I’ve spent this past week in a self-organised residency with Olga Zitluhina, funded by an Arts Council of Ireland bursary. I met Olga as part of the E-motional Bodies and Cities project in 2012/13 and had an opportunity to work with her some more on an additional residency in Dancehouse Lemesos where we made an improvised performance that was influenced in part by our experience of Cyprus in the immediate aftermath of its banking crisis.

I knew from our conversations that Olga had been responsible for the development of contemporary dance in Latvia, founding the first and eventually flagship contemporary dance company (that she disbanded last year). More importantly she developed a training programme for contemporary dancers and choreographers in the Latvian Academy of Culture and through it has had a huge influence on the students who have become her fellow teachers, choreographers and dance producers. All the dancers I met had trained in this programme and identified themselves according to which generation of the programme they’d been in.

My intention in spending time with Olga was to absorb from her, to see a mature artist at work. I loved dancing with her in the E-motional Bodies and Cities work and admired the openness of her creative approach, combining improvisation with a rigour and care. I wanted to see what approach means in her daily life, how she prepares, what impact it has on others. As in my own work, I am interested in how the values that animate an artistic approach are manifested beyond performance. In Olga’s case it is clear that her development with dance students, her organisation of the dance festival are instances of her creative practice.

Seeing Olga’s impact in Latvia, I question my own lack of tangible legacy. I don’t doubt that I make a contribution but it is not measurable or identifiable in the way that I see Olga’s admirable achievements. It may be that I am not motivated to create lasting structures. I create temporary structures because I expect that people who engage with mine will want to create their own once they’ve had the experience, impetus or example I can provide. Increasingly, working with organisations rather than artists, I recognise that some people appreciate, (need?prefer?) more sustained and directive guidance and structure. I encourage autonomy because I desire it for myself. Is it time to adopt another approach and could I manage it?

The irony is that when I teach a technique class, it is a very structured Cunningham class: I never teach for long stints and never profess the technique to be a gospel: no one is going to perform in the Cunningham company now so what I teach has to be about enabling possibilities for future dancing. I taught professional class in Riga this week in a huge, airy studio that delighted me because I could range across it with abandon. I enjoyed giving information to the dancers about clarity and energy through this form. After the last class, I asked the dancers what they’d taken from the classes, what if anything they found relevant. No doubt there was an element of politeness in their responses but I was gratified that they found the class helped them feel organised in their bodies, that the clarity of the elements in the form allowed them to concentrate on how they connected to the ground and mobilised their bodies with lines of energy.

I saw the dance students from the Academy a number of times during my stay. Olga invited me to see their solo improvisation assessment classes and to offer some feedback on what I saw (alongside Fiona Millward, of Independent Dance in London). In addition I attended rehearsals and ultimately performances for two different pieces. I was struck by their fearlessness and responsiveness to change and surprise. They are a group of almost 20 dancers. The Academy selects an intake that is trained over four years before another group is selected. The model works well for a small country like Latvia and might be a useful example for Ireland too as yet another Arts Council report is published that recommends the establishment of professional training for dancers in Ireland. Training together for four years creates a group that trusts each other and understands each other so that they can respond in the moment to the shifting environments, contexts and choreographies in which Olga puts them. It seems that from their first year, the students are performing for the public, earning money and learning about performance in the process. Of course, in watching them, I recognised my own appetites, a desire for some more clarity of physicality to ground the energy and occasional frenzy of their movement. But I wouldn’t want in any way to compromise the adaptability of these dancers, an adaptability and responsiveness that is a valuable training for life.

Olga and I danced together a little during our stay, in the studio, on the street in Old Riga; but also in our short swims (bracing dips) in the refreshing sea in Riga and Leipaja, in our daily routine in her apartment, in my watching her perform a Deborah Hay solo, ‘Dynamics’, as part of a Museum Night programme in Leipaja. I learned from her in all these moments and in the conversations that asked how you continue as a mature artist, what does it mean to be relevant, how to work when the choreography encompasses educating, organising, advocating etc. I return from this residency delighted to have seen the fresh greenness and lilac-scent of Spring’s arrival in Riga and feel some freshness in my own thinking too.

I chose to present Cure at the Mac in Belfast at the beginning of April for a number of good reasons. None of them were commercial. I was glad that the MAC fee meant that I was able to pay the rest of the team for their work on the performance (though they were more generous with their time and input than I could be with money). There wasn’t enough money to pay me which means that I paid (in time, in energy) to perform and Project Arts Centre didn’t get paid for its work. Why do the performance then?

The work is alive when it’s performed. And so is a particular way of embodiment for me.
If I don’t perform I worry that Cure is over – finished in my body, finished as a work available to be performed again. Performing keeps alive the possibility that there will be another performance. Therefore, to perform it at the MAC was a pragmatic and an emotional decision.

