The Wedding by Gecko a mastery in physical theatre | review

Words by Bengi-Sue Şirin

Wednesday 8th June 2022 is the day that Paula Rego died. I love her work; its cynical slant on society; the cartwheels it dances over norms and expectations; the incorporation of humour in unexpected ways, in the darkest of places. So to end Wednesday 8th June seeing Gecko Theatre’s show The Wedding feels like an apt homage to ideas that fascinated Paula Rego. Gecko’s programme notes describe the piece thus:

The Wedding is inspired by the complexities of human nature: the struggle between love and anger, creation and destruction, community and isolation. In a blur of wedding dresses and contractual obligations, our extraordinary ensemble of international performers will guide audiences through a dystopian world in which we are all brides, wedded to society.

‘Bride’ by Rego 1994

I can’t help but think of Rego’s magnificent 1994 painting ‘Bride’, an arresting part of her Dog Women series. It strikes me because the bride, attired in white for what society tells us is ‘the best day of our lives,’ looks so remote, so inexplicable. So much the figure of the complexities of human nature. I find it a compellingly jarring reframing, when the wedding becomes a symbol of struggle, discontent or oppression.

This theme is in keeping with Gecko’s artistic vision. They are an Ipswich-based physical theatre company who, in their words, ‘create performance that explore contemporary themes relevant to the society in which we live, performance that is inspiring and provocative.’ Under the leadership of Artistic Director Amit Lahav, Gecko have performed their 7 shows and 2 films at venues all across the world, from the Fringe to the stage to the GCSE Dance syllabus. I have not come across any of their work before tonight but I see that Gecko have a buzz about them – the audience at Barbican Theatre are for the most part a young, hip, Peckham Levels crowd. And with disco music in the background and smoke filling the auditorium, it almost feels like I am at a bar. The Wedding is back by popular demand after a highly popular 2019 run. How many non-establishment stage shows can say that?

The lights dim. When they come back on, we see a white dress hanging centre-stage, and what looks like the end of a giant cylinder slide pouring onto some cushions downstage left. Kind of Louise Bourgeois meets Tracey Emin? Out of silence we hear rapid gleeful cries, cleverly ricocheting from side to side – and then I realise, it is somebody whizzing down the giant slide! Moments later, a man shoots out of the chute. Other dancers enter this way, too. The audience are delighted, I can feel the thrill in the air. Tonally, it is playful, madcap, avant-garde. I am hooked.

The Wedding to me is a series of vignettes linked by an overriding theme, ricocheting from side to side like echoes from a giant slide. It is one of those dance shows where I best conceptualise it through moments. One of these moments near the beginning which is etched onto my memory is where a woman is bepuppeted by four male dancers around her. They use sticks and a square of white fabric to ingeniously cover her like those parachute games we used to play at school, lifting and rotating it above her. At points, she stands on top of it, and the men pull at it with sticks to make it appear like she is floating. The fabric alternates between a lightness that floats above her, to an oppression that pulls her down. We hear a riot of Balkan brass, music you would hear in the polka tent. Confetti falls in piñata-fast bursts, like it will do for much of the piece. The fact that she wears a wedding dress sharpens the knives that carve this imagery – of a woman happy, or of a woman trapped.

