Clarity is important to me but sometimes you have to trust when something works even if you can’t define it. When I invited Sarah Browne to work with me on Tabernacle , I didn’t really know what she would do. In the end, we could point to the Appendix, a pamphlet she created for each of the performances, and to the particular design and proportions of the benches and to the clothing she sourced as visible contributions.

These contributions were tangible and made sense in terms of Sarah’s practice, in particular in relation to her way of dealing with material. However, these material manifestations were just part of a much greater role she played as sounding board, support and stimulus for me and for how I was thinking about the work. We credited all of this work in the programme as Visual Artist. It’s not an inaccurate credit but it’s not specific either.

Last week I joined Sarah in the Shetlands to help her in the making of film that she will show as part of a new exhibition at CCA in Derry. (It opens March 29th ). It’s been stimulating for me to be part of Sarah’s creative process that combines research rigour, a considered ethics and aesthetic intution. She’s generously included me in that process but I’m still not sure how my role could be defined. We’re agreed that I am the Choreographer. However there will be no danced steps, no interventions that abstract the movement of the subjects. And yet I feel my contribution is part of my wider choreographic approach.

I hesitate to explain what Sarah’s film is about since I think the material we’ve filmed in Shetland will tell its own ‘story’. However, I am clear that the point of departure for my understanding of the project was two images of working women. The first is a historical image of a Shetland ‘Kishie’ woman, carrying turf on her back while knitting.

The second is an image of a contemporary woman carrying a child while using a smartphone. These images stimulated me to think about the economic obligation to multitask, the tendency for all of our surplus energy to be used productively. The images relate particularly to women, whose labour is often less visible because it exists in domestic rather than public situations, because it might involve caring and affect. However, in a knowledge economy it is not only affective labour that becomes invisible. There is also a labour in maintaining the personal profile and brand that is required by a networked economy, mediated by the social technologies of private/professional communication.

The Shetlands makes sense to me as a location to focus an inquiry into this experience of labour, and in particular female labour, because the iconic image of the Kishie woman suggests that it is not just a contemporary phenomenon. It has a history, a geography and an economics. A division of labour between the sexes that predates the discovery of North Sea Oil, continues in new forms now that oil has brought money, roads, swimming pools and near total employment to the island.

In preparing for the filming, Sarah and I spent some time together thinking through what the choreographic input could be. As a support rather than author of the film, I wanted to help Sarah to clarify her idea and to understand what she really wanted to communicate in it. It was liberating for me to feel that I could ask questions, propose stimuli and reflect back what I was hearing in her thinking, without interposing my own agenda. This felt to me like the kind of choreography as facilitation that I feel I’ve been developing as I link my work on the Clore Leadership Short Courses to my choreography in the studio.

In Shetland, working with Director of Photography Kate McCullough (who shot Three+1 for now, and Mo Mhórchoir Féin for me), we filmed the fastest knitter in the world (Hazel Tindall) a photographer (Floortje Robertson), one of Shetland’s representatives in the Scottish Youth Parliament (Kaylee Mouat). As choreographer I thought about the rhythm of their activity, the dancing of Hazel’s articulate knitting fingers viewed in close up, the energy of gales blowing on wet roads and loughs. And I tried to see Shetland and these women as Sarah was seeing them, viewed alongside birds at twilight, petrol pumps and smoke stacks.

Photographer Sarah Browne

I’m still thinking about what I’ve learned from being inside Sarah’s creative process. She combines detailed preparation and organisation with an openness to instinct. She finds small details that tell big stories. She is quiet but resolute.

Here is Sarah’s blog post that makes clear her thinking on the project.

© Floortje Robertson 2014

Earlier this month, I took part in a networking evening for ‘creatives’ in Waltham Forest where I’ve lived since moving to London 20 years ago, having fallen in love with dance and with Pete. Hosted at the William Morris Gallery (deservedly and delightfully Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2013), the event was a great opportunity to meet some of the many people in Waltham Forest who are involved in the cultural sector both locally and in (mostly London-based) national cultural institutions like the Royal Opera House and the Barbican. I’ve always known that the borough is home to creative people. Good transport links and relatively affordable housing are pragmatic reasons why that’s the case. Pick’n’Mix:the Dance Selection was my way of highlighting the choreographic talent (Kim Brandstrup, Freddie Opoku, Stephanie Schober, Matthew Bourne, Jonathan Goddard) in and from the borough that rarely gets an opportunity to connect with audiences in Waltham Forest.

When the Council developed its Cultural Strategy in 2010 (Taking Our Place in London), I wasn’t so confident that the council was aware of its cultural resources, particularly among borough residents. Since 2010, Cultural and Leisure Services have been moved around within the Council structure and sits now in the Health and Wellbeing portfolio of Cllr Ashan Khan. Although that placement within the priorities on the council has an impact on how arts and culture is framed there is a lot to celebrate and be encouraged by how arts and culture is being invested in.

Waltham Forest Council is about to launch an Arts Grants scheme of £200k to be spent over the next 18 months. It also has a £9 million programme to improve the Borough’s High Streets and an arts regeneration committee currently developing a public art policy. The regeneration of The Scene at Cleveland Place which incorporates a Cinema will release significant S106 funding to be used artistically and creatively. This together with a pending bid to the Arts Council for capital funding towards a new performing arts space in Leytonstone and a renewed partnership with Film London demonstrates what the Council calls a ‘commitment of ensuring that Waltham Forest becomes a cultural destination and a place for its residents to satisfy their artistic thirst.’

