DOWNTIME - interviews with dance artists & arts leaders, talking about dance & the arts

The extraordinary Jo Verrent is my guest on downtime today. Jo is the senior producer for Unlimited - the world’s largest commissions programme for disabled artists, ensuring that work gets seen, discussed and embedded within the cultural fabric of the UK, and further afield, with partners such as ACE, Creative Scotland, Southbank Centre, and the British Council.

I joined Jo on July 7th via her laptop in her home in Yorkshire, England.

We talked about the work the disability arts community has been doing to try to capture the attention of the government via the WeShallNotBeRemoved movement, Jo’s belief that organisations that don’t have access and diversity at the heart of their practice should either sign up for voluntary redundancy or just be shut down – they had their chance. As ever Jo was full of brilliantly concrete ideas, proposals and projects for how we should change, who we should prioritise and how the sector can make itself more interesting, relevant and equal in the difficult but potentially exciting months and years ahead.

My guest on Downtime today is Kate Prince - the AD of Zoonation – and the choreographer behind the massive hits Some Like it Hip Hop, Into The Hoods and most recently Message in a Bottle – a show set to the music of Sting which premiered at Sadlers Wells in Feb 2020. She was also, as we’ll hear, choreographer on the west end hit Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and she co-wrote SYLVIA at the Old Vic. Her commercial credits include Strictly, the Olympic Games of Beijing, The tour de France and Nelson Mandela’s birthday party.

 Kate and I had a right old chat at the end of June 2020. She taught me a thing or two about the various ways her shows are produced, what the term hip-hop actually means,  how projects can be tailored to support working mothers if the will (and the cash) is there, and sadly, about the appalling racism members of her company have had to endure. Some of that might be hard to hear. We also talked about how her work is motivated simply by the desire to tell stories, how different audiences respond differently to those stories, and the tricky territory of crediting dancers for choreographic input to a show.

Today’s Downtime chat is with UK-based choreographer Gary Clarke.

Gary is known for creating a place to tell socio-political stories and histories of the British working class, in a contemporary dance setting, which is no mean feat! He is loved and respected by audience and dance professionals alike. Lou and Gary have worked together for over 12 years. Lou was dramaturg on COAL (UK Theatre Award & Critics Circle Award), and Wasteland, among other projects and productions.

Gary and Lou spoke early on in the Covid journey, in May 2020, and they discussed how Gary Clarke Company initially responded to the Covid-Lockdown, how the future might look for the company and the sector, and the arrival of a peacock in his Dad’s back garden!

In this episode Lou spent some Downtime with Aditi Mangaldas, a leading dancer and choreographer in the classical Indian dance form of Kathak, based in Delhi, India. Aditi runs her own rep company -  Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company – The Drishtikon Dance Foundation. It is here that she experiments with what she calls ‘contemporary danced based on Kathak’. Her productions, for example Inter_rupted and Within, have toured the world to great acclaim.

Lou zoomed into Aditi's life while she was in the countryside outside of Bombay towards the end of June 2020. They had a far-reaching conversation that covered the Covid situation there, the uber-difficult task of supporting artists when the sector itself is not organised , and the digital work she is creating to raise funds to support the artistic community. They also talked about Aditi’s relationship with classical Kathak, what her style of  'contemporary dance based on Kathak' means, what her processes look like and why she turned down the celebrated National Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2013. Quick fire questions were, on this occasion, provided by Aditi and Lou’s mutual friend and collaborator Aakash Odedra.

http://www.aditimangaldasdance.com/index.php

One of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists, Claire Cunningham is a performer and creator of multi-disciplinary performance based in Glasgow, Scotland. Claire and Lou talked about two key themes of Claire’s thinking and work – our relationship with time, (and the concept of ‘crip time’); and the ‘choreography of care’ .

For the past 11 years Sharon Watson has been AD of Phoenix Dance Theatre. She is now CEO & Principal of Northern School of Contemporary Dance. This exciting and inspiring conversation took place as Lou joined Sharon in a personal moment that merged quiet reflection with exhilarating potential, as Sharon spoke of her journey as a black, female leader and artist, and her determination to seize the opportunity for radical change now.

I had a great chat with choreographer, dancer and designer Theo Clinkard, in early June 2020.

In addition to making pieces for his own company, pieces like Ordinary Courage (2012) Chalk (2014), Of Land & Tongue (2014), This Bright Field (2017), he has also made work for Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, and Candoco Dance Company - among others.

Theo and I talked about the work he is currently developing ‘The Century Project’, his desire to engage in slow thinking – in both his life and his work, and his desire to move both his life and his work out of traditional performance spaces. Despite the current threat to opportunities for intimacy and proximity, both key parts of Theo’s work, it felt like the post-covid landscape might strangely align with the hopes he had anyway, for a more sustainable practice and a sector with access and diversity more firmly at its heart.

See
http://www.theoclinkard.com
https://www.under-story.com

Cathy Marston is an award-winning choreographer, based in both Switzerland and the UK. Recent shows in the UK include The Cellist for The Royal Ballet, The Suit – initially created for Ballet Black, and Jane Eyre and Victoria for Northern Ballet. As we’ll hear she recently made Mrs Robinson for San Francisco Ballet and should now be working on Of Mice and Men for The Joffrey Ballet.

Cathy was Associate Artist at the Royal Opera House from 2002-2007 and Artistic Director of Bern Ballet from 2007 – 2013.

I joined Cathy on a sunny May 25th 2020 at her home in Switzerland. We chatted happily while, unbeknown to us, that very day terrible things were happening in America that would change the world for the worse for sure, though hopefully also for the better. Without knowing any of that, we had a privileged and fascinating conversation about the fall and rise of narrative ballet, approaching ballet through the theatre of character, emotion and story, and how stories reveal their imagery as we dig deeper into them.

See http://www.cathymarston.com

Melbourne-based choreographer Lucy Guerin presents her work regularly across Australia and Europe. In addition to touring such shows as Split, Attractor and Untrained with her own company Lucy Guerin Inc, she’s also made shows for Lyon Opera Ballet, Chunky Move, Dance Works Rotterdam and Ballet Rambert.

We talked in early June 2020 about how the enforced Downtime had brought an unexpected relief from the pressure to tour internationally, a positive focussing in on ‘home-grown’ work, and how things were going for the Melbourne contemporary dance community.

Enjoy!

Belgian/Moroccan Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is one of the world’s most sought after  choreographers. He’s made over 50 shows, works in contemporary dance, ballet, film and theatre and has picked up a frankly embarrassing haul of awards.

Collaborators include Antony Gormley, Damien Jalet, Marina Abramovic and Beyonce – to name but a few.

I worked with Larbi and Gormley on Sutra, and with Larbi and Damien Jalet on the Olivier Award winning Babel (words) around 2008 – 2010.

As well as running his own company Eastman, since 2015 he has been the Artistic Director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders.

Conversations with Larbi are always extremely free-flowing. Here our wide-ranging chat covers his experience of Covid-19 as a person, a choreographer and the AD of Ballet Vlanderen, as well as how the intimacy of his practice has evolved in response to both his position as a leader, and an awareness engendered by the #MeToo movement.

I popped up on his screen while he was at home in Antwerp in late May 2020.

Enjoy!