The eclectic and wonderful Candoco is holding auditions over the next few weeks to find fifteen people to take part in Jerome Bel’s piece ‘The show must go on.’ There’s no upper age limit, so I applied and was invited to audition in Birmingham last Friday, along with nineteen other men and women, both dancers and not, from seventeen to sixty-eight years old. It was a great experience that went a long way to fulfil my need to work with other dancers and performers, even in the unlikely event I’m accepted to take part.
Entering the studio we were greeted so warmly by all the company members that it was easy to relax into chatting with other people, and from the start there was an atmosphere of openness, laughter and fun, and no sense that we were competing with each other. The audition was led by three of the company dancers, and the tasks became increasingly challenging, and exposing – playing, moving, singing, miming – culminating in one-minute solos with no time for preparation. It could have been intimidating and embarrassing, but instead, it was led so skilfully that everyone rose to the occasion and shone. There were funny, eccentric, touching, and theatrical moments. I don’t envy the company the task of choosing who to shortlist. Jerome Bel isn’t your run-of-the-mill choreographer. He’s challenging, provocative, mischievous, searching – many things. 'The show must go on,’ is not dance – or is it? Reading about the audience response to the first performances I'm reminded of the first night of Rite of Spring in Paris 1913. But I’ve only seen snatches of it on youtube. Whatever it is, I really look forward to seeing what Candoco, and those who are accepted, make of it in their tour next spring.
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In my mind I know there are far too many books written and published, that many of them are pretty poor, and bound for oblivion. It also seems a pretty strange activity – to live with a set of fictitious characters in mind, and to spend hours inhabiting, and attempting to describe their world. But my heart tells me otherwise – the best days are those when something is accomplished towards my novel, be it as short as a paragraph. My life is the richer for both writing and reading.
I began writing The Green Table over ten years ago on an Arvon course – Writing for Young Adults, led by Celia Rees, and the wonderful Jan Mark, who died only three months later. But in many ways it began much earlier than that. I was twenty one when I lived as a student and au pair in Amsterdam. On summer weekends I walked the length and breadth of the city, soaking up its unique atmosphere. It felt so much closer to the events of the Second World War than England – and I could sense the shadow of Nazi Occupation. ‘You’re all going to start a novel this week,’ Jan Mark told us, and I wrote the first page of The Green Table – a German dance teacher living in Amsterdam, and ranting against Hitler and Nazi Occupation as she teaches her young students. And so it went on. ‘The Green Table’ as a novel for teens never quite made it to publication. Twice it was accepted by editors of well known publishing houses, but refused by the marketing panel. So, to counter despair, I went off to do an MA. One of my fellow students on that long ago Arvon course was Jan Fortune, who created and runs Cinnamon Press, and encourages many writers of fiction and poetry to reach potential. After completing my MA I had an idea I’d like to redraft The Green Table as a novel for adults – enabling me to explore adult perspectives on the theme of oppression, as well as my young protagonist of the original work. So, with Jan as mentor, and her unfailing support and love for my original idea, I began a task that was far more difficult than I ever imagined. So difficult that it sometimes felt like the mental equivalent of clinging to a precipice, unable to go up or down for fear of falling. I’ve just completed a first draft, and after reading it aloud, I know at last that I can make it work. Jan has agreed to publish it in the autumn 2015, the tenth anniversary of Cinnamon Press. Last week I had my first conversation about the book cover with Adam Craig and I now wait to see his initial ideas. And tomorrow I’m flying off to Amsterdam for two days to walk the city again before writing the final draft. There’s a sense of relief, even delight, to have got this far, and to have found such encouraging companions along the way. Last Friday I went on a drawing day in Manchester - The Palace Theatre and New London Ballet. Whilst I enjoy drawing, what I was really looking forward to was the opportunity to watch the dancers, both in class, and later in rehearsal for Swan Lake. It's one thing going along to class every week, and teaching ballet barre to my small dedicated group of women, but quite another to see such highly trained, exquisitely lovely dancers doing what they do every day of their professional life.
The exercises were not overlong, but were set at such speed by the ferocious-looking ballet mistress that it was incredible that the dancers and the accompanist had a clue what she demanded, never mind tempo and timing On Saturday I went for an audition for The Body by choreographer, Joe Moran. The Body, a sound and performance installation that draws upon the work of writer Paul Auster, will be performed in the Nottingham Gallery in November. ‘Amidst ten chairs and in counterpoint to a spoken word sound score, nine performers listen, sit and stand in forming and reforming configurations.’
I’m certain it’s more compelling to watch than it sounds. I’ve never seen Joe’s choreography, but I like what I’ve read about him. Here he is talking about a recent production, and like many dancers/movers, unable really to articulate what he means. Dance, after all, is another language and the meaning is always lost in translation. 'His work has gained recognition for its intelligence, complexity and disregard for convention. He creates bold, physical and distinctive new works for theatres, galleries and public spaces.’ Arriving with dripping umbrellas, we were welcomed by Heather Forknell of Dance4, and led up flights of stairs to a long narrow studio, with a door that opened to a fire escape and views high over Nottingham. There were fifteen of us, ranging from late teens to mid-fifties. Whilst we waited for Joe to arrive, we lay on the floor, rolling around, stretching, warming up, hugging the radiator, and chatting – and I was back in that familiar world I miss so much, where the common language is movement, and the connections with complete strangers are made so much more easily than through words. The atmosphere was friendly, curious, open, with nothing of the paranoia and insecurity I remember from auditions in the past. Joe arrived, and taught an improvisation class. His manner was quiet, unassuming, and generous, and his class was a delight. We moved every part of the body, slowly, with control, swiftly, on the floor, and running and jumping. Above all, we listened, through the muscles, through the skin – the kind of listening I’ve only ever experience through dance. Afterwards, for the rest of the day, I felt renewed, more alive than I have for a long time, despite the fact I exercise every day. To work with other people makes the difference. Early this week I heard that I’ve been accepted to take part in the group of nine dancers. I’m delighted, and look forward to working with Joe and the group very much. Over the summer I spent a week alone in Wales. I stayed in my publisher’s house, looking after her cat, and hoping to complete a first draft of The Green Table.
After leaving the coast and the wide green valleys of mid Wales, I reached a slate town overshadowed by glowering slate mountains and shale slopes, a clear river swirling alongside terraces of miners cottages, and a narrow gauge railway that ran through mountains and woods to the sea. I was a stranger, speaking English in a Welsh speaking area, navigating my way past the chapel and tiny school, up a narrow lane that came to an end at the railway track, and back again to find my destination on the intersection of two roads – the front entrance of the house on the high road, the back, one storey lower, on the road below. I was met as soon as I opened the door, by a talking cat with a tail curled over her back like a pug. Her name was Freya. There was something illusory and fantastic about my time there, now I reflect on it. As if in a fairytale, I went from door to door, uncertain where I should sleep, the corridors and stairs organised in such a way that I kept getting lost, all the time trailed by the most vocal cat I’ve ever met – my Familiar for the week. The house was full of contradictions – raw as a student flat, but hung with original paintings and prints, books lining every wall, and a brilliantly organised and well-stocked, but dimly lit kitchen. In the centre of the house, was a room like a tiny museum or library, blinds down, a perfect white wooden floor, a narrow bed, and in the centre an old typewriter, and phrenology head, placed on a table made of an upturned wooden box. It felt like the heart of the house, secret, fascinating and beautiful. To spend too long looking seemed an intrusion. I fell into a routine of walking for half an hour, before sitting on the floor of the living room, warding off the cat as I attempted to give form to my scattered fragments and chapters. Several times a day the steam train chugged past the house on the level of the top storey, faces pressed to the windows like a child’s picture book. At five every afternoon, I set out again to explore. The road quickly disappeared into wilderness, past a few dwellings, and round great heaps of slate. There’s a unique sound made by footfall on loose slate, as clear as broken glass, more slippery. I walked into the mountains, round a lake, past ruined barns, and through pastures of bog. I picked blackberries the size of acorns. In the evening, after the House Martens had flown to roost, it was so quiet. Only the dogs in the distant farmsteads, disturbed, set up a barking that reverberated across the valley.And every time I returned to the house, the cat mewed, until I finally shut the bedroom door at night and fell into silence. It was only a few weeks ago, but it seems a long time ago now. I returned with some semblance of a novel and much more work to do. The house, the strange wild landscape and the perplexing cat stay with me. For the first time in many years summer has seemed to me to be as long as winter – and how long a Derbyshire winter can seem. We’ve had glorious days of light and sunshine, with intermittent wild bursts of rain, from the first greening of the hawthorn, to our recent weeks of the scented Buddleia flowers and clouds of Peacock and Tortoiseshell butterflies. Now the swifts have flown, too soon, and the apples and mirabelles are ripening and falling, but still the bats flutter out every night, and it feels we may have a few weeks left before the tug and bite of autumn.
