determined. The story structure is “happily ever after”, and I ended with the character of Happy doing his little number, which left everybody buoyant and happy.
And I suppose it was like a share house. It has its ups and downs as people fight and fall in love with others, changing the dynamics of the house and causing difficulties when you’re trying to live together. That is very like us as a company. As a group of people we have to learn to live together and it’s about understanding, patience, tolerance and acceptance. It was as much about that as it was about the story of Snow White.
I was very pleased with Seven. I feel as a company we’ve turned a corner. I think the emphasis for the next period of time should be on communicating something. It’s not just about invention of movement and being clever. It’s about its intention and communication, and that’s just as important as the fact that you make interesting movement. This is where we’re headed anyway. I felt audiences really respond to that in Seven. We had to work a lot harder to find movement. Some people who came and expected to see what we normally do were somewhat disappointed, whereas others, who came with no expectations, related to it and went on a journey because they weren’t looking for something that wasn’t there.
I guess you can’t help but have what’s happening in your world influence the work you create?
I think too I was probably seeing so much pain in the world. I’m looking at all the wars and the terrorism, and it’s such a place that’s in the gutter. I just thought I wanted to get us out of there, to see what we can be capable of in a positive way. It’s interesting, we all know that violence begets violence. We’ve come to accept that the only way to move forward is by forgiveness and acceptance, and yet, we keep stumbling. When it is about deception and betrayal you have to be able to forgive, otherwise you have to go separate ways.
You spoke about wanting to have something that is happy, compared to the devastation that is occurring on the news every night. What do you see as the role of contemporary dance in society?
Dance can do anything. It can be joyous. It can be just enthralling. A piece of music can get your toes tapping and you feel that you just want to move to it. Dance should be allowed to do everything. I’ve got my eye on a new project, which is not about love. It’s about water, and the mystical qualities of water, but it’s also about the political and environmental issues.
So you feel that Seven was a success?
It’s flawed. It was its preview season, and there’s a missing scene. It’s where they are all looking at the mirror and there needs to be a scene written for Bashful. At the beginning of the show she says “even though they tease me, I like living with them”. And so that’s the scene where she’s looking at the mirror and feeling rather pleased with herself, that they all tease her about her vanity. This scene is being written as we speak so I have one final scene to make sense of the second half of the production. She’s the one character that’s not quite fulfilled, and the beds never got used because I only got them just before we had to go in the theatre. The second half, which goes into the whole realm of dreams will be much more realized. I think it will push it into a really good work, rather than just an enjoyable work.
When do you expect that that will be finished and then what will you do with it?
It will go in Outside The Square, a tour of theatres in outer metropolitan Adelaide, which is fantastic. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to go interstate with it to other festivals, and so we’ll get a chance to sell it properly.
How many works do you work on simultaneously? I know that Wanderlust was just last year, and then Seven, and now Impulse, which seems to be a very short space of time.
Well it is, but it’s not as much as we used to do. It’s a constant juggling. You’re making one but you’re preparing the next, just like right now I’m busy thinking about the water production Aqua. It’s for 2010, but in order to get all the ideas together, to get the ideal people to work with, it has to start now. It’s already getting the writers working on essays so we’ve got the basis of this thing. I’m planning to continue working with writers because I want original material for us. And the reason for that is because contemporary arts are so important. Without the contemporary image of ourselves we don’t move forward, we tend to stagnate. If we don’t have contemporary arts and visions, we go nowhere.
Your new work, Impulse is about the relationship between music and dance. What is your view on whether music and dance are something that should be combined?
Not should, could. Why not explore all of it? I think I hit on something when I did Shimmer 10 years ago, which was incredibly popular. It’s like I’ve done a full circle and come back to it with Seven, because the movement, the whole thing, has an intention. Shimmer communicated something tangible about a group of people that repressed their desire in order to find a certain level of spirituality. Shimmer used a different movement language, but like Seven, it combined the idea with the intention of the movement.
And is that why you’ve decided to restage Shimmer now as part of your new production Impulse?
Partly. Then I’ll have the freedom to sit the new string quartet alongside it, where it is about the music propelling the movement. There’s a lot of energy in the music, so I think it will be quite a joyous, energetic experience. I’m inviting some new technology into this work because we are in a different period of time. In dance you can see the sound in the body of the dancers, in this propelling action, but we now have this wonderful possibility of seeing the sound in the light. We have techniques now where we can take the sound of each individual musician, feed it into a computer, and program it to come out in a visual way, through projections. We see it on our screen savers. The challenge will be so that it’s not distracting. So I think that the older and the new things can really sit well together. It’s the whole notion of having an idea and bringing things to fulfil it, rather than “I’m just going to make this fancy movement and stick some intellectual idea on top of it to justify it”.
Is your new work Impulse purely your response to music or will it have a message?
It is very much about the personal response to music, and the relationship between the musician and the dancer. It’s very much about seeing that connection, feeling that kind of immediate rush. It’s a very intimate environment. The audience is on two sides and everything happens in the middle. It’s not about a fancy set. It’s absolutely about the musician and the dancer. So the idea is to get it so you have an immediate visceral sense of that, that you can see it and sense it immediately.
How do you approach developing a work like Impulse, as opposed to how you develop something like Seven or Mixed Doubles? How does the collaboration with the musicians work?
I’ve convinced the musicians that we should look at them not in the traditional format. In this arrangement they are either at the corners, playing towards one another, with their back to each other playing outwards, or on a diagonal line. They are in very different configurations. So the sound is going to shift. It’s about that interaction. It’s about putting them into the field of what happens, so they are part of that whole choreographic design. That’s the only way I can think of to use them to redefine the space with their music, but with them as people too. By shifting them within the space, it redefines the thing architecturally. I thought in this program I’d like to keep it really simple. It’s about the pleasure of dance. I was working with Professor Ian Gibbons, who is a neuroscientist. He says that when we dance the synaptic pathways are different from when we walk. They are completely transformed. So when someone is watching, this same thing happens. They are not just looking. They have done the scientific tests and have the photographs of brain maps to prove it. The audience can experience what you are going through as a performer. With that information, I am seeing if I can pull those things really close together, so you can have a really close feeling of what that movement feels like.
Breaking down the boundary between the audience and dancers worked well in your work Petroglyphs. Do you hope to do the same with Impulse?
Yes. That’s why I’ve put the audience opposite one another. There is no set in the way. The audience are the space in which is happens. They are part of it. That is the form. The audience is what holds the thing together, so absolutely.
Impulse by Leigh Warren & Dancers and Zephyr Quartet will be presented from June 28th at the Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre. Impulse is a production comprising two dance works: Impulse to music by Michael Nyman and Shimmer to music by Graeme Koehne. Impulse is an exhilarating new collaborative production celebrating the unique and often unpredictable relationship which exists between music and dance.
Get your tickets through BASS 131 246 www.bass.net.au
Part 2 of this interview will appear in the August edition of Dance Informa. Look out for it!
Leigh shares about his company, choreography and dancers, plus his thoughts on the future of contemporary dance. |
