It’s six months since my appointment as Artistic Director of National Dance Company Wales was announced.  But today is the day I finally step officially into the new role.  It’s not that I haven’t worked with the company in the interim – attending meetings and performances, representing the company at events, getting to work with the dancers a little.  But today is when that becomes my full time job – my first ever full time job.

Photo Teresa Elwes

It was important for me to finish my work as Artist in Residence at the Walthamstow Wetlands, important to honour that work as an individual artist and all that it has taught me over the years.  I know that what I’ve experienced thanks to the Wetlands will come with me as I begin work in Wales – the interdependence of people and place, of human and non-human, the creation of structures of sanctuary and refuge for all.  It will come in my body that has danced on the Wetlands with wind, birds, trains, helicopters, people and jackhammers.  I hope I can share that embodied experience with all kinds of people in all kinds of places, sharing from this dancing body to many others that will teach me new things.

Sam is a young dancer who lives in Waltham Forest.  He takes classes at The Place and through his mum, he found out I was dancing on the Wetlands and sent me a video of a dance he made inspired by flying.  So I invited him and his mum to join me for an afternoon on the Wetlands where we talked about the things we saw there and how I dance with some of those things in my mind.  Sam noticed floating feathers and rigid, prickly seed heads that burst and disperse.  He saw the water levels rising and falling on the reservoirs.  He saw bees and dragonflies.  We also discussed pirates. And danced.

Photo Teresa Elwes http://teresa-elwes.pixelrights.com

I had crossed paths with Isabella Oberlander and with Wanjiru Kamuyu on my travels over the past year and, as with Annie Hanauer, knew I wanted to dance with them.  Isabella I’ve known since she arrived in Limerick to take part in the Daghdha Mentoring Programme.  More recently, she was a participant in a festival organised by Dance Limerick that I helped to facilitate and in which she presented her own fierce dancing.  Wanjiru performed her solo choreography at Firkin Crane while I was curator there and we met again when I saw her dance in Paris during my residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais.  I mention these links because they are predicated on international mobility: this residency at the Wetlands in Walthamstow has given me an opportunity to connect ‘home’ in London to the extended, global dance that many of us are involved in.  And of course, the Wetlands itself is a place that supports and sustains in birds this international migration and movement.

Photo by Teresa Elwes
http://teresa-elwes.pixelrights.com

Photo Teresa Elwes http://teresa-elwes.pixelrights.com

I appreciated the generosity and courage of Isabella, Wanjiru and Annie to dive in to the process so publicly, dancing with unfamiliar bodies in a shifting environment and climate, supporting me in bringing into being a way of human/non-human interaction on the Wetlands.  Into and alongside our quartet, I invited Teresa Elwes, a photographer, passionate dancer and local resident to document some of the dancing.  Her sensitive images are in this post and many more on her website.

Photo Teresa Elwes http://teresa-elwes.pixelrights.com

Photo Teresa Elwes http://teresa-elwes.pixelrights.com

Dancing as a quartet  made us more visible, more clearly an ‘event’.  I loved that some of the security guards stopped to watch our dancing, filming us and engaging in conversation about what we were doing.  Our number also multiplied the energy of the dancing in a way that I couldn’t have achieved on my own.  You can see some of the playful liveliness in this video sketch:

I’d seen Annie Hanauer perform and knew her energy and articulate physicality up close from having been in class with her, but it wasn’t until I saw her dancing in Emmauel Gat’s ‘Sunny’ at the Dublin Dance Festival that we had a chance to talk.  And from that conversation, I knew I’d want to dance with her some more.  I’ve never held an audition, so it’s mostly through these encounters that I’ve been able to work with the dance artists I have.  The Wetlands residency has given me an opportunity to extend hospitality to others, and to have a framework within which to try out new creative relationships and that’s what I did with Annie.  Of course, I felt I had to explain that there was no conventional dance studio, that we would be outdoors, that we would be public all the time and that all of that would be exciting and artistically nourishing, and surprisingly tiring, demanding a different kind of physicality and presence to what one might usually use in a studio.  Fortunately, Annie didn’t need to be convinced at all and was happy to join me in inserting dance into the spaces available to us on the Wetlands.

It was particularly useful for me to have to explain to someone else the process of working I use and take for granted in my dancing on the Wetlands.  This has less to do with how to move than where to put one’s attention, to notice the external/internal stimuli and impulses that might then manifest as movement or transformations of our bodies.  And it was such a pleasure to be able to share the  work with such a receptive and intelligent movement expert.

Here’s a long dance we made on the slope of Lockwood Reservoir.  It goes from being a solo, to a duet, to a quintet when young men happen on us.  In fact it’s a symphony of sensations and references, human and non-human that animate our interaction.  We are dancing  interdependence

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