19. game changer

 

Do you have one artwork or performance you saw that is like the one?

I have the National Theatre’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children (2009). Fiona Shaw ascending the Olivier from below the stage bellowing out a rock anthem. Cheap and dirty Brechtian simplicity alongside these beautiful emotional performances. The scene where Katrin, who cannot speak, alerts the nearby town of the oncoming invasion and is subsequently killed for doing so. The sheer physicality of these intense emotions. 

So - I’m visiting the National Theatre Archive, where you can look through their collections, and I’m going to sit back and enjoy a recording of this production. I’m curious to revisit it to understand why it was so important to me. I hope it will not spoil a special memory - let’s see.

….

Okay firstly now that I’ve done it - what a strange thing to do. I had this crazy sensation of how close this thing from thirteen years ago feels. It wasn’t really a new experience - which was beautiful. There weren’t many moments I’d forgotten or that had morphed in my mind. I guess that’s why it stands out so much for me - because it was such a fitting match, it was so artistically clear (to me) in its intentions just as it was.

I can often have very much the opposite with dance that I have loved, something that was magical in its spectacle for instance - like a particular lift or jump, lets say, from something I saw before I became a professional. When I’ve revisited those works I’m, more often than not, disappointed: I’ve become too familiar with the form and I can’t experience that more childish or instinctive wonder in those things. The exception is always, for me, when it was the physicality that was distinguishable, the trio in Café Müller (1978), for instance - has amazed me for years and every time I return to it I am still in awe. I’m impressed by it - but not because it’s impressive.

So why Mother Courage? I think it’s a combination of things - just as I remembered it is so unrelenting in its energy, it is as spectacular as it is cheap and dirty. It is this hugely successful Brechtian aesthetic - with locations and stage directions scrawled across white sheets, and the stage populated by by this roaring wall of energy from the cast. 

It has that simplicity that makes it very easy to digest. But it is also horrible. I remember when I did my National Youth Theatre intake course, my instructor Montse Gili telling us how important it is to enjoy everything we do on stage, even if we’re dying a horrible death - this show is very much that, it takes extreme pleasure in its brutal ugliness. 

It makes me come to some interesting realisations about the art that has really moved me, Mother Courage and Her Children (2009), Café Müller (1978), What The Body Does Not Remember (1987), Colored Sculpture (2016), Multiple Realities (2022)

I think you would describe all these works by describing their energy, very much in the way I’ve been describing Mother Courage:

Raw
Unrelenting
Beautifully Violent / Violently Beautiful 
Instinctive

Now - what’s interesting is I think most of my recent works have been both made and perceived with very different attributes, I have spoken with artists, friends and audiences about the care to detail in my work, the gentleness, the fragility of it, the genderlessness (?) of it.

So do I make the opposite of what I enjoy? Or at least what I’m most shaped by? I’m definitely more obtrusive when I’m a co-creator in someone else’s work than when I’m the creator. So something happens when I take the reins. 

And actually I’ve used some of the moments in Mother Courage, through my career, as examples of physical extremities - almost as a seven levels of tension thing. The archivist actually was so surprised I was a dancer, they were a little confused and asked if there was actually any dancing in mother courage - and I said no. But I should have maybe said how it has some of the most powerful moments of physicality I’ve seen on stage… which I think is fair to call dance. And I always think it is hard to be inspired by something that is very close in form to what you do, because the fear of either copying or getting stuck in a shadow can be very strong. So perhaps I’ve actively challenged these works in very new energies. But it got me very excited about the ugly side of my work - as it definitely aligns to some research I’m physically undergoing on the limits I can push my body to, and that cycles back into creating intense emotional states through intense physical states - which I think is very Mother Courage.

It also got me thinking about when I started dancing, there was a lot of funding for getting boys to dance and so I was surrounded by opportunities. However, I also witnessed a trend in trying to bring boys into contemporary dance by presenting it as a masculine strength based form with aesthetics that closely resembled the roughness of a rugby player and the virtuosity of a martial artist. These are forms that of course do exist within contemporary dance - I just feel let down that an all boys contemporary dance company would prescribe itself to the same toxic standards as the all boys high school I attended. Not that to be strong and to be toxic are the same thing - but I think as soon as choreographic material requires only strength (especially at such a young age) that can be very problematic for me, are we trying to exclude the same children from all physical activities?

So there’s an embodied rebellion that I’ve been carrying around to being a male dancer. I also taught at London Boys Ballet School for four years, it’s become a part of my pedagogical practice to advocate for freedom to move with physical languages that question gender performativity. 

I can also notice that I actively avoid work which has a blinkered approach to its male dancers - at least when it is as a default. But I wonder if that’s also stopping me finding the kind of raw physicality that is the key to some of the works that are most precious to me. I find it a very scary way to take space, and also a very delicate energy to repeatedly create safely in a creation process. 

But maybe coming back to these extreme qualities should be a kind of New Years Resolution - not that I really do that. But Mother Courage has at least got me in the mood to be a bit uglier - exciting times!

Let me know if you do have a work that really stands out from your histories <3

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'Game Changer' - Modern Family, Season 1, Episode 19