Euroranting
Travelling in Britain is brilliant, you get to see so many aspects of life, use so many different forms of public transport and at no point you feel frustrated, annoyed or to say it mildly ****ed off.
Last week we where having a residency week in lovely Cleethorpes of all places, I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it is slightly different. It is located on the East Coast of England at the estuary where the Humber and the North Sea meet. Getting there was interesting, I started in Antwerp and in no time I got to London on the Eurostar. I think the Eurostar is just brilliant, in less then 2 hours between Brussels and London and you gain an hour on the way, then I had to take a train to Grantham, a bus from Grantham to Newark, a train to Doncaster and then another bus to Cleethorpes. Total journey from Antwerp to London: 3 hours, total journey from London to Cleethorpes: 8 hours. Brilliant. To top it off, on the return journey there where more rail works between Cleethorpes and Doncaster and although they had busses arranged, they didn’t go at the same time as the train was supposed to leave, this resulted in a taxi ride between Cleethorpes and Doncaster, price: £60 , about €80. I don’t know but I wonder if the people that run British Rail actually take the train or if they just sit at home coming up with strategies on how to annoy people on a Sunday morning.
Talking about dance, our residency was brilliantly organised by Mo at Lindsey school. We had different teams (Matt and Rohanna, Laure and Tory), doing several workshops in primary schools around the region and myself and Stephen did workshops in Lindsey Secondary School and created a curtain raiser piece to be performed during our show on Saturday.
On Friday we performed Relative Danger in front of 200 primary school kids and they where ecstatic, they had some great workshops and loved the fact that they could recognise the dancers on stage and even know some of the movements from the piece.
On Saturday we performed Relative Danger followed by Correlate and then our last ever This is Not a body part two performance. It felt great to perform Tisnab one more time, and we all realised how much we loved it. The energy of Dave Boyd's music music and the images of Brian Hartley are just stunning. The piece has flow, dynamic contrast, energy, intimacy and lots and lots of partner work.
Anyway, there was something that bugged me during the week here in Cleethorpes, apart from the way the girls are dressed up north when they are let out of the house on a Saturday night, and it is this shape making, ballet influenced, un-dynamic, no artistic approach to dance. Why do girls in particular, or is it the fault of their private ballet school teachers, need to be moulded into identical, personality-less, dancers who’s centre of gravity is in the back of their throats? This has nothing to do with the teaching in Lindsey School by the way, the teachers there are trying to battle the same problem. I think it is time for the private ballet schools to look outside of the box and maybe stop trying to create ballerina’s. They are creating tension on legs and why are they not teaching ballet with breath and flow and by using the floor? On the other hand I don’t like the term YOUTH DANCE, I don’t like hordes of dancers wearing the same t-shirts or uniforms and dance unison sequences where creativity seems sucked dry and bares no resemblance to a creative process, collaboration or even personality, youth groups where all they learn is to copy their teacher.
I love sharing my experiences with young people and believe that contemporary dance can be a great thing to offer some sense of discipline, body knowledge and awareness and bring in some kind of creativity to people who seem to have very little artistic input from the professional dance world. I think we should try to widen the artistic experience of young people and do this through quality arts activity and not by selling an image that is so far away from reality as George Bush's policies on global warming.
No, I am convinced that dance with young people or anybody from the community is brilliant and essential but this should be approached in a professional and artistic way that draws upon experiences from the dancers involved. So, please lets stop making shapes connected into lovely “routines” but let dance be a full-bodied experience for anybody where creativity, physicality and musicality are the main starting points.
Maybe we can’t change the dance world in a day but wouldn’t it be great if you could get the Eurostar from Brussels direct to …..Cleethorpes? Now, that would be a cultural revolution!J Fx
