SEAN GANDINI TALKS TO THOMAS WILSON

uh welcome to the london international line festival 2021 online things were a little different this year and uh we welcome sean gandini to talk about his work uh there are two of his shows that you can see on the mind festival youtube channel this year there is the special edition of smashed which i think was the fourth iteration of this show the third one indoors and we'll talk a bit about that and then the 2019 premiere of spring which was a collaboration with sadler's wells new wave associate alexander whitley and um both of these versions also had live musicians and guest artists and really in a way represent the kind of the culmination of two parts of the gandini work and we'll we'll talk a bit about that as well i'm thomas wilson uh i'm your host and um i have in fact written a book on gandini juggling which i think is still available via their website which looks at the history of the company but enough of that let's talk about gandini juggling maybe sean for those who are finding us for the first time finding you for the first time how would you describe what it is that gandini juggling does what do you do so we make shows mostly that's the main we do a number of other things but mostly we make shows that have a juggling element at its center the kind of the atomic element of our shows is juggling in all its forms i i've realized during lockdown uh i work with my partner katie lahockel and we work quite closely and most works are co-signed by both of us and we both realized in lockdown quite how much we adore juggling and um all it's uh endless permutations and so we've made about 30 shows um 31-hour shows and a number of smaller things they just look at juggling in in a whole different variety of ways and and i guess um i think what interested me and brought me to the company all those years ago because you've been going over 30 years now i think or at least really yes yeah thirsty yeah yeah um is the fact that you seem to be very happy moving into dance moving into a theatrical world sometimes just dealing with what you might what people might call pure juggling sometimes it's about the architecture of space sometimes it's about um the humanness in juggling um what what is it that prompted you to say well okay i'm happy with juggling but i want to go and see these other parts i want to see what happens when you bring these other things together well i think for me even though i absolutely adore juggling i also very much enjoy making things the pleasure of constructing the pleasure of choreographing the pleasure of structure and um juggling is sometimes juggling flirts so well with other art forms and other complicated structures that why not and i realized i i'm sometimes jealous there's a kind of artist that sticks to one idea and has that thread you know the person that just puts shoes in the middle of a room and sometimes i'm jealous of those people what do you do and i put shoes in the middle of the room and every couple of years they'll change the style of shoes and i i feel like we are much more grasshopper artists so we're very happy to explore all manner of things and we can do huge u-turns and i think we just really enjoy the journey and we're curious about the world so we'll encounter a new form of dance and and one of the first things that we think is wow what would happen if you you you put juggling on that or how does that apply to juggling yeah i guess that's interesting because in a way you've you've also never quite left also the more kind of i guess a kind of classical juggling world of just throwing objects for fun and seeing what's happening with objects and that can be in a to a juggling audience but equally a number of your works have been very popular works outdoor works very accessible works and there's something i think that's interesting and smashed that starts to maybe bring that popular maybe it started as a popular piece but became much darker well actually in my mind smashed was a dark piece and in fact i i did a a conversation a few days ago uh about another our pieces called clowns and queens that maybe we could touch upon and where where i was saying somebody that i made it partly in reaction to the fact that i felt that smashed had been um received in a different way to what i expected but then i i in with time i've realized that that was my preconceptions and not the audience um but when we made smash we made smashed very very quickly as a commission from angus mckishni on uh from the uh who at the time was running a beautiful outdoor festival in front of the national theater in london and he for a number of years gave us this amazing carter blanche uh do what you wish isn't that every artist's dream the the no strings attached commission um and peter bausch had just died and we thought we would make a little something uh based around the idea of what if peanut bausch had choreographed juggling or how would her world inform ours um and at the same time it was an anniversary of isaac newton and a conversation we'd had with another um outdoor producer bradley hemmings uh who we talked about making a piece based on apples um so these these various ideas came together and we decided to restrict the show just on apples but one of the things at the back of my mind was this dark universe i there's something there's two images in penis work one is the lonely woman surrounded by men which is a very disturbing uh image and and has taken on an extra um layer of meaning in today's metoo uh world uh and uh for me