Well, the company is hard at work creating a new piece that is set to the “Pelleas et Melisande” suite by Sebelius. We have just two weeks before it premieres! It will be the first time SYREN has worked with live musicians, so we are thrilled and a bit nervous at the same time.
The company has never worked so fast, with only four weeks to get the piece done. Our heads are spinning in 12’s and 3’s, but we are really getting somewhere, and I think that after Thursday’s rehearsal we will have a solid dent in the beast!
Check out what Lynn and Lindsay were rockin with today…
Two and a half weeks ago I was on the Greek island of Rhodes, soaking up some rays. This weekend, I was in the West Highlands of Scotland - getting soaked.
Rhodes and Scotland are at opposite ends of Europe,and there are some interesting comparisons to be made.
The beautiful views from my hotel rooms, for example:
Guess which one is in Scotland…
Up in the north of Scotland, the clouds were so low (or we were so high up) that it looked like smoke or steam was coming out of the ground. It seemed to be so perpetually damp I could not imagine that there could ever be a problem with forest fires (which there are in Greece, which is really hot and dry), but apparently there is:
Another interesting comparison is the animals one comes across in the course of the day. In Rhodes there were cats everywhere. They were really cute and I ended up taking more pictures of them than anything else. If this makes me a philistine then I am sorry!
The Greek donkeys were rather nice too:
In Scotland there are cows and sheep and some birds of prey, and rather a lot of frogs.
We walked about 20 miles yesterday. I like walking for similar reasons as I like dancing. I kind of retreat into my own head and either I don’t think about anything other than what I am doing or I feel like I can sort things out with a clarity it’s hard to find in my everyday life. Now we’re in Glasgow all that beauty is less than two hours away by train. You walk straight off the train into the most wonderful countryside, where the air smells really clean, a bit like cinnamon chewing gum. I feel so lucky to be here.
On the other hand, I do need a bit of sunshine… I wish I could be close to both places!
I’m looking out of my window and trying to get some work done on a rainy Sunday morning. It’s really wet out there and the leaves on the trees across the street are starting to change colour and fall. This has been a rather sunless summer - not just here in Glasgow but my old friends in London have been complaining about it too. (We British DO talk about the weather, it’s not just a great big cliche…)
I find it very hard to believe we are nearing the end of September already. This has been the busiest summer of my life, and unfortunately it’s been almost all about work and not about dancing or anything else. However, it’s been good in the sense that I have learned a lot, especially since I have been working alone and for myself - both for my PhD and in doing some advertising consulting to pay the bills.
But it’s not all been about work and rain, oh no. At the beginning of August I went to London for a week, ostensibly to do some research but actually so I could hang around with some of my friends and do some of the summer intensive at the Place. The intensive was great. I did Graham Technique with Kim Jones from the Martha Graham Company - this was amazing. I was so happy to be doing the class again because it’s my favourite contemporary technique to do and yet it’s really hard to get a proper Graham class where I live. (Actually in London it wasn’t all that easy.) It made me sad that I wasn’t able to do more than just a week of class in the summer - because there’s no way I can ever be the dancer I want to be, because of money, time constraints, location, etc, etc. In Glasgow I can do a couple of good classes each week, and they are good, but they are not enough. But this is the way that people who love dance but aren’t full-time dancers live - we just have to make the most of what we’ve got. It’s hard to pop in and out of something like Graham, because during a week’s intensive it draws you in, like a life philosophy, and when it stops you feel bereft.
The other course I took was contact improvisation, which in the end I loved. I say ‘in the end’ because it was the first time I had ever done it, and to be honest for the first two or three days I felt completely lost and out of my depth. Not because it was technically difficult, because it’s not, but because it’s so much about trust and letting go. I had to let go of lots of preconceptions about things. For example, we were practicing lifts and I was scared that i would be too heavy, but our teacher said to remember that we are not as heavy as we think, and it’s much more about timing and trust. Having said that, I found it really hard to lift people who were shorter than me because the centre of their weight seemed to be so much lower down than mine. Over the course of the week I grew less scared about dancing with other people and by the end I was in love with it. I was also covered in bruises, because I did get dropped and fall down rather a lot. Unfortunately there’s nowhere I can do contact improvisation here, there used to be but it was discontinued because there weren’t enough people. Oh well.