I can afford to do this performance without payment because I earn income through other work, as curator at Firkin Crane, facilitator for the Clore Leadership Programme, PhD student at NUIM, coach and mentor for other artists and arts professionals. However without staying connected to the challenge, gift and discipline of Cure (and the immersion in dancing, creativity, thought and relation it encapsulates) I don’t think I’d have anything useful to offer in those other roles. It is what Cure teaches me, as a performer, as choreographer, as a human, that gives me the resources I need to share in other contexts.
It wasn’t easy to prepare for this single performance. For the premiere and the two performances that followed quickly after it, I could devote myself full-time for 3 weeks before the performance to physical and mental rehearsal. Re-rehearsing for the Autumn required a different approach which was less frequent but nonetheless sustained over a period with at least weekly performances. For Cure at The MAC I was fortunate that a previously arranged week of residency at DanceHouse preceded the performance. That meant that I could run through the material each day after warm-up; but the residency had other focii too. And my other roles meant that lunchtime and evening meetings required a certain amount of mental attention too. I wondered in the days leading up to the show what impact these circumstances would have on my preparation for Cure. It isn’t that I wanted to recreate the conditions of the premiere performances: I wanted to understand instead what performing Cure means now in my life and how I can integrate that kind of one-off performance in a way that still give the piece the preparation it needs.

I folded at least one origami crane a day for 5 weeks before the performance.

There is a very practical need to be physically capable of satisfying the piece’s physical demands. I want an audience to recognise the physical challenge but not be anxious about me as a performer not being up to the challenge. There is also a mental challenge to know the material well enough to be able to embody and communicate it and to do that in a way that is sensitive to the nuances of the choreography. I was happy that returning to Cure after a break of some months, I could remember the material with relative ease. There were moments that I needed to clarify, moments that hadn’t been uncertain before, but they were isolated and readily recalled. Rehearsing without the blankets, or salt or concrete or the chairs until the last week, I was concerned that my familiarity with those materials would be diminished, relying on a memory of them rather than on active or activated relation. I never want Cure to be about ‘managing’ to get through the performance. The choreography has been crafted and cared for and I have a responsibility to the work present it with the same care and with a kind of security that helps reassure an audience and allows them to relax into connecting with themselves through the work. In my approach, such reassurance is what permits me to draw the audience a little further, a little deeper than they might otherwise. So being able to perform the work with some kind of ease (it’s never easy) is important.
Ian Patterson’s review of the performance that appeared in the culturenorthernireland.org website is for the most part gratifying, especially in the detail of his attention and engagement and in his willingness to communicate a visceral, emotional response as well as a rational account of what he saw and thought. I was a little concerned that his language ‘dance macabre’, ‘painfully visceral’ suggested that I might have substituted physical intensity for subtlety, pushing my performance with a one-note effort. I take comfort from the fact that he felt the performance ‘provokes a gamut of feelings’, even if the list that follows ‘raw, bewildering, edifying and shocking’ isn’t very varied!

What was also very gratifying was that returning to Belfast after the work with Maiden Voyage in the summer felt like a positive return to a familiar place. I felt very much supported by the local dance community and valued that sense of connection. And hosting a supper in the MAC on the eve of the performance for a mixture of MAC staff, visual artists, choreographers, writers and curators helped me to feel that enabling connection also.

I’m ready for more now.

Clarity is important to me but sometimes you have to trust when something works even if you can’t define it. When I invited Sarah Browne to work with me on Tabernacle , I didn’t really know what she would do. In the end, we could point to the Appendix, a pamphlet she created for each of the performances, and to the particular design and proportions of the benches and to the clothing she sourced as visible contributions.

These contributions were tangible and made sense in terms of Sarah’s practice, in particular in relation to her way of dealing with material. However, these material manifestations were just part of a much greater role she played as sounding board, support and stimulus for me and for how I was thinking about the work. We credited all of this work in the programme as Visual Artist. It’s not an inaccurate credit but it’s not specific either.

Last week I joined Sarah in the Shetlands to help her in the making of film that she will show as part of a new exhibition at CCA in Derry. (It opens March 29th ). It’s been stimulating for me to be part of Sarah’s creative process that combines research rigour, a considered ethics and aesthetic intution. She’s generously included me in that process but I’m still not sure how my role could be defined. We’re agreed that I am the Choreographer. However there will be no danced steps, no interventions that abstract the movement of the subjects. And yet I feel my contribution is part of my wider choreographic approach.

I hesitate to explain what Sarah’s film is about since I think the material we’ve filmed in Shetland will tell its own ‘story’. However, I am clear that the point of departure for my understanding of the project was two images of working women. The first is a historical image of a Shetland ‘Kishie’ woman, carrying turf on her back while knitting.

The second is an image of a contemporary woman carrying a child while using a smartphone. These images stimulated me to think about the economic obligation to multitask, the tendency for all of our surplus energy to be used productively. The images relate particularly to women, whose labour is often less visible because it exists in domestic rather than public situations, because it might involve caring and affect. However, in a knowledge economy it is not only affective labour that becomes invisible. There is also a labour in maintaining the personal profile and brand that is required by a networked economy, mediated by the social technologies of private/professional communication.

The Shetlands makes sense to me as a location to focus an inquiry into this experience of labour, and in particular female labour, because the iconic image of the Kishie woman suggests that it is not just a contemporary phenomenon. It has a history, a geography and an economics. A division of labour between the sexes that predates the discovery of North Sea Oil, continues in new forms now that oil has brought money, roads, swimming pools and near total employment to the island.

