Output details

Inventions for Radio 1964. Choreography for Duet. Commissioned by Dance Umbrella, Dance South West – Pavilion Dance, South East Dance. Further support: Tanztendenz (Munich), Greenwich Dance, The Nightingale Theatre, Norden Farm Centre of the Arts and Greenwich Dance. Media partner: The Wire. Premiered at Schwere Reiter, Munich, 5th-6th March 2010. Subsequent performances in the UK, including Dance Umbrella , 27th-29th October 2010. DVD only. URL and hard copy evidence date of dissemination.

Inspired by Delia Derbyshire’s recording of reassembled interview footage about people’s dreams, the piece uses the recurrent themes of water, colour and falling. The choreographic approach to the soundtrack, the environment, and the performance deliberately allowed interpretative scope, allowing the audience to make their own associations. Sometimes it feels as the words and the performers are synchronized, and meaning is inescapable; spectators may unconsciously feel the pull of language, allowing it to shape their view of the performance. But throughout, the research process aimed to create a constant ebb and flow of potential meaning in and between the words and movement. Initial research was carried out by using guided improvisation techniques, based on immersing the dancers into repeated playing of the soundtrack. The dancers were then given directions within the context of chosen themes; for example by directing dancers to find their own personal responses to the soundtrack, and allowing them to build up a library of movements and responses to create a vocabulary for a piece. This core language is then repeated and evolved in different ways, allowing dancers to diverge and return from the language they have developed. The piece therefore demonstrates potential for uniquely complex and densely choreographic themes; material is channelled through a diagonal corridor of space, whereby overtaking, blocking, and partnering manoeuvres mirroring the fast and chaotic nature of the spoken soundtrack.