A chat with Janet Smith
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| Posted by Kate Bordwell
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…
