Any opportunity to take words off the page and make them
leap into physical space and I am your woman.
I have seen the process of marrying text and movement in collaborative
theatre double the power of a piece so I was hugely excited to be asked by
Glasshouse Dance to devise and deliver with them a workshop that combined dance
and writing.
Glasshouse Dance are an exciting, contemporary dance
company. They are visionary, challenging, passionate and poignant. A fusion
between two dancer/choreographers, Sarah Lewis and Laura McGill. They are interested in the human, in emotion
and touch and their dance pieces have wide appeal. Their work as Glasshouse was
at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in
US, where two dancers edged their way in sharp and funny face offs to form
their relationship and settle in the end for love. It is hard to get humour into dance that
isn’t clumsy but there is a wealth of humour in what they do. Individually they
have performed nationally and Sarah Lewis toured in another love story, that of
Walter and Agnes to the Edinburgh Festival in Neil Paris’ dance company,
Smith. The company is also interesting
because it encourages older people to dance.
Laura McGill has a company called Mosaic for dancers over the age of
55.
The idea of a workshop combining text, movement and location threw up
lots of questions. How would dancers and writers approach the idea of embracing
their contrasting art forms? Would writers be able to throw off their mantle of
physical stasis? How to put movement
into the words – and movement into words. Could we create a narrative journey
which would make sense as a series of actions? Would we be illustrative or
interpretative?
Glasshouse Dance were keen to experiment and explore freely
and so was I.
The workshop took place at The Garage, on a light June
afternoon in an upper studio which felt suspended in space and time. All our participants were women, nearly all
of them dancers. It seemed it was hard
to entice writers away from their desks.
Over the next five hours, women explored orally their personal
histories, wrote, observed, responded and moved…a lot.
We started with an invitation to talk and to listen with a
series of prompt questions drawn from theatre and used to open up memory and
soul. The invitation proved to be
moving, the talker sat or lay in a comfortable position with their eyes closed
while the listener sat and really listened.
It is rare to have the opportunity to talk freely without fear. We moved onto a whole series of exercises
both warming up in terms of movement and writing. One of my favourite
activities was asking the women to dance the handwriting of others. Words were
used in abstract forms, groups watched movement and described and then moved
beyond description into more narrative forms or lifted their words into
parallel dimensions. Ultimately the women went outside to gather impressions of
Chapelfield Gardens in that gorgeous moment of sunshine – when they returned
they wrote down things that struck them, people and then created a complex
dance, a series of movements exploring and recreating that outside world. Only a couple of the women used their voices
but the text streaked across the back wall was a perpetual thread that ran
through everything the women did with their hands, eyes, feet and legs.
Combining writing and dance was a one-off, a first-off, it
was an activity occupying the borderland between art forms and more the
valuable and intriguing for that.
© Belona Greenwood
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