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Bruised Blood (Choreography)

Bruise Blood is a 35 minute dance work for 8 dancers and an on-stage beat boxer. This music-led work has Steve Reich s seminal sixties classic Come Out as its intellectual and political impetus.

Reich quoted a wrongly accused New York black youth using analogue looping to create, from one sentence, an abstract wall of protest mirroring the real life street protests. I asked a beat boxer to remix Steve Reich live on stage. Then, further linking these two disparate styles, I invited a third composer (Glyn Perrin) to create his own remix of Reich to ’introduce‘ Reich to the beat boxer. The remix strategy uncovered fertile ground for my signature interest in historically hybrid dance vocabulary and the compositional principles and disruptions it suggests.

The tryptic score inspired three distinct responses: Reich evoked densely textured ensemble work; Perrin more conversational and intimate solos and trios; and more angular and fragmented energies partnered the beat boxing. The connecting concept came from the words of the young black man in Reich s music: ’I had to open up the bruise and let the bruise blood come out to show them.’ The physical body as evidence, of both vulnerability and tenacity, created themes that were explored in my dance work.

The relationship of dancer to surrounding space has always been of a combative nature in my work. It is a political statement as well as an aesthetic one, and the choice of the Reich piece gave me an ideal opportunity to journey further into this pugilistic activity between body and space. The work ended, however, with the image of a young woman supporting her male partner who lay vulnerable over her shoulder.

Funded by ACE and extensively toured and reviewed in the national press.