the loop machine?

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah, I have tried it alone, yes, just as a tester, never, like, engaged. I’ve tested, I’ve tested it in 2003. I’m thinking about it whether how you can compose what you’re making. But I haven’t got to that place yet. It becomes quite cacophonic, often, like. But I’m thinking, like what types of sounds could one to engage with? Yeah, you know Or do we make a song? Do we make a minimalist soundscape? Do we make? Yeah. But I haven’t yet.

PETER:

Or is it just a dance and that’s the music.

Hanna Gillgren:

Exactly. Or is it just the movement? Absolutely. Yeah.

PETER:

And so it’s called The Voice Circle and so normally it would be in a circle so we can imagine that kind of composition, in fact.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes. Normally it’s transmitted around the circle. or the person engaged in the doing could also move in and sort of solo inside and come out.

PETER:

A sort of cipher.. Great.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah.

PETER:

Then let’s do it. Cool. See you in a bit.

Hanna Gillgren:

See you.

PAUSE

PETER:

OK. That was amazing.

Hanna Gillgren:

It was so fun.

PETER:

We were just joking that it’s a show, or I was joking. It’s a show. But I think now, I mean, we can do whatever we want, but we can just recall what happened, what we remember. yeah, and see what comes up.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah, nice. Yeah, I was really struck by… One was the sort of sonicness or how I let go of the body and the listening of both the loop that we created together, and your sounds and my own sounds in relation to this space and how that. I was thinking, yeah. how that shifted throughout and really subtly, and I was very. I kind of mesmerized and busy with that. Yeah for some time. in it.

PETER:

So it’s as though that it disappears?

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes. Yeah. Sometimes a loop disappears while we record it, sometimes you disappear, sometimes I disappear, sometimes you appear, since the disappearing and appearing of the Sonic world, which is super interesting and the the choreography of that, I guess it was the first time I’ve I encountered that feeling. doing this exercise.

PETER:

Yeah, no, it’s super strong. Like, I I was thinking about at some point, I wasn’t sure if I’m following you or if I’m following the loop, or if I’m leading or following, like in a sort of like already philosophical way, I don’t like to think about it, but it’s like the closest I’ll talk about it because I don’t feel like I know enough, but I think it’s the closest thing to like point towards the experience, but it gives me a strange sense of free will, where, like, I’m unsure if I’m choosing, what I’m doing..Cause it’s interesting to think of it, like, it’s not quite improvisation in the traditional sense, because I’m not. I’m not sort of making choices. I have a real concrete thing that I’m to copy and follow.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes.

PETER:

But at the same time, it’s emergent and generative. It takes me places, which I unexpected. And so I kind of see that disappearing in there, like you say, like, I lose, I lose myself. The will part of me. So it starts to disappear and it becomes communal. Like, it’s. I think it really taps into a quality that exists in all dance or all dance I’ve done, where you’re with the room and the body and the circumstances just as much as you’re doing something.

Hanna Gillgren:

Interesting. Super interesting. Yeah, I’ve never thought about it like that, but I think. for me, also, it’s this pleasure of letting go of deciding or letting go of controlling, letting go which I think I often. I often interrupt, like that’s I like that, but in this, I’m really like, I’m not even trying not to. I’m just not busy with that. idea of.. I guess predeciding change or predeciding interruption, or predeciding anything, just allowing things to come. There’s something so liberating, or just letting go of, you know, having a plan.

PETER:

Yes.

Hanna Gillgren:

Or like a calendar or a. You know, having stuff, a list.

PETER:

No, exactly. It’s very sociological. Yes. I don’t have to. I don’t have to.. Yeah, I don’t have to be this political, social, political being in the world navigating all these choices and stuff. But in that thing of, yeah, like, not making decisions and choices, for me, it felt like it so much comes up. So it feels like there’s not much need actually. to generate or to intervene, like you say, and interrupt because already it’s a lot.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes,

PETER:

right?

Hanna Gillgren:

It’s a lot is true.

PETER:

Which, in a way, sort of ties into the difficulty you had.

Hanna Gillgren:

You said at the beginning of like, how do you compose this, or should it be composed? It’s exactly that. And I’m a little bit busy with that while doing also, like, what would it woodions make, you know, out of this and And yeah, where exactly where does one. Yeah, where does one go with it? Do you compos it? Do you not? Where? Yeah, and what type of composing does one do then? In order to not lose this sense of of letting go and hack and an audience perhaps be part of the letting go. I don’t know, like how I’ve had the last couple of weeks, I’ve tried to compose a little bit. And of course, that just brings up tons of questions and inquiries and like, Ooh, and and you start to sort of leak things and, yeah, I mean, it’s it’s a very.. And then are you into this? Is it just just for the doer? Like, is it the doing of that’s.

PETER:

Yeah.

Hanna Gillgren:

actually the interest here rather than observing or how do you encounter it? Is it something that goes on for a day or two and then you pop in and out? And then how, what are you know, what is the score or what could they ingredients be then in order to Fine. Because it was interesting today with you, because it was more i’ve done it when everyone is really busy with their own. thing. But we were quite, we kind of followed. There was a sense of being together, like a union, which was great. And then there sort of also the loot machine and the amp in the middle there being some sort of centering kind of totem or something like that we were like kind of circling or having as a kind of magnet to anchor and different things come up each time, obviously, I do it with people. So it’s really. I think that’s nice. And I thought to myself at some point, I should have told you, you can go off on your own.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah.

Hanna Gillgren:

But actually, it was really quite in interesting. The fact that we were like, and then slowly, of course, by doing, you can of also went like, okay, I’m going to go on my own and see him.

PETER:

Yes. No, I mean, actually, like, it’s mirrors a little bit what you’re describing, of like, how would this translate to like a sharing sort of situation, like are you sharing the experience and how do you how does it how does it get communicated or felt by the audience? And I had the similar thing of like, the way the podcast is structured, like, I’m learning your composition and there’s a sense of, like, whatever I however I interpret it, usually is the version that we end up talking about. And so it really is a sense of what is it today here? If I was your dancer, we’d have this type of conversation, perhaps, and then you would say, but then try going off on your own.,

Hanna Gillgren:

yeah. Let’s it again, do you remember last week? Yeah,

PETER:

yeah. And for yet at the same time, there’s something like is its own thing. Like we’ve sort of captured it and we’re allowing ourselves to say, well, that was that was what it was meant to be, and that was what it is. And we’re not going to repeat it or and it sort of later to me actually to think about how. Because this figure of like the social political came up, but that also seems to be that place of thinking about like, how do I compose it? How do I communicate it? How does it then enter into the world? exactly, like, which sounds represent the experience the best? And there’s.. It’s like almost impossible to sort of to name or to condense ’cause it is the speculative, the dream, like, the unknown, the the possible that is what it is. Which really is really interesting when you think of it as as like in the realm of politics because so much of politics is about like, we need to do this and this and this. But what happens then of the the dance, sort of the going anywhere? the allowing whatever it is to be included.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes.