Another moment I found really engaging was the suitcase scene. The stage was empty apart from a lone suitcase. Just as I was starting to wonder, how do I unpack this image, a real live MAN popped out. The way he did it conveyed that the suitcase was his home, and that we had disturbed him but he would be happy to entertain us for a bit. This man – Mario Patrón – is a master of physical theatre. He moves in the manner of a cartoon lizard (or gecko) with agile, sideways comedy. Patrón retrieves a radio from his suitcase-home and props it up on top, playing a lively track to accompany his dancing. He speaks all the while, a mix of his native Spanish and the kind of English that a street performer uses to tempt tourists into stopping and watching. I realise that that is exactly what he is doing; there is a hat in front of him, he has the charm and the moves… Then out of the suitcase-home pops a woman, danced by Wai Shan Vivian Luk. She chatters lovingly to him, but it is not in English or Spanish… It is in her native language? Despite the different dialects, the two clearly establish a relationship for us all to see. I am amazed that I can form a storyline out of such aural chaos, but the strength of the choreography and the dancers is such. This particular scene is really sweet and personable – perhaps a positive angle on matrimony? But, I later realise, it’s actually setting us up for a harder fall when Patrón undergoes horrific violence at the hands of a violent thug in a bridal dress, unhelped by the state and left nearly for dead. Many interpretations could be made of this storyline, but for me, the institution of marriage is shown to victimise otherwise happy people. It is brutal, but a point very well made. 

I realise as I write this that light, comedic moments in The Wedding arc to really dark places. Picture this – three suited and booted men, packing themselves into a very small booth that resembles a room, in the centre of a large stage. The booth has windows and what looks like furniture inside. The scale, the motivation… It is bizarre and funny. But then one of the men out of nowhere cries, “I’m struggling to breathe!” He clambers up, jolting through what would be the roof of the booth in desperate thrusting escape attempts. He begins to choke, strangled by the confines of his tie, again unhelped by the people around him. Voiceover assumes his inner narrative, repeating, “I’m struggling to breathe” over and over until…. Deadpan, droll, and in reference to the metaphorical wedding we find ourselves trapped in with society: “I want a divorce.”

So the parallels with Paula Rego are certainly there. Society, the state… They are portrayed as oppressive, violent, life-ruining things. We see the despair Patrón and Luk are left in after his attack as they hug like they have nothing left but each other. This moment, toward the end of The Wedding, marks a turning point. A single warm pink light illuminates the stage as the rest of the cast, in roles of victims rather than oppressors, wander onstage and form an even bigger hug around them. The damage done by the state is healing through people taking care of one another. After all the show’s fanfare and noise, this scene is stripped back and beautiful; the acoustic album. Even the simplicity of the circle formation suddenly appears transcendental. And now too there is confetti – but much less, and much more gently – soft and wayward, like falling petals. From this point, the pinky lighting toughens to a much more fierce and fiery orange, and the ensemble ride the wave of the collective to take their seats on a horizontal line of chairs. For what I now realise is the first moment of total unity in the piece, they clap their hands, stamp their feet, and chant their newfound group strength in a rousing, upbeat rhythm. It surges, more and more intense – and ends, triumphantly, the kind of ending that you can’t help but love and applaud furiously. All the brutality and darkness was harrowing, but it brought us here.

The Wedding whizzes us down a gigantic emotional slide – starting at silliness, looping through playfulness and charm, taking us to the depths of state brutality and the oppression of the individual, and then giving us a final push down the tunnel of collective healing and catharsis. The interval-less 80 minutes fly by, which for me, is rare (I value my processing time). Indeed, ‘The Wedding’ does not have the ease-to-follow of linear narrative. It is much less like a three course wedding banquet than a lively buffet affair, where you have much more freedom over your helping and you can individually choose which hors you’d most like with which d’oeuvres. And I feel this is extremely pertinent to the idea of the piece. Life, as dictated and interpreted by oneself, as much more affirming than that to which the state would have us wed.

Reimagining the dying swan – Gender Bender Festival | Review

Words by Giordana Patumi.

What remains today of a choreographic work considered a milestone in the history of Western dance at the beginning of the 20th century? In what forms and in what bodies has it survived over time? Who takes up its legacy and why? In which cultural and geographical contexts can it re-emerge? How has it been transformed by the many reinterpretations that have taken place over more than a century? How does it resonate with today’s choreographers and what values can it convey in the future?