it was always there was nothing funny about that image and with time i've come to realize that you can do dark via funny and in fact some of the best dark is done by a funny but when we first presented the show and we did it outdoors i couldn't understand why people were laughing at these horrendous things and and then bizarrely i feel like smash has gotten darker but also much funnier it's become people talk about it as a funny show and i think the funnierness has somehow crept in it's one of the rare shows we've done it about 700 times so it's it just lives on its own i don't feel like we we almost don't have control of it anymore it's a bit like the virus evolving every few shows something mutates in the show in fact yeah that's a good metaphor the darwinian evolution of shows yeah i guess there's so much in in that to come back to and i guess partly is i guess then this this interest you know to start from isaac newton and the the image of the apple dropping um and that that hints to an element of the interest i guess of science and physics and that has a very natural home in juggling but also often i think in a lot of arts that interesting what's going on over there in the sciences and how do we pull on that but also excuse me also something about the way in which you started from with from the bounce was it starting from an an image the idea you know you talk about this image and the images of bausch and there's kind of these the i guess the choreograph choreographic motifs the line the line of action yes and then there's also i guess those formal parts and then there's also the part of bausch that is about how humans behave to other humans actually what you say is exactly right it was a series of images actually the image i had the most in my mind is what you call the line that we call the parade which is that moving very very uh gracefully and it normally has a little hand gesture that actually because we made this show quite quickly some of the things that i've learned about pina i have learnt in retrospect and in fact somebody wrote this beautiful m.a on the relationship between smash and penis work and they draw conclusions of scenes which are related but i had never seen those scenes so i think it's partly uh i guess in penis credit that um some some i feel like some of these monumental artists whatever you do they have done before i i'm working on um we are working on some cunningham uh inspired material at the moment and it's the same thing anything you think of choreographically somebody goes ah yeah merc did that in 56 um but but returning to pena so there's that parade the line and bizarrely it's such a simple thing that opens the show and yeah i had tried for a few years before to do it and i i never had the right team of people and and fortunately when we made smash the right team of people were there that we could make it quickly it's one of those things where sometimes doing the simple well is as hard as doing the difficult well um that's interesting isn't it i think we'll come to that in a second and i think just reflecting on this idea of um i guess the the greats and how their work there's something maybe inherent in a in a particular formal arrangement or device or way of working that carries not just the form but also the the impact or the intention of the work and it seems like you know if we do borrow these forms from people you also have to take what that form means to that to that artist and it comes into your work regardless in a way i guess i guess partly me saying the form is you know the medium is the message the form is is the content yes and then you i mean you get into some very complicated um uh things when you are channeling another artist if if you channel something that's sufficiently back in time say you you rewrite a vivaldi i feel like it's a different process to somebody who's still hovering as such a close to us cultural entity as peanut bausch or merce cunningham and and so then you also you i feel like you need to respect the form but you have the very tricky thing of creating something that's both genuine to the person but it's not a parody or a cliche which for me with smash was such a tremendous worry i i had at the back of my mind this because it was made so quickly and it was never meant to live we never asked the the the the the pina foundation whether we could do this and so as the show kept going i kept thinking i mean we sent them emails and they knew of the existence of the work but somebody would turn up and say what are you doing and at which point obviously we would have shut the show down but and so we had exactly that with dominic merci who i have the utmost admiration and is such a beautiful beautiful artist and we were doing a show uh uh i can't remember the name of the festival impressive beautiful festival in paris it was 10 days i'm doing shows around outdoors in paris and we start doing a show and there's a quite a humble looking man with a plastic bag of shopping and as we do the parade it's very easy to look out into the audience and i see dominique merci who is of course one of peanut butter's most well-known collaborators performers and really i guess one of the holders of her legacy these days absolutely and and in all the seminal works uh from cafe muller uh to the right of spring i mean just yes and i think was was very close to her in discussions about how the work was made so so in a way it was almost like having peanut out there watching and i thought my god this might be the day this might be the last match