Sketch - Yorkshire Dance

Yorkshire Dance’s 8-month project supporting six artists with an interest in developing their dramaturgical practice

Jamaal Burkmar Gavin Coward Non-Applicables (Sian Myers & Fenella Ryan) Carlos Pons Guerra Grace Surman Sophie Unwin

Igor & Moreno, Idiot-Syncrasy at Yorkshire Dance, 2013 Š Sara Teresa

www.yorkshiredance.com

Jamaal Burkmar

Yorkshire Dance has chosen six artists to take part in Sketch, an 8-month development opportunity for dance makers with an interest in developing their dramaturgical practice.

Sketch will enable artists to research and develop a new dance idea with a focus on dramaturgical practice.

They will be supported by international dramaturg Peggy Olislaegers, with support through the reflective process from strategic planning facilitator and producer Richard Sobey. The project will culminate in early February 2015.

Sketch will support these artists with: • Intensive workshops with international dramaturg (Oct 2014 & Feb 2015) • Minimum of two weeks of studio space at Yorkshire Dance for research and development • Peer to peer learning and feedback • A fee to cover costs of both time in the studio and of attending the workshops • Public sharing or performance of research as part of Friday Firsts The selection of the six was undertaken by a panel including expertise external to Yorkshire Dance and we are delighted to be working with artists new to us as well as continuing to support some of those we have already worked with. www.yorkshiredance.com/sketch

The idea that I will work on is two-fold. It is a continuation of my piece Ocean; I want to continue to develop the spirit and energy that was involved. The overall theme and drive from that piece is important and I don’t want to lose that. I want to incorporate this theme with a new idea involving the shapes that orchestra conductors make, circus ringleaders and captains on the field of play. I want the dancers to act as these types of characters, conducting and orchestrating the piece as it moves on.

I have begun to craft movement and construct geometric pathways, and organised a 3-week research period in which I developed the idea and structured sections in order to come back and develop a piece.

Dramaturgy became important to me when I saw Fabulous Beast’s Rite of Spring / Petrushka. The imagery and the story enthralled me, and I aim eventually to achieve something similar.

Gavin Coward A Symphony Of Fear “a life lived in fear is a life half lived” Spanish proverb The idea is simply about fears. Personal, political, emotional; fears we all experience as human beings living in this world. Fears of love, fears of getting old, fears of the unknown, fears of who we are, fears of success, of failures, of death, of the past, the present and the future. I want to create a solo performance that is like a mini-movie, a series of moving images and story boards.

I want it to have a strange, beautiful, melancholy, cartoon-like animation quality.

A silent movie feel, with raw physicality, gestures and mime. I would like it to incorporate lots of words, that appear on signs throughout the piece (reminiscent of the 1965 Bob Dylan video Subterranean Homesick Blues). The words appear on me, on my T-shirt, books and props. I will use objects that relate to various fears, acting as symbolic metaphors. All objects, props and costumes are locked away in something, some sort of box, trunk, case?

I reveal them throughout the piece.

I will be like a old-fashioned traveler, slightly dishevelled, slightly unhinged, an old-school entertainer.

Non-Applicables (Sian Myers & Fenella Ryan) We will develop a performative, interactive supper club, riffing on the theme of ‘the perfect dinner party’.

Our idea is to create a live set which leads the audience through a series of domestic spaces. With the Non Applicables adopting the role of hostesses, each event explores the expectations and etiquette of a dinner party through a choreographed, participatory eating performance.

We have researched many guides on how to be a ‘perfect’ host and to throw a successful dinner party, from past and modern-day resources. We want to turn this on its head and alter the audience’s experience of this ‘perfect’ dining context through the use of text, body language and movement. This essentially will be a performance on ‘how not to throw a

perfect dinner party’.

For the final performance we intend to collaborate with East-London supper club duo Tuck to create a unique dining experience integrated with the live performance.

Carlos Pons Guerra I will research sexual cruising – a practice that lends itself to performance and opens an array of avenues for investigation – its history, its psychology, its excitement, the tragedy, its consequences.

What are the characters adopted by the men who practise cruising? What are their stories? What are its visual / physical codes of communication? What would happen if it were women who were cruising, and why isn’t it popular amongst them? How can the audience feel a sense of anonymity when engaged in a form of intimate performance? How can the spectator be let in on the psychology or narrative of the performer’s character, through dance?

The research will be influenced by the work of erotic cartoonist Tom of Finland, and his historical depictions of the men who practised cruising.

Framing the work will be my continuous fascination towards romanticism, and in particular, the ballet Giselle. I would like to relate the notion of lost women, the Wili – condemned to ghostly eternity by the betrayal of their male lovers – to the many men who fell prey to the darker and tragic consequences of cruising and the gay male image.

www.yorkshiredance.com

Grace Surman I was recently awarded an artist’s residency with Bodysurf Scotland to work with an ecologist, to explore an exchange that may lead to the science and the art moving towards a symbiotic relationship.

I start from the very basic question: How might I explore some aspects of ecology and share its significance with a wider audience? The desire to understand these ‘primitive’ needs from within my arts practice have a deep interest for me, and this opportunity is the perfect opening of that investigation.

I would like to unpick the language that surrounds science, but of course not the ideas themselves: Inter-species collaboration / dialogue = putting my pet in the show Generational interconnectivity = putting my baby in the show Process = this is taking a really long time I’m interested in considering, and contesting, the artist’s place as translator in the context of environmental and ecological; to share challenging scientific ideas and models, to see them in ways that are thought-provoking, entertaining and enlightening – and reviewing how sentimentality is ingrained in this subject matter.

Sophie Unwin Through the Juncture Fellows commission my first solo endeavour, The Chronicles of Joy, was born. I had already started to research the theory of happiness, inspired by Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest Of Happiness, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and questions I was asking myself about my own pursuit of ‘happiness’. The Chronicles of Joy is a one woman show, a performance lecture about happiness from the perspective of Joy, a character whose straight-talking, candid and frantic personality is still under development.

I want to focus my efforts on both the research of, and physical element of, the solo, interrogating the movement language I have already started working with.

Outside the studio I will conduct interviews and read about happiness in relation to philosophy, psychology and religion.

After ‘scratching’ the work earlier this year, I am eager to dissect and deepen the existing material; I feel I have a deeper understanding of the work and its content, enabling me to return to it with a fresh approach to it and its development.

I am interested in the dramaturg’s role, and the invaluable experience that working with an artistic eye can offer an earlycareer artist.