The project Swans Never Die, programmed by Gender Bender Festival in Bologna, Italy, invites the audience to think of The Death of the Swan, a solo considered a milestone in the history of 20th century dance, as an opportunity to learn about styles, techniques, identities and cultures. The project’s partner institutions offer a joint programme (in presence and online) that offers performances, workshops, meetings with the artists, webinars and artistic residencies to invite the public to discover the different possibilities of following in the footsteps of a classic through its contemporary reinterpretations. Traversing the stages of this journey through history and memory, the audience discovers the many forms of existence the dance has taken over time since it was choreographed by Michel Fokine for Anna Pavlova in 1905.

Gender Bender is an international festival introducing the Italian public to the new imagery related to gender identities, sexual orientations and body representations stemming from contemporary culture. Gender Bender offers a series of events ranging from film showings, to theatrical productions and dance performances, visual arts exhibitions, installation, round tables and conferences, live concerts and performances by musicians and djs, and clubbing events.

Three works were programmed as part of Swans Never Die: Open Drift by Philippe Kratz, L’Animale by Chiara Bersani and Peso Piuma by Silvia Gribaudi. Together with the dramaturg Greta Pieropan the artists present to the public an imagery linked to the swan that opens up new and personal choreographies.

Philippe Kratz opens the evening with Open Drift, a piece for two performers in which he attempts to capture every transition and transformation, every single moment of passage. “If I could imagine a way to remain perpetually in transition, in the disconnected and the unknown, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom,” says Philippe Kratz, who in his reinterpretation of the swan starts from the concept of transition as an element inherent in the flow of existence.

This transiting takes shape in two bodies that meet by chance in the flow of their lives, before setting off again and each wandering towards unknown directions, after having experienced the life of the other. They are like swans wandering on the water, meeting and separating.

In L’Animale, Chiara Bersani investigates the soul as a place of movement and transformation. In approaching the concept of a ‘swan’ she decides to go ask a question: What happens when we look into the deep night and recognise ourselves through song? The soul is like an aviary full of birds. It is a place where movement, colors, the movement of air and intentions become the flesh of what has been, of what grows, changes, dies out, turns into a ghost.

Silvia Gribaudi closes the evening with Peso Piuma. The piece unpicks the intimacy of the body; the reconstruction of new movements with fatigue and happiness, repeating those arms and that broken neck typical of Pavlova. Silvia Gribaudi invites the audience to explore the intimacy of the body and the abandonment to physicality that in her vision characterises the Death of the Swan. The choreographer, drawing on the imagery of Pavlova’s broken neck, chooses to mould and form a swan that is both light and powerful.

The Death of the Swan continues to interweave the past, present and future, and nourish the imaginations of generations of artists, stimulating new reflections on what we inherit from history. It also looks at how dance travels through time through the incorporated visual, emotional and kinaesthetic memory of dancers and spectators. It is a journey therefore, through the past and future history of dance, to discover how a classic still inspires choreographers and manages to speak to the public: immortal, just like the swans who “never die”.

Header image: Rebecca Lena.

About the artists:

Philippe Kratz is a choreographer and dancer born in Germany. At a young age he worked as a performer in Bühnenkuns, a project of the Tanztheater Suheyla Ferwer. He trained as a dancer at the École Supérieure de danse du Québec in Montreal and later at Berlin’s State Ballet School. He joined Xin Peng Wang’s Ballett Dortmund and in 2008, at the invitation of director Cristina Bozzolini, became part of Aterballetto in Reggio Emilia. He has received several international awards and in 2020 he was awarded as Choreographer of the Year by the magazine Danza&Danza.

Chiara Bersani is an Italian artist active in the fields of visual and performing arts. Her educational path is mainly in the field of theatrical research with contaminations from contemporary dance and Performing Art. She has collaborated with important realities of the European contemporary scene including Alessandro Sciarroni / Corpoceleste_C.C., Rodrigo Garcia, Jérôme Bel and eBabilonia Teatri. Since 2016 she has been collaborating on several projects with choreographer Marco D’Agostin. She has received several national awards and in 2019 she won the Ubu Award as best actress Under35.

