On the verge of Giving Up: Or Why I fell Silent

The sharp witted amongst you might notice a few incongruent elements to my blogs recently:

One: I actually feel silent for 7 months.

Two: that I never posted anything about our trip to Indonesia. The truth was that I spent the majority of last year on the verge of quitting my dance work. We were encouraged by all the major UK funders to apply, and then we (I) fell between the lines of everyones’ funding. It is impossible to open a new show in Indonesia when you can not even afford the flights, let alone have enough seed money in the company to finish the show. Without any support, and with smaller commercial commissions drying up, we weren’t able to go to Indonesia in October.

I wrote this in response to the situation:

Breaking the form- democratising movement .

“Is the only reason you call it dance, so you can access funding?” Dance Industry Leaders; March 2014.

I come from a traditional arts background and through my career this has taken me from running a critically acclaimed venue in the West End, to critically acclaimed choreography for stage shows, an award winning dance company, to producing a ground breaking transfer of an international museum, to pioneering work at the forefront of Augmented Dance and undertaking a year long fellowship as part of the Clore Cultural Leadership Programme. I say this not to blow my own trumpet, but to highlight the breadth of my experience, and how I reach the point of todays provocation. I started trying to answer a different question 5 years ago, when I set up my company Hellion Trace because I spotted a terrifying divorce between people’s belief in their own movement quality and what they saw as dance.

“I don’t know if I could trust the technology. I guess at heart I’m just a ludite” World class dancer.

What happens when you believed in finding out what dance could be in the 21st Century? It turns out you find out a lot about people, behaviour change and cities. The last element was the biggest surprise. Augmented dance is about an equally weighted dialogue between technology, audience and movement. It inheritantly liberates dance and most fascinatingly creates chaos because that dialogue between forms disintegrates the silos our societal, and educationally enforced roles repeatedly force us in to.

Most dancers, and most of the industry won’t touch technology with a barge-pole (unless it’s another static projection, or filmed traditional show). It’s such a shame because the chaos is a beautiful live dynamic dialogue that is unique and changing each performance, full of new movement qualities, new audiences to dance and the arts, and positive memories. And fundamentally it’s just another tool to tell different stories.

I understand some elements of it- I have had to interrogate and change my craft at a fundamental level – find comfort in new languages, communication, technologies and not being able to rely on passed triumphs (despite writing up here for everyone to see!) In dance it’s inherent in the training- you are taught by a master, who was taught by a master- but was is created is a self referential, historic facing industry that alienates the majority of the public who can’t see any assimilation between themselves and the coded vocabulary going on onstage. Over the course of the last four years I have discover the pitfalls of being stuck in the middle- when it’s almost impossible to find dancers willing to enjoy finding comfort in the chaos. When funders don’t appreciate and understand the necessary shift in creative timeline and process needed to create truly Augmented Dance, and when national leaders still insist digital is webcontent.

Breaking the form democratises the wealth of instinctive movement knowledge we all have. Celebrating this knowledge within beautiful sounds and visually stimulating interactive environments that a 3 and 73 year old love equally is a game changer- and the moment I stood back and observes the quality of the engagement I realised this work could be a catalyst for change.

“sorry, who is your audience ?” National Funding body
What happens when you reflect behavioural change practice into interventions and installations? You quickly realise that any banding of the public under banners such as NEET or Over 60’s is offensive, wrong and shows a completely lack of understanding. We classify our audience engagement based on learning styles- and look for locations that draw in the mixed demographic we are searching for.

We talk about those who learn through action or learn through observation. We talk about the quality of engagement for the active observer. We believe the experience of the people watcher is as important as the extroverts, as they are all at a point along the behaviour change wheel.

I now work more often with architects, engineers, city-planners and futurists. I have adapted my creative and collaborative processes, learnt new interdependences and found a critically challenging and engaging space that forces thinking up from the small identical traditional audiences, to possible world wide democratic change, and I’m finding that I can’t be bothered with the label of dance.

Our cultural industry is haemorrhaging talent and swelling with the 1.1 % and with each turn of the key, our cultural establishments are becoming more shortsighted as they chase after tit-bits rather than rising their banners high at the forefront of the conversations about copy-right, IP, democracy, human nature, behaviour change and social commentary.

Breaking the form, smashing it apart, challenging myself, and those around me, riding out the discomfort and thinking big creates a scary viewpoint. But as a fantastic stranger in the Netherlands once told me: “It’s easy to change the world- you just have to start.”

My actions, have the same potential as an installation I create. But how do we maintain our stamina is crucial: So here’s my battle cry from the parapets of not fitting in: I will, with the incredible collaborators I work with worldwide, change the world by encouraging connections and spontaneity, serendipity and memories – moments that might change one’s life forever.