Of course there is a typical and understandable focus on ‘communities’ as audiences or participants in this investment with an almost inevitable separation of artists from those communities when in fact many of the borough’s residents are simultaneously artists and audiences – some professional artists, others enthusiastic and often skilled amateurs. The Council would do well to support participation by its residents in artistic activity at all levels, supporting professional and non-professional practice and ensuring there is an ecology where the range between professional and non-professional is interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

There is a great appeal for me in being able to access cultural activity near home, being able to make work near home and being able to connect with people who want to engage with my work and its ideas near home. Rehearsing Porous down the road in Dean James’ KNI Hub studios in Blackhorse Rd last summer was a real pleasure. I notice that RSA has also been recommending that there should be more place-based commissioning (see Vikki Heywood’s inaugural lecture as Chairman of the RSA, encouraging greater connection between artists, cultural organisations and local communities. I do worry, despite my own enthusiasm for what is possible in Waltham Forest, that again there is an assumed separation between artists and communities, a lack of recognition that artists are part of community (even peripherally, though often centrally), and that the understanding of who communities are needs interrogation. For me communities and places need to be thought of as porous entities, open to inward and outward movement, as indeed a borough like Waltham Forest is, and also as entities that are constituted by difference and healthy disagreement. Too often the language of social cohesion sounds like a smoothing out of difference, with cultural activity expected to provide social glue, when in fact much art is a way of giving form to a dynamic of differences held in tension. While I want to play my part in making Waltham Forest ‘a place for its residents to satisfy their artistic thirst’, I want to keep in mind that those residents are multiple, that the communities they form and reform are in constant flux and that the thirsts that need satisfying are many and varied.

Today we brought Porous from the studio in Donegall St, Belfast to the Writer’s Square nearby. Porous is a 20 minute piece I’ve been invited to make for Maiden Voyage as part of their Dance Exposed series that brings dance into public spaces. It will premiere officially in the Belfast Festival this weekend, with three performances on Saturday in the gallery space at the MAC and three further performances on Sunday in the foyer of the Ulster Museum.

I don’t often do commissions and I was curious to know what prompted Nicola Curry, Artistic Director of Maiden Voyage to invite me to make a piece for the company. I think my experience of working in public space, on bodies and buildings, was part of the attraction. However I was concerned that I would have to work with a group of dancers I didn’t know and manufacture a piece in two weeks just before the show. I have no doubt I could do that, but I’m not sure that the resulting work would connect with or develop the kind of choreographic process I’m happy to have been involved in recently. Fortunately, Nicola was very accommodating, so instead of making the piece in a couple of weeks before the premiere, I arranged for us to work during the summer, with a further week of rehearsal just before the opening. By having that time in the summer, I felt that I could get to know the dancers, experiment and take risks trying out different things, without the immediate and often suffocating pressure of an imminent deadline ( a pressure that would compromise my openness and that of the performers). I knew that whatever we did in the summer, I could always set the experiments aside and return to safe ground in October if necessary. I found that freedom very positive as Vasiliki, Carmen, Oona and I worked in the sunshine in studios that are a bike-ride away from my home in Walthamstow.

Though Nicola talked about the commission for Dance Exposed being site-specific, I understood that the work would travel to different sites and therefore needed to be more site-responsive. That responsiveness needed to be in the structure of the work but also in the way the performers would inhabit the choreography and the space. I enjoyed generating with them material for an improvisation and approaches to that improvisation that would guide, connect and free them. I wanted them to be porous to their own sensations, to the interaction inside the trio, and to the environment in which their structure was unfolding. The multi-dimensional task was not easy, but as we draw closer to the premiere, I am very happy to see their increasing skill in navigating the task, individually and together. I am delighted by the surprises that emerge from this now familiar structure and material.

Photo from Vasiliki Stasinaki

Already in the summer, we took the rehearsals out of the studio, to make sure that the dancers could experience sensations beyond the confines and familiarity of white walls. Today Porous made sense to me in Writer’s Square. It seemed to belong, despite its idiosyncratic movement language. Passers-by could wander through the trio without destroying it, because the choreographic structure could already accommodate that different energy. Its boundaries are permeable, not defined by footlights or proscenium arch. Even a group of stoned teenagers who initially threatened to disrupt the choreography gradually became enfolded in it, one young woman standing close to watch the dancers while the others sat on a wall to observe. I was alert, wondering if I needed to protect the dancers, but I’m glad that they found a way to be in the work without shutting off or out the encroaching energy.

This structure I have made with them owes much to what I’ve learned from the Cure choreographers and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to transform the things I’ve learned for a group of dancers that I haven’t known as long or deeply as I have those with whom I normally work. I’m very curious now to see how audiences will respond.

As I continue to tour Cure, and try to extend the choreography in a way that invites people in to the work from different angles, it’s great to have this video reminder of the the supper we held at Fire Station Artist’s Studios before the premiere in the Dublin Dance Festival last May. Many thanks especially to the Patrick and Katherine at Create and to Julia, Ellie and Tiina at the Dublin Dance Festival who invested so much personal energy, as well as the support of their organisation in making the supper a valuable experience. Thanks also to everyone who participated.
My continuing experience of talking about Cure over food convinces me that it’s an important way to connect and to give people a way in to the performance.