In 2008, Kate Champion's company Force Majeure premiered a work
called The Age I'm
Inas part of the Sydney Festival's About An Hour dance
series.
Featuring a cast of actors and dancers, ranging in age from a
teenager to a 78-year-old, it certainly included dance but also had
the performers lip-synching to extracts from pre-recorded
interviews and using video cameras and hand-held screens in highly
imaginative ways, generating humour, pathos and social
commentary.
Reviewing it for her Stagenoiseblog, Diana Simmonds noted
that the production crossed "so many boundaries it probably ought
to have a passport."
"It this really contemporary dance? Is it really theatre? Does it
matter? It's Kate Champion's Force Majeure and it's brilliant,"
concluded Simmonds.
Defining what is dance, what is dance theatre and what is physical
theatre isn't entirely clear-cut. The boundaries are blurred and
becoming increasingly porous as dance, theatre, physicality and
other artforms - from sculpture to digital media - are combined on
stage in new and exciting ways.
Dance and theatre have been interlinked since ancient times, of
course. What's more, dance companies have often used the moniker of
dance theatre in their name - London Contemporary Dance Theatre,
for example, or Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Nowadays, however, the term "dance theatre" describes work in which
dance makers put movement and words together and has been around
for over three decades.
Physical theatre, meanwhile, is best exemplified by companies like
Legs on the Wall, formed in 1984 by a collective of artists working
in new forms of contemporary circus. Legs on the Wall has played a
key role in the development of physical theatre in Australia, which
it defines on its website as "a form that draws on circus,
acrobatics and dance."
Nigel Jamieson's extraordinary 2006 production Honour
Bound, which combined extreme physicality (created with
choreographer Garry Stewart), aerial work and sophisticated audio
and visual projections to explore David Hicks' incarceration in
Guantanamo Bay, is a landmark production in Australian physical
theatre.
Champion admits that in the past she has found it hard to label her
work. "We have found that 'physical theatre' is sometimes a
useful term when we haven't wanted people to expect too much dance
in a production," she says of her work for Force Majeure - the
company she founded in 2002 with Roz Hervey and Geoff Cobham.
Champion regularly uses ensembles of actors and dancers as in
Never Did Me Any
Harm. "So I've come full circle to being happy with
calling it dance theatre," she says. "It feels more honest to call
it dance theatre."
For the same reason, Champion calls herself a director rather than
a choreographer. "I certainly bring my dance and choreographic
knowledge and history into the room but I'm not interested in
people moving the way I do and demonstrating movement," she
says.
"I'm interested in giving the performer tasks to explore with their
own physicality. I ask them to respond but I craft and edit the
material they create physically and suggest things. I think the
huge skill within dance theatre is knowing how to set those tasks
and questions that will give you useful material."
"Dance theatre" as a form or "tanztheater" emerged in Germany. Its
founder is widely acknowledged to be Kurt Jooss (1901 - 1979), a
famous German ballet dancer and choreographer associated with the
expressionist dance movement, who believed in combining dance,
music and drama in performance. However, it was legendary German
choreographer Pina Bausch who took dance theatre to the
world.
Its roots can be traced back to the early 1900s when experimental
American dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis visited Germany.
The interest they generated was intensified by the teaching of
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss musician, who developed a method of
teaching music through movement called eurhythmics.
In 1910, Dalcroze founded a school outside Dresden. German dancers
Mary Wigman and Yvonne Georgi developed Dalcroze's eurhythmics into
an expressive dance style, which was developed further by Jooss and
his Hungarian colleague Rudolf von Laban into work they called
tanztheater.
Bausch, who was born in 1940, studied with Jooss at his Folkwang
Tanztheater in Essen for three years before going to the Juilliard
School in New York. She would go on to run the Tanztheater
Wuppertal Pina Bausch from 1973 until her death in 2009 where she
introduced speech and other highly theatrical elements to her often
stark, violent productions, becoming "the outstanding creator of
dance theatre in Europe, if not the world," as The Timesput it in her obituary.
Bausch's work had a huge impact in Australia when her company
toured to the 1982 Adelaide Festival. Several Australian dancers
including Meryl Tankard also worked with her company.
Champion saw Bausch's company in Adelaide and again three years
later in New York and says "it definitely had an impact" but it was
Australian-born Lloyd Newson's London-based DV8 Physical Theatre
that really inspired her.