PETER:

And yet, it is choreographed. It’s a clear score. Yeah. So we’re sort of like… Something is named. However.. I know exactly what you mean when you say that fight between, like… Okay, how do I compose this? How do I share this?

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Martin came in last week to observe a little bit and just in terms of sitting through this You know, of course, you will zoom in and out, probably as an audience, like you do in there also a little bit, like, oh, I mean,. I’m a bit bored or like, all of this feelings and thoughts. But there’s all which I felt today with you was this idea of most hypnosis. I was getting into a sort of trial, almost like a trance where things kept the repetition of the loop and the movement was there, but I sort of lost, like lost the sound a little, lost the rhythm of it or the patterning of it, which I thought was super interesting in the doing. And I was also have been thinking a bit about a sort of emotive state, like, could you bring this to some sort of extremely recognizable emotions or characters or attitudes or states. how far do you go that route? And back in Yeah, I sort of been playing a little bit with that. Also thinking in how we can meet each other in it, sort of how what are the potentials of negotiation and.. Yeah, transmitting.. Yeah.

PETER:

There’s so many elements, right? Like, I had to think of flocking.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes.

PETER:

as like a method, maybe, or even just the fact that it’s like, I can’t see you now. So how am I actually being with that or continuing with that? Yes. I was like, are we doing that traditional thing of when I’m facing a way and you now following me and if I turn around and I following you? And it’s all more or less. And you also introduced this word insistent, which just before we started, you said, you’re very interested in insisting. And I had to think. Yeah, in what way, right? There’s so many elements to that. For sure. But I think one thing that I could say that I was insisting on, or maybe you can answer, like to insist on those emotion or emotive states. Because it makes me. There’s something very primal.. The rhythm, the bodily connection, some of the sounds, ’cause they weren’t all, like, harmonious.. They were really a guttural. Right. They really had a physicality. Even some of them. Yeah, you had to move to do them. Like. And it was interesting as well. Then, now I’m bringing up two different things, but then trying to bring that to the microphone as well. Because then, of course, it shifts, you know, Ooh! But there’s some, yeah, very. Yeah, primal. For want of a better word.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes, it’s true. Now, it’s really interesting when you find yourself in that place. where you, I guess where you go, “Oh, yeah, I can feel this as something that I’ve been through or that I felt at that time sounded like, and I recognized it and then how you kind of get there and also sit on how you kind of move out of that. And then, like you say, they’re bringing to the microphone is somehow letting go of the body part of it and just sounding it is a very. It’s it’s a very other place to be in and other feeling to be in. So. Yeah, it’s almost like you’ve become all of a sudden in a sort of recording studio space where you’re just occupied by laying down that sound in relation to other sounds there are and then back in to the doing all the bodily thing. Yeah. It’s a lot of bits, a lot of states.

PETER:

Yes, yes, exactly.

Hanna Gillgren:

We have done this with three. So three amplifiers, three loop machines. It’s quite mental. Like, you have to usually do a little bit of a longer loop, just not to crowd it, but. Yeah. Yeah, also the sound coming from different, I guess, places in the room. is an interesting choreography to go through,

PETER:

but I mean, it makes you think of knowledge, right? Like the beginning of the exercise is this blank slate type, or at least we have contracts really agreed that it’s a little bit blank, and then we keep adding into a moment where you can’t distinguish between what has been added, what is being added, what is being sounded, like it’s such a loud noise. I somehow imagine, like, it has it has a a similarity to how we’re amongst so much information, so many voices and instructions and knowledges and truths, perhaps, in our world. How do you distill or make distinct those. Yeah, those. It makes something of it, right? Somehow..

Hanna Gillgren:

That’s a lovely way of looking at it. I’m very different truths. Yeah, or I’m treats. Yeah, exactly.

PETER:

Exactly. Exactly.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah. Yeah, I was mentioning this idea of doubt, just..

PETER:

Yeah, that’s true.

Hanna Gillgren:

Just before we started this idea of. Are you sure, you sure we’ve been been playing with this sentence and kind of deconstructing words and sort of chopping up with the loop machine and finding kind of being a bit busy with also finding this idea of what truth and what am I doing, what am I sure of? What am I Where am I going? and finding the, I guess the doubt some doubt in performativity because it’s performing often is such a. re showing somehow certainty that we know what we’re doing here. But finding a way of embodying doubt. Yeah. Yeah. For the not knowing or the Yeah. I’m curious about this place. And I will remember this work with Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema. Is it Young War? They did. They did 10, 15 years ago. Weak dance, strong questions.. Do you remember that?

PETER:

I know of it, yeah, but I don’t think I. I don’t know who it was with. I will look it up and put it in the show notes. I have a feeling they were sort of doing this exercise with two hours of just inquiring what the sort of body performative things is. So.

Hanna Gillgren:

Almost moving as if each movement was a question rather than a statement, right?

PETER:

Yes. Yes. I mean, absolutely. I’ve often thought there’s something in exactly the performative gesture or the apparatus of the stage, which produces a sense of argument, like whatever I put in front of you, this is a statement. This should exist, at least.. Right? Like, I’ve chosen these steps, these bodies or I’ve chosen to be here in this way, because I believe in it or I’m standing up for it. And exactly, this. How do how do you meet with actually conditions or knowledges or truths that don’t have a an argument. It’s a little bit the difficulty we have like between what’s the story? What’s the meaning of what you’re doing? And it’s like, well. can we stage doubt or can we stage meaninglessness?

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes.

PETER:

Or abstraction, of course, is the classic one? Or even can we just. Can we just give something a chance regardless of knowing what it is?

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah, yeah.

