Reading Mark Robinson’s report for Creative People and Places on Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities , I came across this quote from Peter Block

‘I’ve lost faith in reforming anything that calls itself an organisation: They inevitably dehumanise us… organisations value people less and less and yet… there’s enormous hope in humanising spaces in organisations….What dehumanises organisations is the system’s design based on predictability, consistency and control. There can be experiments and exceptions locally for a while, but most often they are killed off by the system’s requirement for consistency and predictability. My aim is to carve out spaces for human possibilities. I cannot change organisations – they have this inbuilt context, and the patriarchy is so deeply embedded in us – but I can decide every time how to occupy the room… ‘
Peter Block, in interview with Converse 8

Mise freisin.

I’ve always been drawn to dance artists who are performing when it’s beyond the expected, people whose persistent dancing may be surplus to conventional requirement, not normal (let’s say in the statistical sense). Part of this project of Dancing More Wisely is to reflect on what allows some to persist, to investigate what conditions, what personal, social, economic, physical conditions would allow more people to have sustainable dance lives (and careers) if they wished. And resourced with that wisdom, how we might resist the pressure to use it all up quickly because no one envisages you’ll be around for the long haul?

I was struck by Annie’s mention of a well-intentioned question from someone she met. They asked her: “How long do you plan on doing this for?” It’s a question with a lot of potential – a genuine enquiry, an expectation that it should finish, a judgement that it’s already gone on too long. I’m embracing it as a potential title – perhaps it’s the title of this little dance.

What looks like a duet is in fact a trio with Olga. I think it’s the coolest dancing I’ve done all year

When I was asked by Luke Murphy if I’d like to present something at a season of dance he was curating at Uilinn – West Cork Arts Centre, I was keen to accept but to also make clear that over the past two years I haven’t had the opportunity to produce any work, as in prepare it for stage with the usual support of lighting, design and costume that an audience might expect. The combination of pandemic restrictions plus the fact that as an Arts Council member, I’m not able to apply for funding in my own name, has meant that while I was able to dance, I couldn’t pay the teams of collaborators that I’d usually work with to shape and refine how a performance meets its audiences. What I did have to offer was the beginnings of a repertoire born out of the pleasure of dancing and a belief in dance as a way to connect to ourselves and to others, to ourselves through others and through attending to this apparently solo activity, to connect to others.

What I assembled was an evening of dance made from the different elements I’ve been working on this past couple of years: For Tove, the solo that has evolved through a number of screen and streamed versions for this first live performance; the Déambulations audio piece from the Walthamstow Wetlands; Unreeling, the solo I performed at Tipperary Dance Platform and finally For Isabella, a solo I’ve created with and for Isabella Oberlander via Zoom that draws on the Wetlands as sanctuary. I trusted that these pieces, still fresh, still with potential to develop further could work as companion pieces for the evening. I liked that they had aspects that drew from my own experience but that the evening ends up with Isabella who transforms my experience through her own.

We performed in the gallery space in Uilinn, a space with a concrete floor that I really shouldn’t dance on, and a generous height that is a pleasure to be in. The audience was limited due to pandemic restrictions but felt warm and supportive. It included family, dance colleagues and friends as well as other artists from the area. I tried to create a relaxed atmosphere by encouraging conversation between the audience members. And so when it came to a short exchange at the end of the evening, it was rewarding to hear what people had connected with. Some mentioned calmness after a difficult day, some memories of London through the audio piece, another a memory of their father in the middle-skin of my bare torso (she didn’t call it middle-aged but she did mention the particular quality of skin that my body now has and that I couldn’t have evoked when I was younger. There are connections this older body can make that younger ones can’t. And vice versa.)

As with TDP, I was energised by performing and by the realisation that sharing the work with others does do something more that the pleasure of dancing alone can offer me. It has an intensity that teaches differently and the work is clearer (and by work I mean the choreography and what I’m trying to achieve by dancing) when it’s undertaken in relation to audience.