you do maybe at the end of it he goes look what was that maybe he doesn't even talk to us uh and then i could see his smile getting bigger as the show went on and i then i had this sense of joy and then he came to talk to us and he was the most wondrous man he said that kind of thing that in a way is incredibly frustrating to hear when you're in a given uh marginal art form but also it's often meant as a compliment which is i didn't think that juggling could possibly work with being about and i know magicians get this or acrobats i didn't i didn't think i like juggling or i don't normally like juggling but i like um which which yeah um uh so then we we've been going to work with you on the special edition didn't you yeah to give you a little bit of a support and you'd had obviously dramaturgs working with it before because i guess part of the way you work is very collaboratively and i'd like to talk a bit more about that later but i guess here is the collaboration with someone who knows the the things you're riffing with to to remix smashed for helen uh and joseph from the mind festival asked us if we would put together a special version of smash because smash i think smash might be the only piece we've played three times at the mine festival and so we opened the 40th anniversary um and because of smash's success there was often two teams uh performing the show at the same time so i think we have about 30 people who have performed a version of smash and the idea was to bring as many of them together and i sent dominic an email saying will you come and he he was very he he is the most humble of of uh of people and he said well i don't know if i can help but if you want me in the room and so we had three days or four days i can't remember exactly uh with dominic um watching things and feeding in and um yeah sometimes life delivers these special moments because to have made a tribute to peanut butter and end up working uh on it with dominic mercier as just a kind of heaven what what were his gems of his pearls of wisdom that he delivered actually he was very much he was i would often because i had this anxiety of having him there so i would go does this work and he would go i don't know let's see let's let it live so he was very actually he he trusted things and let them be and i know that we added a new scene which which is a scene i really like uh which was it's based on a charles aznavour scene the in the the classic indoor smash there's only two women and seven men and all of a sudden we had the dilemma that in the larger smash we had more women but something about the the volume of men versus the women is what works in smashed one and so we have this little surreal scene about halfway through where more women appear and they do this uh charles aznavour song about a man uh in in that kind of 19 i don't know exactly when this song is from maybe 60s 70s uh the transvestites of the time that men who dressed up as women and performed in paris and it's my mom and i we live alone a small apartment is our home and i think dominic wasn't sure about this scene and this lin um who's a wonderful uh juggler and performer who works with us um carries the piece and it was really on her shoulders and i think when we when we did it um at peacock part of the saddle as well um lynn sat on a chair and me and she said it was quite nerve-wracking because it was just me and dominic sitting in the room kind of judging the scene and dominic went oh yes okay this is right uh so he he's very he lets things grow and and trusts intuition and i guess that's something else that's quite an interesting uh thought which i'm having a lot working on mers cunningham's extraordinary legacy and choreography was how much you go into the studio with things prepared which mers did and i find that absolutely astounding and mind-blowing and i think that pina would pre-prepare but also play and which is more how we work you you test things you have an idea but then that conversation with the artist in the room can modify and completely transfigure that idea but there is there is a sense that to some extent you do go into a room with a backup of pattern and motif and a kind of vocabulary you already have and you may not have decided what the vocabulary how the vocabulary is going to be spoken in a particular moment but there is a there's that um i guess it's like the classical dance there's a there's a vocabulary that sits under everything you do yes and the more you make the more you have a cupboard full of i mean for us it's juggling patterns and and we are con i mean one of the things that this lockdown has been for us is we've made so many patterns i in fact i struggle with my archiving of this is one with four rings this is one with seven clubs this is one with this this is one with this and it's partly stuff that we're making with with the idea of the the cunningham pieces coming up but um yeah i i mean in some ways i think that's also an imprisonment in the same way that as you grow older you carry up psychological luggage that that it's both a blessing because you have all of these things that you can go back to but there's a danger that you always go back to the same things in the same ways and i guess one of the challenges as artists who have made things for a number of years is to try and break the pattern that people don't go oh geez the gandinis are doing what the gandinis always do that's interesting i think particularly in relation to spring which is your which is i guess your the not the end but a marker point