Silvia Gribaudi is an Italian choreographer active in the performing arts. Since 2004 she has focused her artistic research on the social impact of the body, placing comedy and the relationship between audience and performer at the centre of the choreographic language. She has received several national and international awards including the Premio Giovane Danza D’Autore with “A CORPO LIBERO” (2009), Premio DANZA&DANZA 2019 as best Italian production with GRACES and in 2021 she is the winner of the Premio Hystrio – Corpo a Corpo.

DAJ Guest Writers – OPEN CALL

Guest writers is an opportunity for emerging writers to be published on our website and social media channels. Each month from September to December we will select two writers to write and contribute a creative writing piece or a review of a dance piece they have recently watched live or online. They will have the opportunity to work closely with DAJ team members who will give feedback on their writing once it has been submitted.

We are hoping that this new approach will diversify our approach to dance writing by bringing in new voices on our platform. Furthermore we want to give the chance to anyone who is at the beginning stages of exploring writing about art to get more practice and feedback from our collective. Our dance writers are all professionals with years experience, and have been published in Dancing Times and Wonderful World of Dance. DAJ team members have led dance writing events at Siobhan Davies Studios and 2Faced Dance Company.

To apply: You do not need to be an experienced dance reviewer but we would like you to submit two examples of your writing: one review (of a film, performance or exhibition) and one creative writing of any kind (poem, short story, prose). The review shouldn’t exceed two sides of A4 but the creative piece can be as short or long as you wish. These pieces will not be the ones that are published as part of the series as we will work on that together. We just need to see whether your writing style is a good fit!

We really encourage applicants from working class/BIPOC backgrounds to apply! Dance writing is very white/middle-class and we wanna help change that.

You can send your application to: hello@danceartjournal.com by 27th August 2021, with the subject line ‘GUEST WRITERS – name’.

DAJ’s team members work voluntarily so unfortunately there isn’t a fee for this work. However, you will receive benefits including access to feedback from DAJ’s experienced team members and get your work posted on a well-respected, One Dance UK nominated dance platform.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp exhibition – Tate Modern – Review

Words by Katie Hagan.

As a neutral haven pre and during the First World War, it was only natural for Zurich to become the hotspot for early twentieth century avant-gardism to multiply. Under a spotlight, Zurich quickly evolved into a site for overthrowing the stifling capitalist structures, bourgeois ideals and nationalism that had led to the war. 

The city’s Cabaret Voltaire – founded by Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hemmings – rose from the ash phoenix-like, providing an electric environment in which artists and bohemians from across the continent and beyond could retreat to during this difficult period.

One of those artists was Sophie Taeuber-Arp, an under-the-radar artist and fellow Dadaist whose multi-media work is currently on display at the Tate Modern. Although remembered for her textiles and paintings, it was surprising to learn Taeuber-Arp trained as a dancer at Rudolf Laban’s school in 1915 and danced with the likes of modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman and Swiss dancer Suzanne Perrottet.

The exhibition seeks to introduce visitors to Taeuber-Arp’s flair and transdisciplinarity; the multitude of what’s exhibited highlighting her resistance to being defined by a single artistic form.

The Dada zeitgeist was characterised by roaring outlandishness, humour and disharmony, basically everything that was the antithesis of the stuffy middle-class, post-Victorian stance that art should hold a mirror up to life. One of the earliest instances of Taeuber-Arp’s interaction with the art movement – as the Tate exhibition highlights in its designated Dadaism corner – was of a performance of Galerie Dada in 1917 where she capered to Hugo Ball’s nonsense poem dressed in a harlequin/robo Cubo-Dadaist costume designed by her husband, the artist Hans Arp.

According to Ball, Sophie was 100% a groover. “All around her is the radiance of the sun… She is full of invention, caprice, fantasy… It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity. The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements. The buffoonery of perspective, lighting, and atmosphere is for her hypersensitive nervous system the pretext for drollery full of irony and wit. The figures of her dance are at once mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic.” 