PETER:

Even in its ambiguity. Yeah. be with it regardless. I have to think of sort of asymmetrical relationships with like, you know with the environment, for example, or plants. We don’t know how they feel if they feel, even. And yet we’re more and more recognize the importance of being ethically in relationship to them regardless, if we will ever yet know what it needs or what it’s saying.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That’s super interesting. Yeah, this is, I’m ready curious about exploring this.. this question, because the older I get, also, the more, of course, like with the cliche, the less you feel you know and the more complex, like. And yeah, the more complex, I guess, the world is complex, everything is complex, but also you kind of. I feel like and it’s for me, youth had such a sort of assured kind of yes. Of course, this needs to be shown. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I will now, you know, exactly like you say. And then you’re like, but does it really need to be shown, or do you really what? And part of me also, you know, an older woman in dance is this kind of idea of, yeah, that needs to actually be there. Yeah. And often sort of invisibility of older or women my age. So I think yeah, there’s something in that where I’m thinking, yes, that that should be somehow in the world or you,

PETER:

of course,

Hanna Gillgren:

performativ Arena or whatever.. So, yeah, all of those things are super interesting to think about and also often, I guess, working with a younger generation or people in their 30s or 40s and It’s. It’s super interesting. I really like that. How what we’ve been through in different times of training, what was the focus of the training? What was the discourse, what are our references? And bringing all that in is really lovely. And I’m learning so much, like I’m working with. This is great. I’m appreciative of that. So whenever I do this exercise, also the different people is yeah, I get so many ideas and thoughts that I jot down, because amazing. But yeah, interesting.

PETER:

I mean,

Hanna Gillgren:

perform not to perform. Yeah.

PETER:

But also, that I can’t imagine and I’ve already feeling it with certain things in my life being older than other people. A sense of jadedness or sort of guardedness or, like the privilege or that space of not knowing what it will feel like? to do something. is. is really valuable. I’m curious how this. It’s funny, it’s interesting, you speak about the performativity. Again, it’s a very political thing as well, right? The Can we have space for older female bodies? Yeah, yeah. But how does it feel with what you described as well, I think I gave a word to it of like disappearing or these losing the sound, losing the body, losing the partner, losing the loop. How does that feel, especially in relationship to actually this recognition that it should be allowed that mature women should be on stage as well, or in the dance world as well.. Like, it’s a dissimilar disappearance? Or is other things that get brought up, that disappear? Are they somehow of a world which doesn’t have a place on stage?

Hanna Gillgren:

Right, interesting, yeah.. Yeah, there’s, I guess, like you say, there is also a sense of freedom to being older and to being also having the privilege to still do this. And having the also.. somehow feeling that I’m not.. There’s a sense from me personally, also a sense of kind of pleasure in the invisibility or sense of freedom in that I think for me being young, a lot of performing was about being seen and being good and being looking good and all of that stuff and now, of course, well, not of course, but for me anyway, that somehow much more diluted and not less interesting. So it’s finding like, so what’s interesting now?

PETER:

Yeah.

Hanna Gillgren:

Where is the interest now and also trying, maybe trying to be honest with yourself and really staying with that? What is the pleasure in moving or exposing or not exposing? Yeah, so I’m saying older women, I think it’s really, I love watching difference on stage anyway. I’m very interested in that. But Yeah. I’m not sure that’s necessarily perhaps me.

PETER:

No, sorry.

Hanna Gillgren:

But yes, I know what you mean, though. I think the precious of going on stage also, like the expectations on myself, along all those things are just like, do I like do I really want that? or should I be I be doing this because all the things with discussed.. So, yes, and I think it’s really beautiful how you put the disappearing and the disappearing of things and people and, you know, kids grow like my son growing up, disappearing up. You know, he’s moving from home, he’s not an adult. Things kind of you know, of course, parents getting older, their parents passing, d la, la, la, people. So it’s an interesting time of disappearing and disappearance… Which is actually I’ve never thought about that’s..

PETER:

It’s a real conceptual space as well I like to experience and to be in.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah.

PETER:

I had my first big injury of my career this year. Okay. I got a sort of like fatigued in the troncantanta. So trcites, I think it’s great great, yeah. And so, you know, when it gets bad, it can barely walk. And I was dancing in a research project, this summer and I really had this moment where it happened and I was in so much pain, I couldn’t could barely walk like I say, and just a realization of like and sadness and like loss of like, what can I do now? What’s available to me and and it’s so complex and we know of its existence as young people, like. And yet to experience it, to experience the disappearance. the fading away of like a certain access or visibility is really interesting. I was thinking it’s really interesting we’re here, so we’re at Saddle Wells East. I don’t think we’ve said that. in one of the beautiful studios looking out on the Olympic park in London. and I have to think of how amazing that in a world which feels like it doesn’t care about this kind of practice, for example. It is existing, and there are these buildings and there are these institutions and stages. And yet, at the same time, I feel as though trying to squeeze or what we’re talking about a little bit. It’s like trying to squeeze some of this diversity, some of this nuance and texture and ambiguity onto one stage. Because there is a monopoly around where dance can get shown and how and what that means. And as much as there’s a desire for plurality of different dances and people in those dances. I feel like also I’d like to see more stages so that there are different. And I mean very conceptual as well, like different ways in which the dance can be met and entered. And that’s not to say that we should keep Sadlers well to white, for example. But to sort of like, yeah, to imagine. Yeah, it’s really it’s really difficult, though, because Yeah, that’s the economy and it is sort of towards productivity and.

Hanna Gillgren:

For sure. Slick work, slick ready. Yeah. And accessible all yeah. It’s an interesting one. I think. Yeah, this idea of dance’s being encountered in the in various different types of spaces and different types of context. and that being a value of this is yeah, because I guess that’s a little bit where we set up our festival Fest En Fest Heidi I to have to find somehow a space where we can meet each other, we can share work, we can watch work, we can talk about work, we can sort of hang out and have a drink or something to eat.. And it can be presented in the way that the artist would be interested in presenting their practice or their work rather than kind of kind of actively looking for different spaces that could host work, which, you know, it felt a real need for that in London. and I think there still is a need for that, because a lot of the smaller, or the more experimental stages of spaces have closed.

PETER:

Yeah.

Hanna Gillgren:

But yeah, I mean, that this is here is extraordinary, you’re right.

PETER:

Yeah, it is,

Hanna Gillgren:

yeah. That we are here and school is here. I think Martin understand that biant job initiating it, and Alister, obviously. You know,reed to this and it was this really beautiful. I’m hoping that it will ripple..

PETER:

Yes, exactly. Is it?

Hanna Gillgren:

Ripple in the field.

PETER:

That’s sort of ripple effect. Yeah. I mean, actually, one thing that I had to think about with age and with stories and histories is actually in the in the exercise, in the practice, I felt histories were actually really present.. Like, the I don’t think I’m describing it so well, but like, the sense of the loop is of it’s like an echo chamber of what’s already there, and of course, our techniques or our dances or where we’ve been, what we think is loud and possible in the space, the social contracts, the spatial contracts, the histories, what we do in a studio, how we talk, how we think, how we move, and then also, yeah, the histories of the building and even just traveling here. We even started with histories. I historicized your origin and my own origin. And they sort of like. they come up and they become insisted upon, maybe but they also show their complexity and their, like, breadth, like that are very generative. There wasn’t a moment where I was like, okay, now I’m doing that ballet class from when I was five, you know?