in the line of the investigation of work with contempt where we dance that began right back in the 1990s with the work with um i guess seminal choreographic voice jill clark um and then found its way through various various small scale iterations through the 90s and then i guess the naughties and then into your sequence your sequence of three i guess bigger works um with um four by four with the royal opera house um sigma and then of course uh spring and so i guess is there something about going to different dance forms that is about you trying to refresh and review what you know so you're avoiding that sense of an artist who just repeats what they always do i i think that what you say as always thomas is is is very right i think i think that is exactly the crux of it but i don't i don't i don't think we articulate it as that i think we get seduced by an art form or or sometimes it's something that's been going around your mind for for years like for example i keep going back because it's where my mind's at at the moment to the cunningham that we're making at the moment that we've watched cunningham for so long and got exhilarated and i think both katy and i when we watch things we can't help to think what would that be in juggling um uh but but you're right i mean the work we did with jill i think just feeds everything we do even when we go very far from it i still feel like this like smash for me i think we made it while still was still alive but but in the back of my head i was thinking my god you would hate this and yet there's a lot of still like we do a duet cathy and i in in the later version of smash that is coming straight out of jill clark's ideas those who haven't seen it that early work was essentially about just pulling juggling apart and interrupting and breaking and fragmenting and really trying to i certainly that's the view i got of what jill was doing when i first met it was oh here she is and she's actually breaking juggling to see what's possible i think it's she was definitely deconstructing and and they were very um incredibly experimental works for in terms of if one puts it if what we do is circus um for want of a label it's at the time they were made there was virtually nothing that was getting into the structure of circus and really pulling that apart so i think jill in that sense jill's input on our company was quite um visionary i i would say but they weren't easy pieces and and we certainly struggled we were stubborn so we we kept going but we struggled with with getting enough people to understand them but they still inform what we do as i said a moment ago and that obsession was structure and and taking it apart is is a constancy almost every day yeah so maybe we should talk then about i guess in relation to spring what what where did spring start other than it's time to have a look at contemporary dance having done ballet and brahmatan um what was what was the what was the motivating question so it was as you mentioned earlier the third part of this trilogy i mean in a way it's weird because i felt like we the trilogy would close this relationship with juggling and dance and actually we're now involved in this huge juggling dancing but um i i call them tinder dates so it was kind of juggling goes on tinder dates with these sophisticated dance forms um in in a way that was different what i would say is different from the work we did with jill is that in in that we thought juggling is dance and let's mess with it whereas in these this trilogy we said our juggling is whatever it is and it's going to talk to this other art form and so as you mentioned we did a classical ballet and 4x4 ephemeral architectures um which was looking a little bit inventing a classicism for juggling what if juggling had the illustrious history of ballet so there was somebody like louis catozz who loved juggling so much that the world was peppered with these juggling houses and saw a kind of reverse science fiction and then we did um classical in the classical indian dance from parathan we worked with cetera patel um and that was more looking at rhythm and um and the segmenting of things into smaller and smaller parts and then actually the journey with alexander whitley who's whose um choreography i find quite extraordinary um initially we wanted to make a right of spring so it was this kind of like um it feels like this other monument and how would we do it and so we'd seen a piece that alex made on rumble i think it's called frames where alex um i don't know how many but it feels like a hundred he's got a hundred frames that get constructed and they can and it's a phenomenally structural piece and i'd also seen a trio that alex did at saddle as well has oyster in the titles and it reminded me very much of jill clark and so we asked alex if he'd be interested we had a little meeting with alex and then alex came back to us saying i'd love to work with you but i don't want to do the right of spring and so then i think we the journey went on a more formalist but i think it's the mo we had the most time so i feel like it's the deepest we've gone back into [Music] dance and juggling and it's the most we both got pushed off our course so we ended up with a show that's very different something we would have made on our own and he ended up with something that he definitely wouldn't have made on his own and i guess that's the best collaboration is when the collaborator knocks you off your of your course yeah and so i guess having spoken i get a bit about dominique mercy's approach