Sophie Taeuber-Arp in a costume designed by her husband, Zurich 1916/17.

Although Ball’s reflection starts with a nod to the fantastical ‘ephemerality’ that has long been used pin dance down – and it’s always when women are performing?! – the reference to fishbones, intensity and the grotesque indicates a fracturing, puncturing, dare I say lingering of her movement which balks from any notion that she was an ethereal dancer performing something that can be easily forgotten. In this sense, her movement certainly aligned with the modern dance aesthetic, turning from the swanlike transience of traditional ballet that had held dance’s identity hostage for so long, and still does in some ways to this day.

Moving around the Sophie Taeuber-Arp retrospective, the influence of her dance training is obvious particularly in her work between the 1920s and 30s. Movement and embodiment line the walls of her oeuvre. In her abstract paintings colours zip around, squares are inverted, shapes intersect. There is both stasis and motion. Her woodwork, notably her Dada Heads series, is absurd but an interpretation of the human body no less. Her beautiful marionettes created for the puppet show König Hirsch (King Stag) in 1918 imbue these figures with a possibility of movement that she would have crafted since her dance training at Laban’s school only a few years prior.

Given that dance was undeniably a constant in her life, bubbling from each ripple within her different creative veins, I would have liked it to feature a little more explicitly in the exhibition. I recognise this is difficult given the thinness of material around Sophie’s dance work, not to mention the complexity of writing about a kinetic art form of which its memory only really exists in a photograph and a few nonsense poems. But I’m not alone in wanting to move away from using this lack of documentation as a reason. Whilst this approach won’t help us rewrite history directly, surely it can let us ask questions? Isn’t that prospect more compelling?

I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say there could have been more suggestions or considerations of how dance features across Taeuber-Arp’s work. All that was needed was to shine a light on it to catch dance’s imprints, recognising this art form as a connector, a cross-pollinator between the forms Taeuber-Arp boldly worked across. In the exhibition, Laban and modern dance are scarcely if ever mentioned – and they are two huge names within the Western dance canon. Taeuber-Arp’s geometric abstract paintings from the late 20s and early 30s show an uncanny similarity to Labanotation (a form of documenting dance using abstract symbols), which was published as a text in 1928 but may have been used by the choreographer years before. Whilst Laban and Taeuber-Arp would have been influenced by the artistic trends of their time (which would explain all the abstraction and lapping geometrics) I certainly feel there is a synergy to be further explicated here especially given dance played such a primary part in her life as an artist.

The Sophie Taeuber-Arp exhibition at the Tate holds a magnifying glass over a female artist who flourished during the male-dominated Dadaist period. Although her untimely death came at the age of 53 – tragically from carbon monoxide poisoning – her work has certainly endured. It was great to see dance feature in this exhibition; I guess I just wanted a little bit more.

The exhibition runs at Tate Modern until 17th October 2021.

Illustration: ‘Drawing (‘Umbrellas’) 1937. Image: taken by DAJ in exhibition.

‘You Are On Mute’ – LCDS graduation | Review

Words by Stella Rousham.

Please note that DAJ saw this performance on Wednesday 7th July during the week where only three of the four works were performed due to Covid restrictions. The following week the full programme of work was performed featuring the work of choreographer, Kloe Dean.

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I have several friends graduating from London Contemporary Dance School this year. I’ve heard their tales of COVID disruptions – from online ballet classes in their bedrooms to fears that they may never be able to perform in person again. It was truly moving to see their graduation piece finally be realised, albeit in a COVID adapted form.

You Are On Mute debuted a trio of new works by three different choreographers, collaborating and devising with the third year LCDS students. Whilst each of the individual works had their own distinct approach, style and pace, themes of sound, materiality, communication and connection ran throughout the night.