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes, this is interesting. Yeah. There’s moments where I. It’s a real flesh not like, there’s moments where I recognize like I know, like, okay, yeah, I do this a lot. And I do this a lot because my neck is really stiff. I would now just keep going with that horror bit. But, yes, and then there are a moments where I’m absolutely also not aware of what is going on. So that, yeah, it’s a really, there’s a lovely way of putting it that history are present on also the kind of past of the vocal work is kind of being looped.

PETER:

I guess I noticed it very strong because I know if I do some movements now and I’m having to teach myself that it’s not in my body, that I know, if I do that, I’m gonna get a lot of pain.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting.

PETER:

So I’m really having to like sort of. And because I think the experience I’ve had with my body is that it has it will show me where the limit is. My arm will only go so far type thing. However, now it’s like, on my leg, if I send my leg there, I could be in a lot of pain for doing it. But like you say, like just like, I like to do this because my neck, right? Like this story, this history, this saga with our conditions is a really beautiful one. Yeah. And that’s why why this is dance. I mean, we very literally using sound and voice. Yes. Like in one could sort of, or when I started working with it earlier this year, I started to ask myself, like, am I still dancing because I’m the focus was so much on the voicing. And yet, this really demonstrates how.. at least, you know, in one way, D is about being with those historical stories and conditions that the body… carries with us.. But this has been beautiful.

Hanna Gillgren:

Yes so nice.

PETER:

I feels so inspired and so, so lucky. I don’t know if I feel inspired, because it’s sort of assumes that we should do something more or go somewhere else.. And actually, I’d rather think that I feel so… a grateful, actually. that I can that this happen. This dance.Cause it was weird and unique. Yeah, yeah, right? Like,.

Hanna Gillgren:

It was great. What an amazing way of starting a day, just movingly new, was super. And it’s also nice that I’ve never met you. You, exactly. And then we go off and do this. That’s great.

PETER:

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean in a way, those stories, actually, of like, what I presume, what I think expectation wise, like, how to like honor what you’ve invited as much as I can. Like, all those dancery learning things, right? like, they were definitely there as well. But, yeah, we don’t We didn’t know each other, but now I feel like we know each other and within this 30 minutes of dancing. That’s really special. Yeah. Thank you so much. If people want to get in contact with you or check you out,

Hanna Gillgren:

I guess the website? H2dance.com. would be a good place. And I think, yeah, my email is there.

PETER:

Yes, yeah, yeah, that’s good.

Hanna Gillgren:

Or a festival, also a festive fest website. Yeah, they can read about the festival and the program.

PETER:

And also attend.

Hanna Gillgren:

And attend March. March is next year, 2026. Yeah.

PETER:

Yeah. And you’re also on Instagram. Instagram,

Hanna Gillgren:

H2hanna. I’m on Facebook, but Instagram more actively. Yeah, it’s the’s the place. One of the places, yeah. You sort of have to be. No, but it’s such a pleasure to meet you and your work.

PETER:

And also, if people are interested, you’re teaching it Roehampton as well, so there’s so many opportunities to interact with you your experience and the dancers you’re doing and things and Exactly. Also, the learning, you’re continuing to do is so beautiful, how you put the put it like that. It gives me great hope and inspiration. I feel very grateful. Thank you.

Hanna Gillgren:

Thank you.

1. Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
2. National Theatre Public Acts – https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/about-us/theatre-nation-partnerships/public-acts/
3. Public Record – https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/whats-on/public-record/
4. Marina Abramović & Ulay (Great Wall of China walk)
5. Rite of Spring Fabulous Beast – https://youtu.be/jsRKugYT03c?si=aI0dO4iS4AjEmNn3
6. Cèilidh – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A8ilidh
7. Olivier Theatre – https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/your-visit/venues-at-the-national-theatre/olivier-theatre/
8. Peter Carter (traditional eel catcher in the Fens)
9. Dance is life, Hudson River Park’s Pier 76 – https://www.danceislife.love/locations
10. Restoke – http://restoke.org.uk
11. Paul Rogerson director at restoke – https://www.restoke.org.uk/people
12. ROSALÍA & Travis Scott – https://youtu.be/q5xIoeG4uVI?si=kOMydrTFuzKVTXMv
13. Public Works New York – https://publictheater.org/artistic-programs/public-works/
14. Dahlia Lopez Ramsay – https://magnettheater.com/people/dahlia-ramsay/
15. Emily Lim – https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/artists/emily-lim/

Closing event for Bradford City of Culture 2025, Winter Solstice 20th and 21st of December in Myrtle Park – https://bradford2025.co.uk/event/brighter-still/

PETER:

Alright, so, hello. Today I’m with Dan Canham.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, that’s it. Canham?

PETER:

Yeah. And we are, well, we could say we’re in the fens and we’re going to dance together. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I really appreciated dancing with you all those years ago and 201 yeah, 2018 or 2019, somewhere around there with Fabulous Beast. You were always such a kind and caring soul. It’s. It was such a joy. So when I had this opportunity to reconnect, of course, it made sense to sort of reach out. And I know now you’re doing many things. I mean, in the intermittent phase, you’ve done a lot of things. But if you could say maybe for people who don’t know who you are and maybe for me, because I don’t fully know who you are yet. Just a brief sort of thing.

Dan Canham:

Yes. Yes, because it’s been 17 years since we danced together. It feels like another life to me. I stopped performing. I stopped performing in 2016. and I got to the point where I was performing in my own work because I was fed up with performing for other people. Yeah. But that also becomes kind of exhausting, and I was always probably more interested in choreographing and directing. I just didn’t know how. So I had to learn what to do and what not to do from other people. But now, yes, at this point, this new revolution of activity for me involves choreographing and directing, a lot of, like, large scale, theater and dance shows that might involve like 150, 200 people, most of whom will be members of the community. And so I’ve been doing a lot of work with the National Theatre Public Acts. We just made a show in Sunderland called Public Record, which was like an original devised piece of dance music theater, with a cast of 100, featuring loads of music legends from Sunderland and that was great. And I would say the thing I love most and the thing that I get the biggest kick out of is just taking those people on a journey, I would say, I feel like I’m a bit of a specialist in relatively quickly, allowing people to access dance who might not feel like it was ever for them.

PETER:

Yeah.