which is to let just things live and let things play which i think is really part of smash smashed mode is a sense of playfulness what what did what did alexander bring so at first for the first couple of weeks he was very polite and i think he was maybe intrigued at how we worked i think because he he will stay on an idea and really drill it and press and refine it whereas we tend to especially at the beginning of a process sketch a lot of things try this try that try this try that try this try that and then go back and add the dots and the detail later and so i think he was a little bit intrigued about how we did that and but he was also had a a wonderful curiosity for the movement of juggling and he had that right from the beginning like how can i throw this differently how he he's an extra extremely physical man so and actually i loved watching him just throw himself in how do i he grabbed the prop straight away which i felt like how do i throw that can i hold it in a different way can i um and then little bit by little bit as we got to know each other he was more present in the studio and and i learned so much from he's he's such a great choreographic maker i i am always um i think i i have um somewhere deep down i i yearn to be uh to choreograph my i love and i love watching good choreographers work because they have it it's like they they they have it inside them there's this great intuition um um but yeah so so then there was this bouncing backwards and forwards and and kind of um i guess some people would say that alex's work is quite serious and and i think that the work ended up being a collaboration from us being the light-hearted person in the room and alex being the more serious with with obviously both of us taking other roles but i know i mean there's a couple of scenes which we cut from the show which i i regret this there's a scene which i should put up on video if the performers that let me where one of the performers comes up and says my hands are so small my hands are too small i can't juggle and then another performer comes and says my hands are so big and i just love that scene but for some reason something happened that both alex and some of the performers didn't want that scene in and so we but there was a battle over some some scenes and i was a bit naughty there's a little cheerleading scene that i added in a venue where alex couldn't come uh because i felt like the piece needed a a a way in for the viewer that if not it just became dense because it's really dense and complicated it's one of the most complicated things we've done this this is really interesting because maybe there's a little bit of you that is still out in the street juggling back you know as you started out in covent garden juggling for the punters as they come by but you know that is so so true i do feel like somewhere deep down ironically when i was in doing street shows in common garden i was a serious one and i'm sure the others they mocked me like oh jesus sean's doing street shows to chopin like what what it what the hell is he doing but then in as we've traveled down the road i feel like i'm the the like heart of the street performer in fact kathy says to me sometimes when we're talking about how to finish a show i feel like i always even though it might be an experimental boom i do feel like you need to put the boom at the end and cathy catty often says to me that is so circus why why are you so even though i'm often saying no we're not circus and we're moving away from that way maybe somewhere and i think she also has an element of that of of putting the little drop line in or the the little comedy yeah i guess there's something about the rhythm of pieces isn't there that the rhythm of a popular piece has a certain has a certain crescendo and a certain a certain rhythm and and then against you know thinking back to the work with jill that had a very different rhythm that was almost that didn't happen to that yes and then you see and smashed there's a really clear dramatic arc and sense of moments of events that punctuate what's happening i mean the end of smashed has got the boom and and in fact when we made smashed two kathy and i had many conversations because i wanted a different kind of boom and catty actually suggested that it end on this kind of slow motion violence which which i think she was very right in in suggesting and but again you could argue that that's a choir boom it's a firework that doesn't go off in the right way but it's still a firework but i guess most are most art has to go somewhere there's a point where it has to end at something at land at something and if you finish quietly you're you're referencing the fact that people know that most people finish loudly and you go wasn't that clever they finished quietly when most people so so i guess there's i mean there's all kinds of complicated the the beginning circus surprise isn't it it's like oh whoops you didn't think i was going to do that but here i am i'm going to do this i mean beginning beginnings are even more tricky i think because uh there's a few things is um i had i the a show that we mentioned briefly at the beginning clowns and queens it's not necessarily on our agenda today to talk to but i had set myself the goal of starting with difficulty not doing this um smash opens with his beautiful seductive parade which in a way is perfect because you get to look at the audience and you say to the audience welcome come inside something nice is gonna happen and in a way it's a fake promise um a complicity