This blog explores the act of walking and its ancient connection to philosophical thought. It will reflect on the process of Walking Piece, a project where 50 people will come together in South London to create a performance around the everyday movement.

More widely, these findings from the blog will also attempt to answer questions surrounding the impact of the Arts on those involved and those who are not, looking particularly at participatory dance.

Watch this space for interviews, photos, articles and other materials that we find in our wanderings.

Saturday 12 May 2012

Interview with choreographer Rosemary Lee - part 1 of 3



You’ve worked with a lot of people of different ages and abilities, and in large scale sight specific settings. I am interested in what it is in particular about that sort of work, that sort of making which interests  you?

So, what attracts me? Well let’s break it down – there’s the different ages, there’s the size of the cast, there’s the site specificity and there’s the untrained and trained dancers - and there are different reasons for each of them.

If I start on the site-specific , there are many reasons why I use that – one, is because I get a different audience, and that’s regardless of whether I am working indoors or outdoors. If the site is not a theatre, you’re going to get a different audience. And that interests me because I’ve always felt, ever since the time I was a student, and I think I still feel this – that although I love going to the theatre there is a certain person who is going to be at the Theatre and that’s to do with their income and their background. Now, I still think I’m basically making work for a middle class audience, even when I’m outdoors, but with something like Square Dances you’re also going to get the odd passer by, particularly in rehearsals. You’re still exposing people who would have never expected to come and see something like this; you’re giving them something. 

Although I want to reach an audience that is going to get something from my work, I’m quite curious about trying to do that with different kinds of audiences. So outdoors you get the passerby, and indoors, for instance when I did something in the Fort Dunlop tyre factory, off the M6 in Birmingham, I got a lot of the old workers coming back to see what had happened to the old building. They hadn’t really come to see the dance, they’d come to come back into the place in which they’d worked all their lives. But to just have someone like that in the audience and for them to ssee their workplace transformed, I felt quite privileged that they would come. They’re not going to go to the Hippodrome to see a dance performance, but they are going to come back to the factory they knew.

So I’m getting a different audience, and I think artistically, I really like the limitation it gives me.
There is still a limitation in a black box theatre but with site specific pieces  is that– often you’ve got daylight if its outdoors, so the magic is different. You’ve got to create a different kind of magic which is reliant on the performance quality of the participant, which I’m really interested in at the moment. You are challenged by the context, the noise, the other worlds coming in that I actually really enjoy. How can I transform this particular site at this particular time? How can I enhance it or make it something different for a few minutes of the day and then it’s gone again. I really like that challenge. Having said that, I’m very picky! If someone said so something in this quadrangle I don’t do that at all, its only sites that maje me feel I can create some other atmosphere or augment the atmosphere that I feel is there, is dormant that I want to somehow enhance.

So the site is really critical for me and the challenges are delightful. I like the compositional challenge of how to make this space work with people in it. Do I need to fill it with 100 women or will something with just one person work?

Number of people – so the large scaleness of it, I think this is an interesting one. A while back Lyn Gardner the Theatre critic wrote a review of something she saw in Brighton where she said something like ‘these big participatory dances are just a way of choreographers getting dancers for nothing’ like it’s a kind of exploitation. I think it’s a valid point and it’s a question we need to keep asking ourselves: why are we doing this? But for me the numbers… if the piece feel like it requires 100 that’s due to the sight. For the women’s Square Dances the reason I wanted to make a piece for 100 women was a) because I felt the sight was right for it but b) because I had a personal reaction to my last piece, Common Dance where I had to turn many women of your age away and I didn’t like that. There was a real awkwardness that I felt I had to take every man and turn away 100 so many women. So there was a huge desire in me to make a work, find a site where I can literally take everybody that applies. Having said that, I didn’t take everyone because of stamina or physicality that I thought didn’t quite work so I’m my own worst enemy there, but I more or less did. So there’s different reasons there for why I did that.

The large number is not that I’m necessarily interested in making work for that many people and that that’s somehow better than working with one person, it’s just different. There’s a slight problem in thinking that choreographers want more, so it’s bigger and better. I don’t think that’s the case, it actually requires a certain skill to make something work for that many people. I think when I work with big groups like that I am saying something about humanity which I can’t say with four people. The mass of people says something about the numbers of people who have passed through that space, or says something about community or society, or says something about women. So for me its about what the effect of the work on people is. Sometimes I want to work with big groups because I think I can say something different and other times I want to go down to one because I can say something with that one person.

Whenever I’m working in what I call an epic way (over 30 people say) I’m also equally trying to find an intimacy in an epic form. How can I create something intimate and delicate with such a big block of people, which you mostly think of as spectacle. I’m really fascinated by that. The other reason is that I want to give people opportunities and there are very few opportunities for people who dance and have a connection in their heart and soul with dance like I do. It’s really dormant for some people too and its an absolute privilege for me to water the garden again and let them come up for a bit and let them see the air and taste the dance.  If I’m going to make a point about humanity, I can’t make it with twenty year old women. That’s a very small area of our lives. I feel I need to show people what it is to exist as a child and as an older woman.

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