Dan Canham:

For whatever reason. And suddenly collectively they’re feeling this collective power and we’re grooving and we’re we’re dancing freely. However, you know, any steps are just used as a little springboard and suddenly people have got smiles on their faces and they’re saying to me, “Dan, I didn’t realize dance was for me” and there’d be really good dancers. And I love that. I get such a high off it. So that’s a lot of the work that I do, and then on top of that, I do a lot of camera work. And sometimes they overlap.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah. Filming, filming dance. But, I mean, what it speaks to, for me is a little bit like dance is just always so close and so present. And it really, I mean, and I experience it myself. Like, it’s not 20 years of professional training that brings you to dance. Like, it’s just a shift of perspective, which actually maybe is a nice link into like where we are. Maybe you could just say a little bit about where we are and what we’re going to do.

Dan Canham:

Yes. So we’ve come, we just met just met in a Tesco car park after 17 years. And I’ve driven you out to the fen edge. I won’t give a full account of the fens, but what we’re looking at now is like 360 degrees of flat land. and in any one direction, we can probably see for at least two or three miles. And in some cases a lot further. And we’re looking at sort of wheat fields that have been harvested, just stubbly wheat fields, which are quite a nice color, actually. We’ve got some lovely greens. It’s been very dry here, you can see, so there’s a lot of beige and yellows. It’s overcast day, but there’s a bit of blue around.

PETER:

Yeah, you can really see the clouds rolling off into the horizon..

Dan Canham:

And we’re on an old drove, like just an old farm track that has been concreted a single track again in the middle of nowhere. I don’t imagine we’ll see anyone for if we sat here for a couple of hours, we might see a jogger or a farmer or a cyclist. That might be it. Which is odd because we’re quite close to Cambridge, quite close to a big city, and I just love how so out here on the fens, I I feel at home because I grew up around here on the edge of the fens, and I feel a simultaneous sense of comfort with all of this space and of ownership, because you’re not going to be disturbed and also slight paranoia. because if someone had some binoculars or a scope, they could be miles away and see us. And in fact, there was one time where for some research for a project in the fens at night, I drove out to one of these droves out near near March, near Doddington, and I put my headlights on and I just started filming myself dancing. And it was, I don’t know, maybe nine o’clock at night, and there was no one around for miles. It’s amazing feeling, and you feel so free. But then literally within half an hour, someone drove up to me and said, “What are you doing?” And I was like, I can’t remember what I said. I think I said something that did enough to just put them off. I was like, I’m just doing some research or something. Usually you say you’re a student or something. and they don’t bother. But yeah, so. Oh, there’s a car car did pass. Oh, and there’s another car look after I said we have to watch out. But we’ve come here because it’s a really straight drove and I thought it would be nice as a kind of reunion of sorts for us to be either ends of this road, maybe like a mile apart, and just slowly, with the wind blowing across us and all of this space, slowly meet in the middle. Feels like something Marina Abramović and Ulay would do.

PETER:

Oh, yeah.

Dan Canham:

They did it on the Great Wall of China. I think that’s the inspiration. They did it on the Great Wall of China. We’re doing it for over a mile on a fen drove. But that is it, then. And we’re going to dance it as a way of the recipe as we get closer and then we have some kind of point of connection.

PETER:

Yeah. I mean, it is. We’re meeting across time and space. Yeah, this is wonderful. And I mean, and I’m now living here, so it’s also apt, right? So we somehow meeting in this place where you’re from and you’re anchored and that I’m finding myself anchoring and encountering. This sounds great. So we’re going to walk along this straight road, turn around, and move towards each others in some way. Yeah. Great. Sounds simple.. All right, then we’ll pause now and we’ll be back in a bit. Lovely.

Pause

PETER:

All right. Okay. So, we’re back in the car. Yeah.

Dan Canham:

At the Midway point. Yeah.

PETER:

At the the rendezvous. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. I was really impressive. I think we just, yeah, we say what we found and what came up for us. I mean, firstly, you found a snake.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, I found a snake, snake skin yeah. Yeah. Or maybe two. I can’t tell. Which, yeah, I had to be careful not to just get carried away with dancing for the snake skin and abandoning you. But yeah, like, just about noticing, I guess. Yeah. And what you notice. Yeah. And I had the feeling like this could be a practice. Yeah. And the more we do it, the more we’d notice. Yeah. And the more we’d slow. I feel like if we did it 100 times, it would just get slower and slower and slower until we were just walking. And it would get longer and longer. And so, yeah, when I started noticing things, then I saw like a snake skin or. the buzzard calling or felt that wind in the grass or yeah, details.

PETER:

Yeah, I mean, I mean, even to the extent, so at the beginning we walked away from each other and we didn’t really discuss how and when we would turn back. But I got to the bend in the road and then I felt like, okay, that makes sense. But there was definitely an urge of like, how much of a dance do I want? And like, how much do I want to include? Like, there was very interesting quality of like wanting to, yeah, like you say, notice more and be with more like throughout, not just the walking away, but also coming back to towards each other. I really, yeah, beautiful sort of. Yeah, quality of inclusion. Mm, mm mm. Definitely the buzzard. At some point, I didn’t realize there were crickets, and then I heard the cricketets. And this is sort of the tractor across the way. And even just the details in the sky and then, for me, it also there was like the relationship between us and it differed so much. Yeah, how much I could see you or not.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you’re not sure. like. can you see what I’m doing? Is it having an effect on you at what point? There was one point where I felt like we had a first proper connection, which I don’t know, maybe 50 meters apart, where you were low, and then I got low, and it kind of slowed down. It felt quite animal. Yeah. And it was like, “Oh, he can see me now.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those stages of intimacy, Yeah. proximity, on a big scale, like Yeah. There’s no rehearsal room, this big.

PETER:

No, no, no. No, no. Absolutely. And I have so much input as well. But on a very fine level as well. Like it’s not loud music or something.

Dan Canham:

It’s Which was weird for me because I almost, I almost exclusively danced to music. Yeah, yeah. And it will almost exclusively be like mining for grooves and repetitive, like things I can like teach and like that’s almost exclusions to be what I do. So having the space to just drop in and out of, yeah. freer stuff was freeing and also just like, what do I do? have music in my head sometimes.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, But yeah. But for me there was such a number of rhythms, actually.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, sure, sure.

PETER:

And the rhythmicality was so explicit and strong. Just because I know that I’m somehow to get closer to you. So there’s the rhythm of just having to walk, right? I mean walking is such a rhythmical activity. But then the wind through the grass and the sort of stop and change and shift in direction. And you’re kind of getting closer to the rhythms of the space. At some point, like I was vocalizing some of the breath and some of the sounds of the things. But also, yeah, having an intimacy with that and definitely like the animal came out from me as well. I’m on the ground and I feel like a hare peering up off the grass.

Dan Canham:

Well, there is a hare. You’ve just said it and I’ve just spotted one. That’s crazy. Can you see it?

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Canham:

Literally. You just said it and we hadn’t seen one. And I haven’t seen one in the last three days out here. And there it is.