that you set up um and i for me it's always been intriguing how do you break that rule is it possible to end to begin in a way that's not that and and i haven't i must say that i've always fought it i know romeo castellucci in inferno has this scene of a man with the five dogs um and and i feel like he was successful in doing that but but certainly there are rules that are very difficult and if you break them in a way the audience is almost knowing the rules and thinking you've broken that rule i think it's jonathan burrows who says that an audience will trust you for about four minutes we'll kind of go oh i don't know about this let me see but then there's a moment when when they're watching that they make a decision and in a way if you will especially if you're wanting to present difficult concepts or mess with a given form if you can seduce the audience at the beginning it's easier to then go ah back to outdoor performance aren't we and we're back to this idea that actually most most of an outdoor performance is the patter it's not what you're actually doing it's true it's true it's true you know and i remember seeing back in in the 90s people in the covent garden who would he would do literally they'd only do a five-ball cascade that would be their home and once you've seen a bit of juggling you go okay it's difficult but it's for you guys it's kind of a baseline entry point um but they're entertaining because of all the work they do around it yes but ironically i used to find that very frustrating at the time because i loved juggling and my my using of the street medium for performing was an excuse to show the juggling as opposed to an interest in the form itself which over the years i have grown to like and i have learned so much from and i realize what an invaluable school having been there um was but then so then going back to spring the the [Music] the the the conversation with alex or the balancing act was me wanting to put in those moments i guess there's also the punctuations which i guess you could see as classical clowning the punctuations that let the audience in and which i certainly have felt that some very pure dance people are very resistance of why are you lightening this form and i think there's a sacredness around certain when when art forms become classical there's the sacredness of the space that you shouldn't mess with it like you shouldn't have this in an art gallery or ballet shouldn't have this and and the hierarchy of the arts as well that that certainly in the cultural hierarchy of the arts dance is higher than circus uh but it's a perception because that it's just cultural history historically circus has always been the art form that's always riffed off things and said ah okay we know that's going on in high culture well i'm going to use that in in whatever theme or whatever way i'm playing my act i think you're absolutely right and in fact i mean there's a much more complex discussion to be had on defining circus and i i always feel like circus is a random 27 skills that have been put into a pot but you're right circus riffs and i i i felt we needed a circus fix over this holiday so we've been watching old monte carlo circus festivals and there's a recent trend in russian circus which is literally they'll take something it and just boom culturally put it on like it can be anything from mozart 17th century costumes to uh and i think circus is um is very has no qualms about just prompt will use that or will uh i mean in a sense it's quite a brutal uh art form i guess because at the end of it circus is a is a commercial art form it's it's only recently in in the uk certainly it's had any kind of um i guess subsidized funding and it was always very much uh you're over there and you're over there in the commercial sphere and then all these kind of subsidized arts are over here and so i guess it has had to be a little bit more brutal and um taking advantage of things but it's also such an extraordinarily great art form i mean one of the things that us experimentalists i i question is circus works it's it's perfect it kind of crescendo it gives you the big trick it has sex it has death i mean it relates to greek tragedy so why are we messing with it what what what on earth are we thinking at the same time you can eat you have popcorn absolutely uh there's there's animals sometimes that's a whole other uh i want to come back to this idea of the people because i guess in the classical circus the classical circus is about bringing lots of people together with their skills and then the job of the of the ring master or whoever is running the circus is to populate the the acts populate the show with those people and then you know well whoever's you know then you might have somebody who's a a high wire act but they're probably also doing three or four other things that you don't see or you might see in the show so i guess let's talk a bit about how you've i guess who you work with what you look for and how also i guess how you've developed or given space for certain people to develop as jugglers and performers i guess within your core team well actually one thing i have realized over the last the last couple of years is um that we we give people space to grow if they want to so for example um at the moment there's a there's a wonderful dancer called jennifer gogans who was in the final cunningham company and who helped us with our initial opening the door to the cunningham universe um she works for the cunningham trust but we taught her to juggle a year ago and she's