In preparing for the filming, Sarah and I spent some time together thinking through what the choreographic input could be. As a support rather than author of the film, I wanted to help Sarah to clarify her idea and to understand what she really wanted to communicate in it. It was liberating for me to feel that I could ask questions, propose stimuli and reflect back what I was hearing in her thinking, without interposing my own agenda. This felt to me like the kind of choreography as facilitation that I feel I’ve been developing as I link my work on the Clore Leadership Short Courses to my choreography in the studio.

In Shetland, working with Director of Photography Kate McCullough (who shot Three+1 for now, and Mo Mhórchoir Féin for me), we filmed the fastest knitter in the world (Hazel Tindall) a photographer (Floortje Robertson), one of Shetland’s representatives in the Scottish Youth Parliament (Kaylee Mouat). As choreographer I thought about the rhythm of their activity, the dancing of Hazel’s articulate knitting fingers viewed in close up, the energy of gales blowing on wet roads and loughs. And I tried to see Shetland and these women as Sarah was seeing them, viewed alongside birds at twilight, petrol pumps and smoke stacks.

Photographer Sarah Browne

I’m still thinking about what I’ve learned from being inside Sarah’s creative process. She combines detailed preparation and organisation with an openness to instinct. She finds small details that tell big stories. She is quiet but resolute.

Here is Sarah’s blog post that makes clear her thinking on the project.

© Floortje Robertson 2014

Earlier this month, I took part in a networking evening for ‘creatives’ in Waltham Forest where I’ve lived since moving to London 20 years ago, having fallen in love with dance and with Pete. Hosted at the William Morris Gallery (deservedly and delightfully Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2013), the event was a great opportunity to meet some of the many people in Waltham Forest who are involved in the cultural sector both locally and in (mostly London-based) national cultural institutions like the Royal Opera House and the Barbican. I’ve always known that the borough is home to creative people. Good transport links and relatively affordable housing are pragmatic reasons why that’s the case. Pick’n’Mix:the Dance Selection was my way of highlighting the choreographic talent (Kim Brandstrup, Freddie Opoku, Stephanie Schober, Matthew Bourne, Jonathan Goddard) in and from the borough that rarely gets an opportunity to connect with audiences in Waltham Forest.

When the Council developed its Cultural Strategy in 2010 (Taking Our Place in London), I wasn’t so confident that the council was aware of its cultural resources, particularly among borough residents. Since 2010, Cultural and Leisure Services have been moved around within the Council structure and sits now in the Health and Wellbeing portfolio of Cllr Ashan Khan. Although that placement within the priorities on the council has an impact on how arts and culture is framed there is a lot to celebrate and be encouraged by how arts and culture is being invested in.

Waltham Forest Council is about to launch an Arts Grants scheme of £200k to be spent over the next 18 months. It also has a £9 million programme to improve the Borough’s High Streets and an arts regeneration committee currently developing a public art policy. The regeneration of The Scene at Cleveland Place which incorporates a Cinema will release significant S106 funding to be used artistically and creatively. This together with a pending bid to the Arts Council for capital funding towards a new performing arts space in Leytonstone and a renewed partnership with Film London demonstrates what the Council calls a ‘commitment of ensuring that Waltham Forest becomes a cultural destination and a place for its residents to satisfy their artistic thirst.’

Of course there is a typical and understandable focus on ‘communities’ as audiences or participants in this investment with an almost inevitable separation of artists from those communities when in fact many of the borough’s residents are simultaneously artists and audiences – some professional artists, others enthusiastic and often skilled amateurs. The Council would do well to support participation by its residents in artistic activity at all levels, supporting professional and non-professional practice and ensuring there is an ecology where the range between professional and non-professional is interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

There is a great appeal for me in being able to access cultural activity near home, being able to make work near home and being able to connect with people who want to engage with my work and its ideas near home. Rehearsing Porous down the road in Dean James’ KNI Hub studios in Blackhorse Rd last summer was a real pleasure. I notice that RSA has also been recommending that there should be more place-based commissioning (see Vikki Heywood’s inaugural lecture as Chairman of the RSA, encouraging greater connection between artists, cultural organisations and local communities. I do worry, despite my own enthusiasm for what is possible in Waltham Forest, that again there is an assumed separation between artists and communities, a lack of recognition that artists are part of community (even peripherally, though often centrally), and that the understanding of who communities are needs interrogation. For me communities and places need to be thought of as porous entities, open to inward and outward movement, as indeed a borough like Waltham Forest is, and also as entities that are constituted by difference and healthy disagreement. Too often the language of social cohesion sounds like a smoothing out of difference, with cultural activity expected to provide social glue, when in fact much art is a way of giving form to a dynamic of differences held in tension. While I want to play my part in making Waltham Forest ‘a place for its residents to satisfy their artistic thirst’, I want to keep in mind that those residents are multiple, that the communities they form and reform are in constant flux and that the thirsts that need satisfying are many and varied.