PETER:

You summon and it will come.

Dan Canham:

That’s crazy. Because also obviously we had hares in right of spring. That’s crazy. It’s right there. Yeah. Yeah. That’s. What else do you want to summon? We’ve had the snake, the hare, learner driver. Yeah. Nice.

PETER:

But it is. It’s about there’s something conjures for me about getting closer to those things and listening and giving it opportunity. I had to think of your work with communities and things and this is such a simple and rich invitation for us today. And I was sort of curious, like, how do you, yeah, how do you manage that that sort of intimacy of dance and the expectations and like familiarity that maybe people who are new to it have or don’t have, right.

Dan Canham:

When I’m working with communities, it’s tends to be like social dances, my way in, even if we’re making up our own social dance, and I’m always mining for like simple steps which I can name the shareable and teachable that I can call out in the moment so people don’t have to worry about what comes next. Almost like a Cèilidh.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah.

Dan Canham:

But without the music or those particular steps. But it really is analogous to that kind of social dance I’ll call out something. And what it does generally seems to is just free people up and free them up to be with each other. And so much of the approach being explicit about naming “This is for you.” “This is for your friends,” as much as for an audience.. And not like a presentation, you know, face out, everyone face out front. I want them to be facing each other. I want to be looking into each other’s eyes. I want them to be enjoying the steps and crucially, as well, I always say there can be as many different versions of that choreography as there are people doing it. And I really mean that. As long as the spirit and the attack and the quality is there, you can do the same move in your left index finger, if that’s all you have facility for that day as you can with your full body. And I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it. It used to be just words that I said and figured, oh yeah, that theory is sound, but they’ I’ve really seen it. seeing, you know, 160 people on the Olivier (Theatre) doing this like storm sequence where they’re dancing and I’ve seen people like wheelchair users who who are putting it really in their shoulders or like someone who’s like 80 years old. Do you know what I mean? Finding their own way or a four year old just going for it? But as long as the collective approach and spirit is right, then they are meeting through dancing. And the step and the groove is a safety net for them so that they don’t have to worry about what it is they’re doing. They can just meet through. And then as an audience, maybe you see that and you see the connections and you think, I want to be part of that..

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. If not just as a witness, right? Feeling it, feeling the music, feeling the rhythm.

Dan Canham:

Yeah. Yeah. So, and I think the thing about the freedom of expression, obviously, obviously, as a choreographer, I have, like, many different, like, um needs to serve, not least serving the story or even if there’s no narrative, you know, serving the rhythm and the journey of a piece. But yeah, I think and so I’m really, I’m really hot on, like, detail, you know, when detail of approach and of attack, but then, I think because I worked for so many choreographers over the years when I was dancing, who were so. precise to the point of controlling that it could strip you of that creativity if you didn’t have exactly the right body or approach. And because I never trained. Because I did a drama degree. And my body doesn’t suit certain approaches. Then I just get a real kick out of opening up and cracking, approaches to dancing.

PETER:

Yeah. Because what’s so striking with what we did now is also that I’m standing there alone and I have to think about how the grass will continue moving. The crickets will continue sounding. The crack in the road will continue opening and the plants will continue growing through them. The snake will continue to shed its skin and the farmer will be still doing the fields., like this sort of like strangeness in dancing of like I’m doing it alone, but am I? You know, we were so far apart at the beginning I could barely see you. I didn’t know if it was you or not,

Dan Canham:

if it started

PETER:

if it started exactly and like, are we together or am I dancing by myself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there’s some sort of thread there where like the individual and the collective, they’re not so far apart. Like each person in the on the stage in the community dance needs to somehow be alone in themselves and in who they are. And at the same time, beside and with everyone else, right? There’s something

Dan Canham:

Totally And I think for that reason, I don’t often use physical contact. And if I do, it tends to be quite gestural or like overtly theatrical. I won’t often involve like, yeah, or if it is social, maybe there’s, you know, a social dance to it, but I don’t often use contact and even before work and a lot with members of the community, even with pros, I wouldn’t often use that because maybe because I enjoy my own space and being able to have agency over my own space whilst being in relation to Yeah, I don’t know. You can still do that when you’re touching, but maybe it becomes harder.

PETER:

Yeah. Yeah. No, there’s more or the agency, that like control of oneself is somehow limited, even by the just the social code of like, okay, now we’re touching so I should honor that. I mean, funny enough, we did touch. And I felt it as like a question. Like we were getting closer and closer and then of course the the sort of sort of, what do you call it, the end result of like getting closer is just let’s clap hands, let’s bump fists let’s hug but I felt that resistance and it was interesting because it meant, okay, but it’s not about somehow becoming one or I don’t know, that’s bad word, maybe,

Dan Canham:

but I know what you mean

PETER:

being together somehow it like caused me to ask questions of like, how can I continue this dance actually going past you? Yeah, yeah beyond you.

Dan Canham:

I was the choreographer in me was really present. That’s what I was like, no, we have to earn this moment. I like, we can’t just like, that can’t be the first thing, just bump fists. Do you know what I mean? So I was like, my choreographer hat was all, I was just like, what’s the what’s the good choice here? And butting back to back felt good, you know, because this whole thing about forwards and back on a straight line felt really. Yeah.

PETER:

I mean, actually, that was challenged a lot by the environment. So yeah, the road was is linear. Yeah. However, it doesn’t it doesn’t, it didn’t necessarily pull me in that sort of forward/back direction because you have this side wind. Yeah, which is so present almost omnipresent. Like it’s it’s inescapable, regardless of what direction you’re going. It really fronted that.

Dan Canham:

Yeah. That’s right. What did that. I once met, did a project interviewing some people out here and I spoke to a guy who at the time was a traditional eel catcher. He used to make willow traps. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he was part of a long line, like hundreds of years of his family. His name was Peter Carter and he told me “the wind out here is a lazy wind. because it doesn’t bother to go around you, it goes straight through you. So it’s lazy.” It’s just like a classic, like fen saying, but like that thing you say, yeah, I like, yeah, I felt it kind of slightly diagonal, so at times I’d just like orient to the road and then it’s just this wind coming at me or to my front or to my back.