I come away from the experience grateful to have been able to dance, to dance for an audience, to be in a team with Isabella and with Jared who looked after the sound. I wonder about how to develop this work: the same challenges exist in terms of resourcing the collaboration of others. But I trust the material and will wait to see where it can grow next.

When I saw that the Lightmoves Screendance Festival was expanding its programme to support  research on work that combined dance and digital technologies, I recognised that it was an opportunity for Rob Eagle and me to continue the work on dance and AR that we had initiated at NDCWales with the support of Clwstwr.  When I stepped down as AD of NDCWales in 2020 we continued to explore the development of the initial research with the Company but with the uncertainties of the pandemic and the necessity for the Company to pivot so much of its engagement with the public to online formats, the particular queer live-digital experience that was at the heart of our research wasn’t straightforward to pursue.  Rob and I knew ourselves that conceiving an audience experience that involved shared AR headsets wasn’t going to be achievable in a climate of anxiety about hygiene and proximity, though that anxiety about intimacy that’s part of our queer/gay inheritance already haunted our exploration of AR.  With NDCWales’ blessing we’ve been able to progress the work independently and the Lightmoves Open Studios residency offered a space and context for a welcome resumption of our collaboration.

As with everything this past year and a half, Covid and attendant travel restrictions have been challenges to choreograph with.  The week before we were due to arrive in Limerick, Ireland increased the mandatory quarantine period for travellers from the UK who were not fully vaccinated.  Rob was able to respond quickly to arrive for the lengthy isolation period.  The extra time commitment was a signal of how important it was for us that this would be an in-person research.  Rob and I shared an apartment when I got to Limerick 5 days later and worked as a bubble for the week at Dance Limerick’s beautiful church space.  From the start of our collaboration we’ve been keen to foreground the bodily impact of augmenting technologies and the seduction of immersion.  While some of the other projects on the Lightmoves Open Studios residency had chosen to work remotely and made that remote collaboration part of their research focus, it was a delight and release and inspiration to be in a studio/performance space together.  Some of that had to do with feeling part of a familiar creative community, being in an environment where I’ve danced before and being able to meet in-person friends and colleagues who remind me of my place in a wider network of dance. 

Another part of the pleasure was finding an easy working process with Rob that was testimony to what we had learned from our earlier Clwstwr/NDCWales research.  On a practical level we had to relinquish our earlier investigation of the AR headset, the wonderful group of dancers we’d worked with and with them some of the explicit references to Hylas and the Nymphs.  Instead we shifted to an exploration of AR on smartphones with me as the performer.  And yet what we achieved during the week – the nature and the extent of it would not have been possible without a shared language, a shared approach and a clarity about the fundamentals of our joint focus in this this dance and AR collaboration.  

As with the Waterhouse picture of Hylas and the Nymphs, we remained interested in the threshold of immersion, the queer flow back and forth between the seductive pleasure of being immersed and the estranging awareness of what that immersion entails.  As with using the Oculus headset when working with with smartphones we started with existing AR apps as a point of departure, using Instagram as a platform for activating filters that Rob was able to adapt to our use.  This meant that we could dive in quickly to a testing phase to which I also brought some of the solo material I’ve been working on.  On the one hand this meant that we inherited assumptions, content, approaches already built into what we were bringing to the collaboration.  But it also meant that we were working with something that was already layered, already tested, already viable.  And it meant that the collaboration between dance and technology was an encounter between robust elements that was made productive (rather than combative) by the work of mutual understanding that Rob and I had done through our previous research.

We worked with AR layers activated by codes marked on my body – marks which made us think of tattooing and other body adornment whose long history proves how fundamental augmentation always been to the human bodily experience.  The invitation to draw people and their phones close enough to my body to read a code and activate a photographic layer prompted the questions of intimacy and safety that hasalways been our preoccupation.  The set up brought up questions that are technical and artistic as we tested the transparency of layers, the effectiveness and durability of mark-making on sweating skin, the dramaturgy of revealing marks and their attached images that might enhance a narrative and finally the experience of viewers who might see others coming close but who would maintain a distance to observe the process unfold and therefore have a different perspective.