The thing that I noticed when I was on the Intensive was how much better my alignment is and how much more movement I have in my back and my hips. This is because since May I have been taking weekly gyrotonics sessions with Penny Withers. Penny was trained at the Royal Ballet School and had a career with the Scottish Ballet, where she now runs the young associates training programme. Penny is a great teacher and I have learned so much from her.
Later on in August I went with some of my friends to a place in the woods which I love near Dumfries, in the south-west of Scotland. There we stayed in a reconstructed iron-age roundhouse, which had a thatched roof and a fire in the middle. There’s also an outdoor hot tub and sauna! The iron age people knew how to live. The fire was good because it rained all weekend and we were soaked, so at night we sat around the fire and dried off, drank rather a lot of wine and played games. It was really fun.
I’m now really excited because a) this week my favourite Glasgow contemporary class starts again (which is Graham/Cunningham style) and b) I am going to Greece for a week this coming Saturday.
On Sunday my mum, my sister Jane and I did the Race For Life in Edinburgh - a 5K race in aid of Cancer Research. I actually walked it, because my knee is still not up to much. We raised over £500 between us for the charity. Oh, and I did my bit for Winger publicity too!
My knee is actually a lot better than it was. It’s stopped making the really scary clunking sounds and it no longer feels wobbly. I have been doing gyrotonics which appears to be making me very strong and stand up straighter, and I went to a beginners ballet class on Wednesday which went fine, no pain at all, which is just as well because I want to be super-fit for the Place summer intensive in August.
| | Posted by Kate Bordwell
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.)
On Thursday 19 April I went to Stirling, which is a 25-minute train ride north-east out of Glasgow. The reason for my trip was to see Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) in a mixed programme, and to meet Janet Smith, SDT’s Artistic Director. I first asked Janet how she got into dancing. ‘I always danced as a child,’ she said, ‘and I remember at school making work to a musical box and getting my mum to make me a costume out of crepe paper and it got rained on – I was furious with her – I had all the artistic temperament at that moment!’
At her local ballet school she also learnt Greek dancing and the creative freeform element inspired her: ‘The pianist would play some Debussy or something and we would do our own thing – like Isadora Duncan, complete with tunic and bare feet, long hair flowing! That was the idea that you can move how you can move, and we have movement that comes out of us and we can express ourselves and the music and whatever through it, which excited me.’
Following her teacher’s advice Smith went to Dartington College to study dance and drama, where she encountered a wide range of dance styles. ‘It wasn’t a conventional education in that period. It was the sixties, and it was quite associated with liberal arts and freethinking. It was wonderful for me because I really found myself and I found this area of dance theatre… We had some very good tutoring, and I came across modern American dance, which is what they were teaching there and so that led me to America after school.’
At Dartington Smith admired Rosemary Butcher, especially because she ‘worked in her own particular way.’ After Dartington she studied in New York at the Cunningham School with Dan Wagoner and Viola Farber, dancers who had both been through Graham and Cunningham but whose ‘own research led them into very strong personal movement signatures and flavours, and that was totally new to me, you know, to the idea that you can authentically dance out of yourself rather than out of the different techniques and styles that had come to the UK.’
She also learnt from Wagoner in St Louis, where she also encountered Hawkins technique, which in a sense brought her back to Isadora Duncan, ‘taking the structure of Graham work but finding a much more free, impulsive way of moving.’ When she returned to England, she worked with musician-composer, Gordon Jones to create a solo show. She took the programme to Dartington, a move which proved to open doors for her. ‘My head of department there wrote to Robin Howard, the founder of The Place, and Bob Cohan, who was the founding Artistic Director, saying, “Give this girl a chance,” and they invited me to show it, first of all, publicly, and then again just to the company and the school. So we took this work to London, then I had my first reviews, and I began to get funding, which led to me forming my first company.’
She worked on her companies in Yorkshire and London from the mid-1970s until the end of the 1980s, touring her work internationally. These were interesting times, and she had the opportunity to work with a variety of choreographers and dancers, from newly graduated students to some big names in British contemporary dance. ‘I was always interested in being a dancer as well as a choreographer and working collaboratively with different people and I invited people like my then husband, Robert North; Christopher Bruce, who was also creating work with Rambert at that time and working internationally; Dan Wagoner, because he had been a first inspiration to me and the first person that showed me that you can have humour in work which was such a delight! And then other company members created work as well.’
Following some funding issues in the late 1980s, she wound up her company and freelanced – both choreographing for companies around the world and teaching. Teaching allowed her to have a dance company as a project, and in 1997 she was invited to Dundee to work on the Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT).
Over the past ten years SDT has evolved from a very small group with limited funds to possibly the most exciting contemporary dance company in Scotland. This year SDT has worked with Adam Benjamin*, founder of CandoCo, and Scottish Ballet, producing works choreographed by young company members who were winners of the Peter Darrell Award. Not only was it a good opportunity for the dancers’ work to be shown publicly but also for the dancers to work together and to learn from each other. ‘It was lovely. It was an opportunity for the two companies to get together – to do class together, to watch each others’ work and to support each other. I think dancers are generous and supportive people – normally with a nice sense of community – and it was great – both sides admired and supported each other’s work and difference.’ Further collaborations are planned for the future, with a Czech company, and with the ‘up-and-coming’ choreographers Hofesh Schechter and Liv Lorent, whose work differs greatly but Janet admires for its energy and humanity.
She would also like to take the work further afield. Not just so that more people can see the company but because it will broaden the dancers’ minds. ‘I think a dancer’s life is a very short life and one of the perks is the chance to go out and meet people from different cultures and see and interact with different cultures. So as well as being good ambassadors for Scotland it’s also a really lovely life experience for the performers and I want to give them that.’
I asked Janet about whether she had a set approach to creating work. She said, ‘More and more I notice that things happen very differently. I haven’t started with music for a while, and that’s what I want to do next time. Music does inspire me and I have been lucky enough to work with composers and I think that that collaboration, often with Chris Benstead, who goes way back to my Dartington roots, and therefore we have a shared language about work, and so in a way you’re working often with the idea and without the music and the music comes in later on so in a sense he has a lot to do then, to follow our structure, although he can often inspire me by a piece of music which I can then get to working to. I think I work in a range of ways, but I have to, even when I’m listening to music, I’m looking to find the idea that I will get really excited about and feel passionate about and really commit to.’
‘My works don’t always have a story behind them, but I am into making a comment on culture and it happens through comparison because of that idea of travelling somewhere and it triggering your thoughts. I made a piece called High Land after I’d lived in Scotland for four years and it was my response to the whole thing – Scottish culture and the way it plays the tourism thing – Nessie and the way that the landscape affects us and the influences of psalming and step dancing… I have made pieces that are always about people – they’re not always narrative at all but they are more thematic, they take you through to dreamscape or memory, or sense of identity or culture. Those are the areas that excite me a lot – who we are, what we’re doing, where are we going?! On a personal level, rather than politicising.’
We spoke about dance in Scotland more generally. She believes there is a dance equivalent of a ‘brain drain’ because dance education in this country is limited in some fairly crucial ways. There is not enough offered in terms of degree and postgraduate education, but ‘Equally not far enough qualitatively, not maturing dancers, and that bothers me a lot. So it’s been a history of underfunding or not putting the funds in the right places. There’s space and opportunity for more support to be given to individual makers of work and directors of small companies that have ideas and are working and are going somewhere who often struggle on the breadline. I feel that we can train our own dancers better and there’s a really good dancing tradition in Scotland and I think that if we can put dance more into the heart of education so that we could really study it and get a qualification at school we could build confidence and capacity for our teachers at school level to take up dance, just like you can with drama or English or music I think that would do the world of good – not just fitness, but real love of the dance and then audiences for dance would grow and there would be more audiences for more dance companies.’
‘Dance keeps you sane – it’s a thing for life. It keeps you active and creatively engaged and it helps all sorts of social skills and relationships and trust. I think it is undervalued in education at the moment and that’s the core, the starting place from which all else follows.’
We finished with a piece of advice for any dancer or choreographer starting out, which she had heard one of her young dancers give to a school pupil earlier that day. ‘If you like something, just follow it as much as you can. In dance, try all kinds of dance, because something you think is not for you might become for you, and anyway it will feed what you do. Try to see as much dance as you can, and that will inform you about what you really love, about what you’d love to do.’
I enjoyed meeting Janet Smith, especially since it gave me such an insight into the life of a choreographer and company director, and it made me think a lot about movement and what it’s all about - what it can do… I will post about the programme I saw on Thursday night in my next entry.
*More about this collaboration and the integrated work will follow in a separate entry…
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I first asked Janet how she got into dancing. ‘I always danced as a child,’ she said, ‘and I remember at school making work to a musical box and getting my mum to make me a costume out of crepe paper and it got rained on – I was furious with her – I had all the artistic temperament at that moment!’