PETER:

Yeah, yeah. Which I loved. Yeah, I mean, we I think that the beautiful thing with dance for me is that it does, like, it doesn’t really have a language and it struggles to sort of like find sort of representation in the world and relevance sometimes as well. But like you say, these colloquial sayings and things, like the conditions of the place often the environment, they’re so bodily. Like it goes through you, it’s lazy. It’s like a dancing partner, you know? Like it’s

Dan Canham:

and for me as well, like those conditions include my history and knowledge of like people and I don’t know how you found it, but and I think I’m like it in general, but like when it comes to taking up space and when it comes to being an expressive, like, I was really impressed that the first, I don’t know, maybe five, ten minutes of your dance, you were within 10 meters of this learner driver who just parked up and they were maybe watching? I don’t know, chatting through. Certainly it would have been out of the ordinary for them. And what it means to be antisocial or to be unpredictable or to be seen as, I don’t know, like, you know, flamboyant or extreme or expressive in a way that certainly around here isn’t necessarily welcomed because, I would say, at least from my experience growing up, and like historically, it’s quite a sort of conformist, do you know what I mean? Like, don’t step out of the ordinary. It will be commented on if you do. Yeah. And I just wondered for you how that was starting. I did have some level of like, can someone see me? Is someone watching? Will they call the police? What do they think I’m doing? Do you know what I mean? Like, but that speaks more broadly to me about, yeah, public space and dance as this kind of, you know, what it means to take up space in that way. And sometimes I’m uncomfortable with it. Like, if it’s not a licensed venue does it fit? How did that feel for you?

PETER:

Yeah, Well, exactly as you described it as like taking up space. It’s quite powerful as a meeting, actually, when I meet my like… Because it’s in me, also, right? Their eyes on me, my perception of their eyes on me what they perceive me to be doing and what am I allowed to do, what I think am I allowed to do.

Dan Canham:

Exactly.

PETER:

It’s it’s kind of it’s a very, like. It’s a strong sense of being allowed or not allowed to be present. And and we took up so much space. And like you say, there’s no dance studio as long as there’s.

Dan Canham:

No, no, no.

PETER:

But what came of it? You know, like the beauty of seeing your duet partner get closer? Or the person you’re conversing with physically get starts so small and also to have such range. I mean, we could have veered off the the droge, right?

Dan Canham:

The drove.

PETER:

The drove. Yeah, yeah. And gone outwhere. Yeah. So like taking up space, it feels like a right. Yeah, right. And yet that freedom feels really elusive and we were speaking a bit about how the fans are they’re very wild space, but they’re very created Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah. maintained space.

Dan Canham:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s entirely human made now. Yeah, yeah, insulpted and farmed and kind of, yeah, ransacked. Yeah.

PETER:

I mean, like the the sense of permission to do dancing. I mean, I’ve also been looking, how can I walk these places? And it’s terrifying. I mean, most of the time I’m just like, oh, I don’t want to bother someone. I don’t want to walk on someone’s land and stuff. But how do you engage with, those questions in general?

Dan Canham:

Yeah. I think, yeah. It’s reminded me of a couple of things. One is with my oldest friend from around here, we used to go on these long walks, just sometimes in a straight line. You know, along the 40 foot drain, you can walk and some of it is private land. We managed to do it. It is when we were younger, we cared less. Yeah. But we managed to, yeah, walk in a straight line for 22 miles. Between Earith and Downham Market and that’s something. It is that Marina and Ulay thing, if we did opposite ends of that, it would take us, you know, a day to meet. And would you be able to dance for 11 miles? But no, I think, yeah, what it means to to be expressive in that way and to.. I’m really good when I’ve got the license and then I’ll just like. If I’m like, if someone’s like, here’s a stage, here’s a microphone, whatever, here’s a, here’s a license to do your thing, I’ll take up that space. If not, I get very I get very nervous. And yeah making sound and like, you know, all of that kind of stuff because it might be seen. And I’ just come back from New York. I was in New York This is what it’s on my mind a couple of weeks ago, doing some research and like there’s a possible project out there that may or may not happen and but I had the joy of just meeting incredible people out there and watching some rehearsals of things and the first thing I did after being on a plane for eight hours and then an hour and a half through immigration and then catch their Uber was land at Pier 76 on the Hudson River. So I’d been invited there. And there was this thing called Dance is Life, this party on a Monday afternoon between, I don’t know, five o’clock and 10 o’clock at night. It’s properly diverse, properly queer. People are just so expressive. And then you could see some of that too. Just around the city.. Do you know what I mean? Like, people roller skating and central. And like, and in fact, then we were chatting to someone about like nights out there and stuff. And they said every night out is like on some level is a queer night out. It’s no longer just its own thing. It’s just permeates culture for the young people. Do you know what I mean, out there. And I think especially like in New York in general, I just found people so at ease with expressing themselves. And of course, that’s a cliche too, in terms of. But it’s such a comparison to England. And especially around here, Tory hotspot as well. Do you know what I mean? Or probably Reform now. where it is very ordered. Even the land is ordered. It’s all straight lines, it’s, do you know what I mean? And so, and as you say, we could have just cut zigzags across one of it. I would be nervous. I still have the fear of a farmers shotgun.

PETER:

Yeah, of course.

Dan Canham:

From when I was a child. But yeah, I think I got, I’ve really, in New York, I was like, damn, this this is enticing. Yeah. Because there is this invitation to just do what the hell you want, where, what the hell you want and no one’s going to blink an eyelid. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah.

PETER:

No, it’s there is like a hope with this sort of like, I mean, it’s terrifying and freeing at the same time. Like we’re experiencing where anyone can have a voice, right? Like social media and yeah, has sort of on the internet has sort of created the space where we all feel like in some part that we should participate. Like we have to comment on things we have to like things. And that sort of culture, I think is becoming more and more prevalent or permitted in like so much of our lives and especially the young who are like growing up in this nature.

Dan Canham:

And this felt odd because we weren’t filming it.

PETER:

Exactly. Exactly.

Dan Canham:

It’s really for his own sake. Yeah. He’s like, shit, but this is gold. Where’s this? How can we put this on the gram and shit him in and all like, how can I harvest this some of this material like yeah, yeah, yeah yeah and so to do it for its own sake, I think it’s a good practice.

PETER:

Yeah. I mean, I mean, and in a way it’s not as well, right? We’re still capturing a part of it, but I was I was really thinking actually.

Dan Canham:

True.

PETER:

Because you chose such a visually spectacular. It’s not going to get a cross on audio, but it is just amazing. And like just, I noticed the detail, like I was at some point on the ground and you see the lichen. Like you see the conversation between nature and this road that has been built. And of course, yeah, you want to capture it somehow and put it out there, but it’s it’s a weird conversation when we know Instagram is sort of like this monopoly of like creator space as well.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER:

It’s sort of almost authoritarian control space where everything has to function in the best way possible. That’s right, yeah. But what I love is you sort of opening up this question of like giving permission. And that really resonates with the kind of community dancing and when I’m working with people who haven’t danced so much, like exactly how do I give them permission to do these things? Like we know as professional dancers and people have worked in the field for so long that the the border between dancing and not dancing is so thin.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PETER:

Like people can really do it. Like, that sort of old expression of like, oh, I can’t dance is really speaking to something that is very sad actually.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, no, definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

PETER:

It sounds really amazing. The ways in which you’re finding to sort of give permission or give license as you say as well.