As a reminder of deep summer, this is a short film of the orchard in July, created by George Peck, who took the wonderful photographs of the frogs earlier this year. Sunset in the Orchard. Two days ago, the cat – who rarely hunts – brought in a fledgling. He was the size of a walnut shell, still downy, despite the defined markings on his wing feathers. Aidan put him under the apple tree, so he could die in peace, and kept the cat in for an hour. Hoping the parents might return, I moved him to a hollow in one of the trees. Predictably, as soon as the cat emerged from the house, she found him and brought him inside again. There was no sign of any parent birds, so I put him in a box, gave him water through a dropper, and a little cat food, and expected him to die of shock in very little time. By the afternoon he was still alive, and apparently unharmed, so I called to the vet for advice. I was given a plastic bag of baby bird food and told to feed him every hour. I looked on the internet and thought he was probably a Chaffinch, and that there’d be at least another week of caring for him before he was ready to be introduced back to the wild. I resolved to take him into the vet the next day so they could check him over and advise me properly. It was extraordinary how much zest for life this little creature had. As soon as I approached his box he craned his neck towards me, beak wide, head weaving from side to side, knocking against my clumsy fingers. I tried different methods of getting the meal down, the edge of a spoon, tweezers, my fingers, but in the end a dampened prong of the tweezers worked the best – the food slipping down past his little tongue. After a while, and lots of near misses, we both got the hang of it fairly successfully. It was an utterly absorbing task, and getting up groggy with tiredness just as light streaked the sky, I was soon wide awake, fascinated by his eagerness to feed. In the morning I expected him to have died, but there he was, head turning to greet me, beak wide. As soon as he was ready for food, the sound of him chirruping filled the house. After feeding him before going out to teach the second afternoon, I held him in my hand and searched for signs of damage. He couldn’t walk very well – his body toppling forward, wings flapping. Perhaps that was just because he wasn’t ready to leave the nest. He pecked at my palm, settled down, then lifted his beak, and sang – a clear, exquisitely lovely sound. I was away only a short time. On my return the house was silent. I ran upstairs to feed him, but he’d died. He sat small and stiff, eyes part closed, in the corner of his box. I took him out and rather than bury him, placed him amidst the ivy in one of the trees where the chaffinches feed – where he too should have fed had he grown. Perhaps I’d been doing the wrong thing – over-feeding in my eagerness to build him to strength. He was so lusty and yet so frail. One of my students, who I emailed for advice, said it was probably inevitable. It’s so hard for us to rear small birds. But in those moments of watching and feeding I was lost to anything else, life pared down to a matter of survival or not, and our joint will. His brief presence, our connection, and his wonderful song seem to me now like a perfect gift, imbued with significance that defies reason. I lived with the StarDisc many years before it actually existed. For me it began with a pen drawing Aidan made one Christmas – a stone-paved amphitheatre surrounded by tall pine trees. On the stone the stars of the Northern Hemisphere shone like the reflection of stars in black water. ‘I want to create it by the year 2010,’ Aidan said. At the time it was 2004 and I couldn’t envisage it ever happening. Costing £150,000, it seemed an impossibly ambitious project, never mind finding a location.
Good ideas come easily to many people, but it’s so difficult to bring an idea through to realisation. It takes a particular kind of person to generate the energy and inspiration required, as well as the endless dreary work of fund-raising, writing evaluations, public consultations and project management. Hardly the work most artists relish, but Aidan is dogged and thorough and never gives up. Over a long time we had many conversations about how the StarDisc should look, and how it could be made – what kind of stone to use, how the stars could be created. There were trials with luminous paint, ideas for lights to be channelled under the the stone, and even plans for different venues. Originally the StarDisc was planned for an island in Dorset, before Aidan finally decided on the hill at the top of Stoney Wood, where he walked our dogs Henry, Kim, and Katy over the years it took for the dream to become reality. It’s a wonderful area, high up, with wide views down the Ecclesbourne Valley, where one summer solstice we watched the sunrise over Barrel Edge. We’d already reached 2010, and much had been accomplished, until the final funding bid of three was turned down and the project, short of fifty thousand, seemed to be doomed. But the morning Aidan received the bad news, and in the time it took for me to get from Derby to London by train, he’d slashed the budget and secured enough money from family and friends to see the StarDisc to completion. In September 2011, only one year late, we had the wonderful StarDisc launch. The StarDisc has existed for nearly three years now and is loved by people in Wirksworth and far beyond. Aidan, and his colleague, Phil Bramhall, have inspirational ideas for a StarDisc Array, and have spent hours working on it for little or no income for at least a year and a half. Now that the StarDisc has reached the finals in the National Lottery Awards – vote for it here – there’s much publicity generated, and a sense of gathering momentum. I am so proud of Aidan. I admire the way he balances inspiration with the hard work of organisation, and I’m sure the most exciting times are yet to come. Most of my writing energy these days is devoted to completing a good enough first draft of The Green Table by September, but I was amused by this whimsical cat flap. It’s built into the back gate of Number 8 Cavendish Cottages in Wirksworth, enabling someone’s cat to pop out from its back yard, through a Proscenium Arch into the auditorium of Old Lane Car Park. I haven’t yet encountered the cat, but I’m sure I’d enjoy meeting the owners.
Naturally it made me think of performing cats, other than Lloyd Webber’s, and I recall one afternoon in Chester Gateway Theatre watching ‘Sun King to Swan Queen’ by the touring company, Ballet For All. (What a great company that was – an off-shoot of The Royal Ballet, designed by Peter Brinson to bring ballet to small theatres out in the sticks). Just as the ballerina was performing a solo from Swan Lake, a small black cat wandered on from the wings, and wove its way nonchalantly around her legs. From then on, we were all riveted to the cat. A flicker of amusement crossed the dancer’s face, and she valiantly made it to the end of the dance. We’re led to believe that cats aren’t trainable, so a career in the theatre is out. However, a little research led me to this intriguing story in the New York Times about the Moscow Cat Theatre, and its owner, Yuri Kuklachev. ‘The idea of performing cats came to Mr. Kuklachev in 1971, he said, when he found a stray begging for food by performing on its hind legs and doing somersaults for onlookers. Mr. Kuklachev, the son of a truck driver and a factory worker, had attended clown school. He realized he and the cat might be able to do something together. He named her Strelka, and soon she was performing with him at the Moscow State Circus. "Cats are like actors," Mr. Kuklachev said. "They do what they want. Sometimes a cat doesn't want one trick, so he does another." I can’t imagine cats being relaxed about plane travel, nor a theatre full of cat houses and compliant cats – never mind the cat show itself. And the cats perform for love, not food. The world of theatre is full of the bizarre – much material for fiction here. If you leave the High Peak Trail at Middleton-by-Wirksworth, just beyond the start of the steep incline up to the engine house at Middleton Top, the path winds down through banks of wild garlic, and pink Campion, to a disused coal yard. It descends by wooden steps to a long low dwelling surrounded by tumble down barns and the debris of old machinery, and beyond that to an expanse of wilderness that must once have been the gardens of the building. The boggy land has grown wild, raspberry canes lost amongst Rosebay Willowherb, Horsetail ferns – thickets of Blackthorn and twisted Oak, clad in a blanket of moss. Beyond is a grander house that once belonged to the manager of Tarmac, and beyond that the land falls away to fields – the old spoil heaps, dips and hollows of the lead mines, broken walls, and an ancient colony of ant hills, that give the land a curiously bumpy texture when the sun falls low. Sometimes on my walks I encounter the owner of the low house, working on the laborious job of renovation – which involves draining the land, creating new waterways, laying pipes, pulling down and rebuilding stone barns. He works with meticulous care, but hasn’t touched the house yet – this way, he says, he’ll learn all the skills he needs before starting on the major task. He works with quiet focus, as if he’s totally in flow with the land, and with the materials he works with. As if by his slow thoughtful method he’s assisting the old place in its re-emergence to life, rather than putting his own mark on it. Yesterday I walked down for the first time in a couple of weeks. A patch of land that I’d scarcely noticed before had burst into flower after days of rain and sun – a meadow of purple and white Honesty, Buttercup and Campion. We stopped to talk. He told me he’d done little more than dig out the Hogweed, Bramble, Dock and Nettle, and then rake over the soil. That was enough to release the seeds that had lain dormant for so long. As I sat in the sunshine later in the day, transplanting the seedlings from the greenhouse into larger pots, I overheard two of the little girls who play on the orchard. They were talking about life. The older girl, who’s twelve, and seems to have cultivated a new voice over half term – rather refined, without a trace of Derbyshire accent, was talking at length about her ballet class. ‘Life without ballet is pointless,’ she said, unaware she’d delivered a perfect pun. To which the younger child replied. ‘I think life without giraffes is pointless.’ |
AuthorTricia Durdey dances, writes, and teaches Pilates. Archives
October 2017
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