learning so much juggling so we're having these weekly uh to and fro conversations and we send the juggling patterns and she learns them and so and a couple of uh the alexander whitley dancers yushin wu and tia hopley um have both learned quite a lot and aaron o'toole who was in uh 4x4 was one of the ballerinas in 4x4 and has been in three or four pieces since and has become quite a core part of what we're doing so i guess if people are interested we love this idea that we can give them our world and they can grow within our world and then they feed back in stuff to our world like for example sakuri manisto who is a beautiful finnish juggler quite an inventive has fed patents into the company and these patents stay and get mutated so i even though i guess we're an autocratic company in that it is run by cathy and i i do feel like we're quite prolific collaborators and and we we let people in and we're um yeah i don't know if i'm expressing this well but yeah no i think that's fine i think it's interesting isn't it that um because you often dealing with two particularly in the dance work you're dealing with two very specific trainings and it's very you know certainly i guess when you began in the 1990s it was very rare to find people who could juggle and dance and there might be specialist jugglers with those dance skills maybe more common in the classic circus but certainly uh maybe not so in the subsidised sector that actually you're bringing these not only you bringing two forms together often you're having to find people who are willing to engage or have those two disciplines in their body because they're incredibly intensively they need intensive training both of them it's all about repetition yes absolutely and and i think that's been one of the sometimes i get frustrated by it in the ideally i guess we have a school and we teach people to do the thing that we we like doing uh but also the nature of our work in that we're doing a number of different well when there's not the virus around a number of different shows which which are different dancing disciplines or acting disciplines so if our school would be just so complicated because there'll be so many different things um but for in spring and we have a phenomenal cast in that both the dancers and the jugglers did such a huge learning i'm so in or of them all um and then i guess i am fortunate that my wife has got dancing in her bones so she dances and juggles in her essence and then kim quinn who's been with the company for for over a decade now also did a lot of dancing as a little girl i mean they're the these rare gems that have i i guess it's something you can't really the absorption of dancing at a young age is is so helpful uh and like you say it is difficult to find people who have the double skills and we are getting more and more of them bizarrely sometimes it's easier to go from the dance towards the juggling than from the juggling towards the dance because i guess it's also what you say about dance and having that really kind of i guess that child experience of manipulating the body and thinking about the world as something that you move through and dance through and and is there the same thing for the juggler that somebody starts juggling at a young age and it's because it's a way of juggling as a way of thinking or thinking of pattern so so spring has one of the special guests it has is west pedan who is essentially an incarnation of of juggling i think you did a lovely talk with him at um at last year's mind festival uh he he is juggling personified he he grew up with juggling he absolutely adores juggling uh and interestingly enough i think contrary different his journey being different to us in that i think he's happy and pure juggling he's happy to add things in but i would say his reflection on the form is in this pure absolutely virtuosic and inventive choreographic juggling but you really see in wes and there's a couple of his contemporaries the fact that the juggling went into the body when they were little that he what you what you said i i really like that that dancers can think of the world as something that they move through and i think wes and his contemporaries can think of the world as something they throw things through and you see that in in the in the addition of spring where he's the guest he's the guest star it's a sudden it's a it's a big shift in tone in quality yeah it's kind of like a um it's kind of like a it's dropped in almost like as a as i try to think of a culinary thing that you you're having your meal i mean you have something that then having an indian meal and all of a sudden there's a spaghetti and then you're back and then you're on to something in fact i do have i i mean i absolutely adore wes for me i i can watch wes all day um but theatrically i i had my doubts as to how i had used wes in the piece because because wes is so fantastic that he changes the way of looking at the show so then i feel like it it takes about 10 minutes after wes has been on to go back to watching smaller detail and because wes can't help but be spectacular he's a boom he's a boom and the boom maybe and so and it's quite how you use that and um but then he he he is just so such a fantastic boom that he comes in in some of the earlier parts of spring he does this nice little elbow sequence within this uh dancing thing and it yeah he lights it up but uh yeah but i guess we're a bit back to that but the bausch thing aren't we that the form is but it's a bit different the form holds the meaning and here