Dan Canham:

I sort of, yeah, I think what I tend to do is I’m really, I feel like I’m really sensitive. I’m sensitive to where people might be at. And of course I I explicitly state early, like meet this wherever you’re at. And then I’ll, and then I’ll try and set the ask in terms of commitment really high. Right off the bat. And then as soon as one person or a number of people like meet that, I’ll reinforce it and I’ll praise it. And that generally works me and then everyone will say, oh, damn, right, they’re going for, I can, I’m allowed where it falls down, which almost happened to me the other time. Not so long ago. and it’s been a long time since in that situation I was teaching a group of teenagers, some of whom haven’t danced much at all. Some of like teenage boys and they were just part of this group, amazing group. in Stoke as part of this project I was doing with Restoke, or an amazing organization and they’re trying to up their work with teenagers. And in the first morning, I was doing what I thought was relatively low bar engagement, kind of just to get them humming in as a group, and they were not having it. And so my usual tactic of like ask and then support when it’s met just couldn’t happen because it wasn’t being met. And then I was like, shit, what other what other tactics do I have? like, how can I like get them in their power? And I’m used to doing it quick. And this feels like it’s going to be harder. I think actually then, because we were going to make like a we were making like a music video dance video after a bit of a struggley first session, I played them the music that was made by this guy, Paul Rogerson, who works at restock, was really cool music. I showed them some of the visual references, which included like this ROSALÍA & Travis Scott music video where they were like, oh, actually, this is pretty cool. I showed them some of the stuff I’d shot before and then suddenly they were on board. And it was just really interesting to me in that moment of like, I’ve always had the mantra in my head, like, the material, especially in that kind of situation has to be, is the thing. You can be as enthusiastic and as kind of motivating as you like, but if people aren’t really into the material, you’ve got an uphill battle. But one thing I noticed there as well is like there can be other ways of like, I guess we’re talking about, like trust and credibility. And you can signal I’m giving you permission, I’m giving you permission. But if they don’t trust you for whatever reason, even if you think, well, you should, it’s not going to fly. And so even just showing that Travis Scott and ROSALÍA music video or playing that music, suddenly it had a lot more cachet. And then when I was asking them to, we still had a journey to go on, but at least we were on the path, whereas when it first started, it was like, oh no, I don’t we can’t even see the path here. So it’s all trust, isn’t it? And one of the things in New York, actually, I was doing some work with this amazing, the public theater in New York, like, amazing, and they have this program called Public Works where they work with hundreds of members of the community and they’ve been doing it 10 years. Some of them have been in, they call them pageants, but they’re big shows and some of them have been in like four or five pageants over the years. Their whole family. Some of them might have started as a four-year old and now they’re a teenager and they’re still doing it, you know, incredible, long form community engagement. But yeah, on the wall there, Dahlia Ramsay Lopez (Dan meant to say Dahlia Lopez Ramsay) who I was working out there with She’d put “up always act in the interests of trust building.” I think. And she said I think those were the worst. And she’d she’d been round the houses on what it could be, like, always assumed best intentions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that was the one she’d landed on. And I should say as well, like so much of this approach is really, really grounded in director Emily Lim. You know, she’s run public acts at the National. She’s like, opened up so much of my work and and it’s so values led. And I’m sure, like, for her, like, yeah, always acting at the interests of trust building, I think, yeah, it is, like, that’s the. That’s the thing. That’s That’s what it is. And we’ve come out here because we know each other, the trust is implicit, but still, it’s only that that allows for you to step outside of their ordinary.

PETER:

Exactly. I was just going to say, like, in a meta way, like I’m so, I feel so privileged that you trusted me to do this. And I think it was clear, like I sent you a message on Instagram after, yeah, after we’d sort of reconnected there and then immediately you were like, yeah, let’s see. And I think, and throughout it as well, like trusting to stay a little bit longer with a movement, trusting to stay or to go back to back, even though I felt your choreographic hand sort of like, oh yeah, you’re right. Let’s trust in what else could be there. And then trusting in, oh, can we can we find contact and what kind of contact would that be? And throughout, like there’s these plays around permitting and providing, which sort of I had to think a lot about how for a while I was thinking that Dance doesn’t always have to be performed and that dance can exist outside of that economy almost. And I still agree with it, but I think there’s something still, which is similar to performance, maybe definitely not just for the stage, but a performance where it’s like being present, taking space, and trusting one another and permitting one another to be able to, for that dance to exist. And even to trust yourself as well. To dance.

Dan Canham:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. There’s a moment relatively soon after I’d stopped performing on stage where I still enjoyed dancing, obviously, and with dance like to music in my living room and so on. And I realized like, oh, I can close my eyes. Because for years it was like, never close your eyes. Do you know what I mean? Like, that was just my thing. And like, always let the audience in and what are your eyes doing? And that performative outward facing. And then I was like, shit, I can just close my eyes. Just have a great time. Just vibe out. And it felt like, I don’t know. Yeah, it felt like a whole different relationship to moving. Yeah.

PETER:

It’s. I mean, the word is really big, but everything about your proposal today screams freedom in some way or another, just being in such a large expansive space and then trying to to find a little bit of freedom in there and be there. It’s really beautiful.

Dan Canham:

Good, yeah. Good. It’s nice.

PETER:

Yeah, I think we could probably start to wrap it up there unless you have anything else. It’s pertinent from this experience. Otherwise, you could let us know, maybe how to get in touch with your the rest of your work.

Dan Canham:

Yes. If you’re curious. Instagram’s the place I put everything. But I’ll, you know, when I say everything, it’s not my whole life, but, you know, everything I’m up to. And the Instagram is @dan_canham. There’s some pictures and films and stuff up there. I’m co-directing the closing event for Bradford City of Culture, which will be Winter Solstice. Nice. Yeah, so that will be 20th and 21st of December in Bradford in a park, and we’ve really drawn on kind of ways of gathering and of congregating at that time and fire and dance and music.

PETER:

Wow. Real fire.

Dan Canham:

Yeah. Yeah. That sounds amazing. So that’ll be, yeah, maybe like 180 performers, hopefully. From the Bradford region and big audience, maybe We’re hoping for like 5,000. Yeah. Under the sky, whatever the weather. Yeah. And so that’s a big one coming up. And then, yeah, lots of lots of nice kind of film-based projects that find their life and their place. online or in festivals over over the time and there’s quite a few of those I’ve put up on on the Instagram. Yeah.

PETER: