Output details

On taking Care / Common Dance

Participatory Dancework and documentation

Common Dance (2009) was a large-scale, intergenerational, site-specific work involving fifty trained and untrained performers, with choral music commissioned from Terry Mann and sung by the Finchley Children s Music Group. The creative process involved exploring:

- choreographic methodologies appropriate for performers with and without training;

- animation of the site’s architectural features, including the balcony and the hall;

- notions of commonality as expressed in dance structures that appear to be universal;

- ways of drawing on folk traditions and concepts of community that can be accessed by urban, contemporary performers, allowing them to realise and achieve community and to communicate this to audiences;

- strategies for creating full-length performance with fifty performers;

- a performance 'persona' to achieve affect on the audience, including them in the performance and the community of performers.

I edited and compiled the libretto by researching English poets, Enclosure Acts, common space and ground, new nature writing, oral traditions from other cultures, and English and other folk traditions.

The process and the performance inspired other outcomes for me, and working in collaboration with Martin Welton, (Queen Mary, University of London), a ResCen DVD was published (2013) illustrating the ways in which Common Dance was made. The DVD looked particularly at the role of touch, listening and attentiveness.

Research questions for the video included questions that were implicit in the original creative process: how to convey nuanced and subtle ways of working, without diminishing the relevance of the creative process through words; how such a process can be undertaken without exploiting the performers; how the cast embodied movement and concepts to become performers.

The DVD set contains the entire performance, an hour-long edit of the first rehearsal as well as excerpts from the ResCen Symposium 'On taking care' (Queen Mary, University of London, 01/12/2012) .