Sydney-born Champion spent her teenage years in Munich where she
studied dance. Returning to Australia, she performed with
Australian Dance Theatre for two years but left feeling
disillusioned and contemplated a move into film. Then she saw DV8
at the 1990 Melbourne International Arts Festival and her passion
for dance was reignited.
Champion followed DV8 back to London, becoming a trusted
collaborator of Newson's with whom she worked as a rehearsal
director, performer and assistant on various productions.
Formed in 1986 and described by The Guardianas "a stroppy
tomboy in the genteel world of dance", DV8 is now one of the
world's leading dance theatre companies. Newson focuses on the body
and works almost exclusively with trained dancers - albeit from
different backgrounds and with different physiques. However, he
combines movement with theatre, text and multimedia. Over the
years, he has gradually used words more and more in order to
address contemporary social and political issues.
His latest work Can We Talk
About This?premiered at the Sydney Opera House's 2011
Spring Dance Festival. Exploring big, challenging ideas around
multiculturalism, freedom of speech and religion, particularly
Islam, the cast performed complicated choreography while speaking
dense text drawn verbatim from 55 interviews. It was an
astonishingly powerful piece of provocative, intelligent dance
theatre in which the movement illuminated and intensified the focus
on what was being said.
When Champion worked with DV8, Newson was using little text but
like him she has increasingly used words in her work. Quite by
coincidence she too began drawing on verbatim interviews around the
same time as Newson.
"I find that I hit a wall when I try to make movement say
everything," she told The
Australianin 2001. "I just find it leaves people
without understanding it or it's too naff because it's so
literal."
Champion agrees that her work has become increasingly theatrical in
recent years with dance and theatre now roughly half-and-half in
her work. But dance remains a driving force.
"Even though I have an interest in text and words and including a
narrative, I don't want to lose the incredibly poetic images and
resonance that movement can bring to it," she says. "We know the
power of that."
Theatre companies are now picking up on this kind of work. Sydney
Theatre Company commissioned Never Did Me Any Harm.
Last year, Belvoir programmed Human Interest Storyby
Melbourne choreographer Lucy Guerin - another choreographer
blurring the line between dance and theatre - in its subscription
season and follows it up this year with a new work by Guerin called
Conversation Piece, which features three actors and three
dancers.
(It should be noted that Neil Armfield programmed Under the Influence, a Legs on
the Wall production devised by Champion, as part of Belvoir's
subscription season as far back as 1998).
STC recently appointed choreographer Gideon Obarzanek as an
associate artist. The founding artistic director of internationally
acclaimed, Melbourne-based contemporary dance company Chunky Move
from 1995 to 2011, Obarzanek has always been interested in using
other artforms in his dance works.
He says that he and Guerin - who are partners - both think of their
work as dance - "we have a very broad definition of what that could
be" - but acknowledges that Guerin's latest work for Belvoir "is
dance theatre as most people would define it."
Obarzanek says that his part-time role at STC will be
"intentionally loose. I will have an input and feedback into
programming and am also initiating a couple of performance projects
with STC that will unfold over 2012 and 2013. One is small with an
actor and a dancer and the other is a large group piece, starting
out as a workshop, with a couple of dancers but mostly actors and
also people who have never performed professionally before," he
says.
In 2010, STC produced Stockholm, a 2007 production
by innovative UK physical theatre outfit Frantic Assembly, which
describes its work as "theatre that fuses text and
physicality."
Performed by two actors, Stockholmfeatured a script by
Bryony Lavery and fairly demanding choreography. Here theatre
extended into physicality rather than the other way around as in
dance theatre.
Both Obarazanek and Champion say that in recent years theatre
artists have started to show a good deal of interest in their work.
"I think that contemporary dance has become more theatrical and
scripted theatre is looking for other ways to communicate stories
on stage," says Obarzanek.
Deborah Jones, who reviews dance for The Australian, welcomes the
interest from theatre companies.
"For the longest time, people we would call choreographers rather
than playwrights or directors - Kate Champion is a great example -
have been making dance theatre that uses all the tools at an
artist's disposal: heightened movement, text, sound, multimedia.
And they've made wonderfully rich work," she says citing Champion's
solo pieces Face
Valueand About
Face.
"It's taken theatre companies quite a while to notice that dancers
have crossed the border and it's great to see them offer their
audiences - people who may have little experience of dance - the
chance to get into this hugely imaginative and thrilling
world."
Written by Jo Litson
Photo by Grant Sparks-Carroll
Essay: The Evolution of Dance Theatre
Date posted: 14 Feb 2012Author: STC