‘Unfriending’ – the first of the trio of performances– was a film compiled from rehearsal footage after COVID prevented the live version last minute. Choreographed by Janine Harrington and several LCDS students, the film beautifully wove spoken word, movement, sound and fabric to create an ephemeral and delicate piece that was adapted seamlessly for film.

There was no musical backing-track, only the soft, subtle, sound of bare feet padding, sliding and stepping across stage, rising in volume and intensity as they moved faster and falling into a distant murmur as they slowed down. The camera focussed not on faces or whole bodies, but hands, heads, shoulders, feet and legs that strode and stretched between swirls of fabrics in bright shades of pink and yellow.

Image: Genevieve Reeves.

The dancers chanted “We fabricate connections” and “This is a one-way system in motion” as they arranged themselves into an embodied, interconnected organism of flesh and fabric. I was particularly struck by the video editing, which created a layered, palimpsest effect, as the previous shot remained faint in background whilst the new shot appeared. This layering made it even harder for the viewer to distinguish person from person and fabric from limbs. The overall effect was a piece that spoke of the materiality of connections, the visceral and sensorial part of friendship and intimacy, something that is perhaps prevented and transformed in the virtual. 

Ideas of craft, feeling and fabrication trickled into the second piece of the night: ‘Jete Out of the Window’. Choreographed by nasa4nasa, the work took the form of a music playlist, with clips filmed and featuring five LCDS dancers, inspired by Fred Herko’s post-modern piece of the same name. The video displayed a YouTube screen page, with 39 clips running one after another, generating the sensation of scrolling endlessly through a playlist.

The clips captured the suspense and feeling of falling – one showed the doors of an elevator slowly closing, just in time to see a body crumple behind the doors, another displaying a silhouette of a dancer’s soft arm gestures and fluid movements. There was a touch of humour in the hyperbolic, emotive nature of the clips, with titles such as ‘crying’, ‘crying 2’ and ‘falling in love with myself’. More comic videos included a very short and poorly filmed clip of someone doing a jete in their bedroom followed by an inevitable ‘dramatic fall’ from ambitiously trying to leap in an enclosed space. The humour was carefully contrasted with videos which were very intimate and vulnerable, such as one named, ‘feel you’ displaying a lone dancer with their eyes closed and the faint sounds of crying. The series of clips captured the lockdown experience, the home-style videos communicating the conflicting feelings of boredom, loss, and desperation to escape, the juxtaposition of the mundane and the imagined. 

The Youtube playlist format was really effective, and I appreciated that you could see the previous and up-coming video clips on the sidebar. Combined with the rather abrupt, jerky editing of the clips, the overall effect was synesthetic – a visual and auditory memory of emotions and relations. 

In the final work, ‘Pure Comedy’, choreographer Jamaal Burkmar and a substantial collective of nearly 20 dancers sought to “create a universe” through a structured improvision to three musical pieces by Father John Misty. Performed via live stream onstage at The Place, the work embodied the multi-layered patterns, textures, and intonations of the music.

The tension between individuals and the collective carried the piece, as the dancers at once formed a coherent ensemble, and yet, interpreted the music through their bodies in distinct and personal ways. I found myself getting lost in the depth of the work as I flickered my focus between individual dancers, transfixed by the way they carried a certain instrument, rhythm, or tempo. 

Image: Camilla Greenwell.

The performance had a pastoral, folk-feel, as the dancers were dressed in shirts, dresses, and dungarees in natural hues of green, yellow, blue, and brown. The movement was ceaseless. Even when carried by just one dancer, the movement never ended, like the vibrations of the jazzy, bassy, music that never quite died down. I found the pure movement of the work to be refreshing and bursting with energy, but it also had a compulsive, captive quality. 

At the start of the second piece of music, the dancers started in small huddles across the stage, repeating fractured and disjointed gestures, such as wiping the floor repeatedly with their feet, or swishing their arms back and forth. The repeated motion evoked the dancers yearning for satisfaction or completion in their movement, yet something compelled them to keep on pushing. Even without direct, physical contact, the dancers performed perfectly synchronised duets and trios that wove in and out of another, erupting in unexpected ways across the stage. 

