It’s worth writing more about my experiences last Thursday night. SDT’s programme featured two pieces, Touching Zulu by Janet Smith and Adam Benjamin’s Angels of Incidence.

Touching Zulu was inspired by a trip Janet made to South Africa. ‘I never thought I wanted to go on safari – and I found it one of those life-changing moments,’ she told me, ‘because we are robbed in modern life of our senses and other kinds of intelligence because we live in such a different way, in our heads, and by controlling our environment. It made me aware of the delicate balance, the delicate poise that we’re in, trying to control our environment. And it was also inspirational because I saw some of the Zulu dancing which is very much drawn from living close to nature and to animals and informed by animalistic movement and strategies, warrior strategies that are very much connected to the animals. I could almost see the transition from our animal state to what has become modern man.’

Janet continued, ‘[When we dance it] we try to become animals at different points. And sometimes more generally, it’s using our own innate animalistic qualities because we are animals, and in playing in a sensory way trying to give [the audience] a sense of sitting in a hide watching animals come and go into a clearing. And then, as the piece progresses the thinking shifts into being people, warriors, simply working with energies and that fight-flight mechanism that is completely of nature and is our animal selves, we all have that trigger, that adrenalised movement. [The piece features a kill, which] introduces man’s impact on the environment. I think that the dancers go through an evolution as they do the piece and my hope is that the audience is able to – in whatever way – read that.’

And what was it like to see? I was charmed by Touching Zulu, and my experience was all the richer for talking to Janet. SDT’s dancers are wonderful – not only are they strong and expressive, but we saw them become the different things they were dancing, from flamingos to frogs, from monkeys to men. I could see where Janet was coming from, but I did wonder whether the work had more of a political message than she had stated – at the end the dancers went back to their animal states on a stage littered with tin cans, and I thought of the impact human beings are having on our natural world.

After the interval came Angels of Incidence, which is an integrated work featuring STD and four guest dancers with disabilities. I was fascinated to find out how SDT found these dancers, all of whom had quite different styles and approaches to the work. Janet explained, ‘It’s a delight to tour this piece because it’s brought in four guest dancers who have had such different life experiences and who are complete do-ers, positive-focused people and I think that’s great, has a great influence and has a great influence on our younger dancers particularly. You know, when you’re searching for your sense of self and you’re thinking, “Oh it’s hard, I’m not very good,” and then you see someone who’s overcome much greater difficulty, like it’s nothing, actually. It helps your sense of perspective. We had to look really widely for the dancers. We started looking in Scotland but couldn’t find any, and then we advertised, a bit through the internet and through dance publications and through that and the grapevine of Adam, because he works internationally anyway, we came across two dancers from Australia, one who was already living in the UK; one from the States, who had made contact with Adam before. There is this kind of work happening all over, in pockets.’ Janet told me that the experience of dancing with SDT had been good for their guests too – that they had enjoyed themselves and that future solo projects were being planned.

‘The idea of it started a long time ago, because we’ve worked with Adam Benjamin. What he does is really interesting. In order to integrate dancers into a company he works by starting with improvisation, and improvisation is the leveller because you bring to it who you are, and just being true in your response, and you can bring whatever you’ve got to that, and the questions are always, is it honest, is it true, does it work? It encourages risk-taking which can be whatever that means for you. So everyone works within their own limitations and you may be a very able-bodied, skilled dancer but you might not be able to be true, and that’s very hard. In fact, often, training works against truth. Adam came to work with us after we spent a lot of time trying to raise the funds to have extra dancers, so we raised £70,000 over about eighteen months and then we worked on it together, starting just before Christmas (2006) for about a five week period – which was quite tough, quite intense. The starting point was something that had come out of research we did which was the idea that Adam first works to put people in flow with each other, you know, because especially if you have wheelchairs and things that one can be afraid of getting hurt from so we did a lot of empathetic work, and then partway through the process, he introduced the idea of stop – of not going with, of going against. And when he did this, it was like these disruptive angels come in and they make an interesting offering choreographically and as well, he talked about, just the notion of angels, the idea that we each could be at the right place in a moment of our lives to do something amazing for somebody and people told their stories around this, particularly of course the people with disabilities, who had very strong stories to tell. Also, that could happen to you, somebody could just offer you angelic support at a certain moment in your life. and very loosely, and roughly, that’s where he started from. You could see the piece in quite an abstract way or your could see it as a dark journey into light.’

As a whole, I found the piece very interesting to watch. Some of it was very beautiful – the ‘flow’ that Janet talked about was very evident in the dancing – the flow came from the movement but also from the visible connections the dancers were making between each others, like they were joined by invisible forces. This was true particularly at the beginning when lots of dancers were on stage, leaping around, lifting each other into angelic poses, and turning the wheelchairs into vehicles that emphasised the flow – and at the end when there was a duet between a very tall male dancer and a woman in an electric wheelchair. In this the duet the connection, strength and tenderness of the dancers was most evident and my overall impression was of the beauty that we can see when people are so in touch with one another.

I say ‘as a whole’, because the middle of the piece was quite different, with more static moments that seemed to bear less relevance to the beginning and the end of the piece, which made the work feel somewhat disjointed and over-long. It might have been better to start the programme with Angels, because Touching Zulu seemed more robust and impactful.

However, I was glad to have seen Angels and I think it is a very good thing that companies like SDT are hiring dancers to tour integrated pieces like this, for it brings the work to new audiences and embodies the idea that a company – that dance – can be and is open to all, and that there ought to be no set aesthetic for dance, that it’s all about movement, expression and connections, things that we can all relate to as human beings. (All photos courtesy of Scottish Dance Theatre.)