Goodbye Leeds, hello mince pies
Sitting in Manchester Airport waiting for my flight back home. It could be the beginning of a Hollywood blockbuster but no, Bruce Willis is not about to save the airport just in time for Christmas, all flights are running nicely on time and I should be home in about 2 hours.
I have just finished a new 20 minute work for Verve at NSCD in Leeds. The piece is called "This is not a love song". I am into my "This is not" fase so I hope you don’t mind. Feeling a bit too tired to go into too much detail but I will post a short video later. Here are some photographs of the run they did this morning. These guys did a great job and worked like true professionals. Can’t wait till the premiere in February but first its time to fill those stockings and get that turkey in the oven.
Have a fab X-mas and your best ever 2009
Big kiss,
Filipx
Bach in Chapeltown
I have just finished my first week of a 3 week choreographic process, creating a new work for Verve, the graduate company of NSCD. It has been a great week, fabulous young dancers who with no doubt will be picked up by the professional dance world from June next year. SimonCooper, Verve’s rehearsal director who’s cv as a dancer is amazing and sooooo down to earth and is also a real pleasure to work with.
Working at Northern as they call it is something special. I have worked at many similar places over the years, all over Europe and have met great people everywhere but from the first moment you get to Leeds and get in a taxi you are made to feel welcome. Maybe it’s a Yorkshire thing but the taxi driver says ‘all right love’ as if he is your best friend and he also knows quite a bit about Northern and contemporary dance as he drives choreographers and dancers there all the time. The other thing is that although Northern has about 200 students and a large teaching staff, you feel like you are entering a large family. The Artistic Director and principle Gurmit Hukam is very enthousiastic, driven and has a close contact with his staff and students, he knows the name of all the students and that is quite something. It is also great to meet old London friends like Rachel Krische and Lisa Kandall who have left the big smoke for a new life with family up North. I mean it when I say that I love working here.
Last night me and Matt, a dancer from Retina who came down for the day, had a drink with Gurmit and Pete, the schools osteopath and it was very sociable as we where also getting ready to go to the school’s Christmas party over at The Wardrobe. Over a couple of pints of real ale, we got talking contemporary dance, training, creative process, commercial success and cultural differences between the UK and Belgium and big questions like: why are audiences in Belgium made out of people who have nothing to do with contemporary dance but are people with a genuine interest in the art form and fancy an evening out to the theatre? And why is an English audience made out of dance students, workshop participants or parents of students? It might not read as the makings of a great night out but it was fun and above all an honest debate with lots of funny and sarcastic moments. At one point Pete came out with a questions that surprised me a bit as I was sipping my pint. He asked so Filip what moves you? I swallowed and answered that I get moved by lots of thing that happen around me, my little three year old, just being alive and opening my eyes and ears is just so great and I think that’s one of the great things of being an artist, you can get inspired by life, the ups and the downs. But the answer to the question of what physically moves me or what makes me dance, there is just one answer and it is Johann Sebastian Bach! Every time when I start a new rehearsal process, I seem to be unable to work without my friend Bach, I think he must have been one of the most intelligent men that ever lived. I work with lots of collaborators and composers and that is amazing and very inspiring but Bach seems to be my constant through line. Strangely enough I have never made a piece on Bach’s music just because I don’t want to lose my friend and because too many choreographers are using his music already. Now, what I like about this music is not just the sound but the fact that it has this strange ability to create freedom into my mind and body, space for the body to respond and to do things out of the ordinary. The mathematical strucure of his music has a choreographic, almost visual approach that is just asking for movement. My ipod has 20000 songs from every genre possible and still those cello suites, The Well Tempered Clavier, The English Suite and the Goldberg Variations seem to be the inspiration for nearly everything that makes me move.
Does anyone have his mobile number?
Fx