I feel so grateful to have been able to watch You Are On Mute, after all the obstacles that have befallen the LCDS students this year. The show resonated with the experience that students of all disciplines across the country have endured – constant improvisation, hope, frustration and the urgency of connection, communication and companionship. Watching my friends, via a live stream on a laptop in my bedroom generated an odd sense of distance and closeness. It felt disconcerting that they had no idea I was watching. I couldn’t congratulate them after the show; they themselves were muted, unable to communicate with me, not even a glance or catch of the eye as they walked off stage. Yet, I had such a clear vision into their every movement, gesture and facial expression.

Discover DAJ’s Percolate residency archive!

A couple of months ago we did a residency at Siobhan Davies Studios as part of the studios’ Percolate award. During our week-long research, we were exploring new ways to write about dance, going beyond traditional reviews.

Dance writing itself is all to do with documenting the somewhat ‘ephemeral’ nature of performance. It’s why we wanted to not only preserve our intentions; we wanted to make them accessible to everyone so we can keep questioning, exploring, experimenting and moving forward with new dance writing models.

To take a look at our Percolate residency page, please head to the ‘Research’ tab on our menu or visit the page by clicking here!

Reclaiming Adult Dance | Interview with Elizabeth Arifien, Creative Dance London

Words by Katie Hagan

Elizabeth Arifien founder and creative director of Creative Dance London is on a mission to change the perceptions of adult dance. In our culture of comparison, adult classes have long been seen as somewhat secondary to professional dance, a skewed depiction given the styles’ values and objectives exist on totally different spheres that shouldn’t really be brought into juxtaposition.

To reclaim adult dance, Creative Dance London has cultivated a balmy oasis of intergenerational and 60+ improvisation-based contemporary dance workshops and classes; no mean feat given the past year has been marked by disconnection and isolation. Katie from DAJ chatted with Elizabeth earlier this month to find out more about Creative Dance London and its hopes for the future. 

DAJ: How did Creative Dance London (CDL) begin?

Elizabeth: Creative Dance London was founded officially in January 2021 as a community interest company. But it was at the beginning of the first lockdown that I decided to evolve the grassroots community dance sessions, CD60+, which began in 2010 and was founded by Dr Jackie Richards. 

Jackie wanted to bring neighbours from diverse backgrounds together to enjoy creative contemporary dance. At the time she was an energetic, active adult seeking new opportunities and was uncomfortable about being stigmatised as a ‘pensioner’ or ‘elderly’ person. Dance-wise, there was little variety in terms of classes – only line-dancing, aerobic or arm-chair exercise – hence CD60+ was born. Jackie handed the reins over to me, and I merged my community organisation Visceral Creative with CDL to create a world where there is a clear and inclusive contemporary and improvisation-based dance presence for adults.

At the moment we run National Lottery funded weekly dance sessions for adults 60+ on Mondays and Wednesdays and hope to have intergenerational classes very soon. We have just completed a series of sessions funded by Local Connections for adults of all ages, which both older and younger adults thoroughly enjoyed. 

DAJ: Dance classes are so frequently divided into levels and ages. Why do you want to create intergenerational spaces? 

Elizabeth: We learn so much when generations collide and move together. We can experiment with experiences and stories through improvisation. Jess and Morgs did a cross-generational work with ENB called ‘Cinderella Games’ over a year ago now and I would like to see more crossovers in terms of adult and professional dance.

We design our weekly dance sessions and intergenerational series in similar ways. We use lots of imagery and the imagination to allow people to visualise and escape from their current space. We help people think beyond their situation and have a narrative coach to guide the group. One task may involve picking a word to move in and around, another may be based on using tangible objects or asking people to bring things that mean something to them.