actually it's somebody who has such an established style yeah when you bring them in as a guest artist you you're bringing in they're not coming in to do what you do they're coming in to do whatever but then i think that wes was trying to do what we so so it's interesting it's that thing of especially not necessarily in his club solo where i feel like it's west or the west west has so many tricks that wes kind of went these are the tricks that i think are right for sean's show and he he's a meticulous uh maker so he he sent me so many videos saying shall i put this trick in until we put that trick in um so in some of the earlier sections wes is actually learning some of our material but then it's interesting how when you watch him even when he's doing somebody else's material i think it's something about his attack as well he i i do feel like he has an extraordinary joy that i i feel i see in people like i've been watching a lot for some reason keith jarrett played the piano and there's something about the attack they sit up there at their instrument and there's this incredible passion for the thing that just um comes i i think you see i think once you and maybe this is because i've seen so much of the work but once you see the company you realize that each individual juggler performer has their own style you and catty juggle in different ways zachary has his own tone kim has her own tone and there's a there's not a sense of it's not like seeing a chord a ballet where essentially you're trying to erase the difference kind of perfection here you actually have individuals with their own nuances who were joined by the patterns and i think there's i guess that's what i find rewarding in returning particularly to things like smashed or to four by four or that you come back and you go oh actually i can see i can see humans individuals within the work and it's the the humanity of those individuals that is part of the joy of watching it that maybe goes back to the circus part that i go to see people do amazing things but actually the thing i like best at circus is when you see somebody you know they you know the old oh i'm gonna fail for a couple of times before i do it on the third trick it's that moment of seeing how somebody deals with the task rather than the task itself i think you're absolutely right that letting people have their own identity ironically though one of the our missions in spring and alex was very uh keen on this and and i feel like he he succeeded was that if somebody were to watch it for the first 10 minutes or so they wouldn't be able to know who's a dancer and who's a juggler so really blurring that line and i think i guess there's extremes of that whereas i feel like all the performers definitely blurred it but there's moments like tears dancing at the beginning with the line of people counting to 100 with the rings she so clearly is a dancer and wes in the middle when wes comes up and does a five club shower it it's clearly not a dancer who's learned that you know and i mean actually spring has elements say again as i said it's an interesting um it's an interesting task then isn't it can i perform as a juggler but look like a dancer can i erase not erase but mask my jugglingness yeah i mean we that that was kind of partly the task in in in spring and i i do feel like alex succeeded in that i mean partly we had such a remarkable group of of performers that learnt so much and was so open um to this and it's something that i'm thinking very much now we're making this piece at premieres in 22 which is life which is based on a mapping of of merce cunningham's choreographic universe and we are it is the most technical thing in terms of dancing and juggling that we have done and so we are spending forever on the minutia of how does this foot work and how do we and hopefully we cross the lines even more wow that sounds great we'll look forward to that i think we're probably coming to the end of our time oh i guess it's just quickly i i think we should probably remind everyone that they can watch um both spring and smashed on the mind festivals uh youtube channel and i think that's from the 18th to the 21st um and i should say uh we talked a lot about the special edition but the special edition of spring it has two live drummers they are really fantastic and it has our our friends kamerata al-maviva with whom we've collaborated on two or three different shows who actually also appear in the special version of of smashed and so uh actually i must say spring at sadha's that film it it just looks the best the show ever looked guy who are lit in in a very subtle layered way yeah i'm i'm i think they yeah they'll they people should definitely check both of them out they're both very interesting and really i guess they do record they do they do stand as kind of marker points for me of where your where where your work got to at those moments in time and of course um i i hope and i'm sure that life in 2022 will be another one of those marker points but we'll see who knows what the work will be so thank you very much for chatting with you thomas you're so knowledgeable you frame it you frame it better than i ever could you're very kind it's always pleasurable chatting to you because i can just set you off and you'll take us into very interesting places so thanks to everyone for watching and um i think we should always sign off in these times with stay safe yes keep people safe and uh we will see you all soon

2021-01-26 05:26

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