Documentation and reflection are important processes too. These feed into CDL’s overarching aim of transformation – we like to see participants grow and develop in unexpected ways. 

People get so much out of a session if they feel heard. On the Monday and Wednesday classes, participants can go away and develop their work and bring it back for discussion the next week. They are almost on a journey really; building a sense of identity and dance practice in a way that resonates with them.  

Listen to this beautiful poem written by Creative Dance London participants and watch their moving virtual performance, focusing on the importance of community, connection and creativity.

DAJ: Do you think dance can change the mainstream perception of the older generation? 

Elizabeth: The words that Western cultures use to talk about older people are so demoralising. Trigger words such as ‘old’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘isolated’ carry negative connotations that do not reveal the reality of many older peoples’ experiences. There’s also a misleading preconception that the older generation doesn’t want to learn – when in fact they really do!

Older people love to interact with different disciplines and improvise. During our workshops they feel seen and valued. What is also nice is that they don’t have to conform or follow difficult steps. In that sense it is very liberative, almost like a form of therapy. We place precedence on setting this tone and creating this space and it is great to see their transformation week-by-week during our Monday and Wednesday classes. 

DAJ: Yes, there is a negative language that stereotypes anyone who is at retirement age. At the same time it reinforces the problematic infantilisation of dancers, especially those beginning their careers at a later stage.

Elizabeth: Exactly. I have worked as a professional for a long time yet I am at a point in my life where I want to attend adult classes as my body has changed. Some professional classes don’t mesh well with who I am right now. I think it is really important to create an intergenerational adult dance scene that is for adults of all ages. This will allow everyone to get to know the body they are in now rather than the one they were in at 18.

DAJ: I’d like to speak more about working and collaborating with older dancers. What is it like? 

Elizabeth: Choreographing on older dancers is such a moving experience. I am in awe of the beauty of their movement and the stories their bodies tell. Yet, this is frequently ignored by the mainstream. 

We are working on a project called ‘Taken By The Hand’ which will be a short fashion film revealing a long-standing yet hidden community of older dancers in Tottenham. Often underrepresented for their creativity, athleticism and tenacity in mainstream culture, ‘Taken By The Hand’ will enlighten its audience on life after retirement through dance, rich storytelling, authenticity and humour. We’re so excited about this project and can’t wait to reveal more very soon! 

DAJ: A big part of CDL’s identity is to do with community. Why is this the case?

Elizabeth: Professional dance can certainly learn a lot from community work. I have worked across both sectors throughout my career and have taken so much of my learning in community work to professional dance. 

If we all stayed in our lane, how are we supposed to grow and evolve? We all long for being connected and feeling heard and so much of that is what I have lifted from community work. 

I think there needs to be a narrative shift around community dance. There needs to be a reclaiming of the form, as the creativity and stories that emerge from it are so rich. Social media and digital workshops will play a big part in this reclamation, particularly in terms of how community dance is presented and engaged with. 

Image: Louisa Mayman.

DAJ: How do you define community?

Elizabeth: We ran a series also called ‘Taken By The Hand’ from October last year to January 2021 and it asked the question ‘What is community?’ and looked at what we can learn from our environment. The aim of this series was to explore different communities on the planet and what we can learn from them going forward. We looked at the coral reef and how as an ecosystem, it is the linchpin of its community. The reef then contributes to supporting the ocean and so on.

DAJ: What’s next for CDL? 

Elizabeth: Our dance classes in Tottenham have been going for ten years so we want to go back to live sessions as soon as we can. I think we are all desperate to feel that connection and improvise together – to feel each other’s bodies and awareness in one space.

Very recently we welcomed the composer Sabio Janiak who hosted a sound healing session online. We have some exciting projects on the horizon and are excited to be collaborating with some really cool dance companies very soon. Now is the time to keep an eye on CDL!

For more information about CDL, head to its website and Instagram. Header image: Louisa Mayman.