Do you have any early memories of being attracted to the arts in general and dance in particular?
When I was very small I loved dancing, I think, generally, that kids love dancing. I was probably around 4 or 5 years old, maybe 6 years old, and I can remember dancing at parties. I liked dancing but I was probably aware, we’re talking about the early 1960’s, that it wasn’t quite a masculine thing to do and that would be quite different regarding the situation for kids now.
Where did you grow up?
We were a very ordinary family, my dad was from a quite poor family although my mum was a little better off with teachers and shopkeepers in her family. We had an ordinary life and when I think of it, I think of it as a very normal post-war English family life.
I was born 15 years after the second world war, which does seem like a very long time ago, and in that post war period when things were opening up for everyone, that was especially the case for children. In the small town in Oxfordshire where I lived, there was a sense, a feeling, that when opportunities arose, children should have a go.
We were always encouraged to be interested in arty things, not in a very direct way. I learnt a little bit of music, I played the recorder like many kids did, if you were lucky you might get a chance to play another instrument at school, and I suppose I leaned towards performance based, theatre type activities.
You moved to Northern Ireland as a young child?
I moved to Northern Ireland in 1973 and the school I went to had a lot of theatre and music. It was a school in Ballymoney called Dalriada. It was a relatively mixed school, probably one of the most mixed schools in Northern Ireland at that time, with Catholic and Protestant students in it. It was direct grant state school but it had a significant proportion of Catholic students. That area of the country had a history of the non-conformist Protestant tradition, as well as a mainstream Unionist tradition, and that school still had a feeling about it of being somehow inclusive and open door.
And there was definitely a sense of being open to the arts, there was a very strong performance and theatre orientation. Once or twice a year there would be a school production, sometimes Shakespeare, sometimes a musical, and I was always involved in those. There was an orchestra and I played the bassoon, there was a choir and I was in that. I also played a lot of sport. I played rugby, a bit of cricket and I played squash. There was nothing very specialist about any of it, but there were opportunities to do lots of different activities.
You were encouraged at home and at school?
I was certainly encouraged at home and at school. It wasn’t pushy, more, “if there is an opportunity and you are interested, then do it”. I would be encouraged, but it wasn’t a situation where you were supposed to achieve something, rather you were expected to get the best out of it, to enjoy it.
I think that my interest in sport, music and theatre, was really what lead me to being interested in dancing later on, after I left school and went to university.
How did you get interested in dance?
The way I got into dancing was quite strange. I had always loved dancing when I was going out in my teens in the triangle area, Portrush, Coleraine, Portstewart going to clubs, seeing bands and you would have a few pints of Guinness and that would get you up on a dance floor. But I never thought it was something you could be part of that you could actually be involved with as an art form practice.
I was home for the Easter break, I was studying in England, and I think it was my first year at University. I was in the pub, The Anchor in Portstewart, drinking a little too much and my sister said that we had to leave because she had a dance class in the morning. I think I said something like, “I could do that,” and she said, “Well, you will be coming with me in the morning.” So, she got me up early and took me to her dance club. It was a contemporary dance class, an extra-curricular activity at Coleraine University.
I had been doing a lot of theatre at University, expressionist stuff, and I thought that I would be able to do it, but I had absolutely no idea, I just didn’t know what I was doing. However, there was something intriguing about it, and I went with her the next Saturday as well and I found it really appealing. When I went back to University, this was the early 1980’s, maybe 1981, it turned out there was a boom in dancing. There were lots of dance classes, jazz dancing, contemporary dancing, and I went to everything. At one point I was going to about 13 dance classes a week and I just threw myself into it. And at some point I just decided that this was what I wanted to dedicate my life to.
My studies in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, while I was interested in it, I was never really comfortable in the culture of that particular university at Oxford. I had some wonderful teachers, but there was a strange friction there, I found being there very stressful, and dancing allowed me to meet people who were not part of the university, rather, they came from the town, and it allowed me some breathing space. It was a bit of an escape and I just kept doing more and more dance.
How does this situation progress?
I got a really bad back injury and I was in a very difficult situation. I was in a lot of pain. I could barely get out of bed, I couldn’t dance. If I did try anything I would end up not being able to get out of bed for three weeks. Eventually a friend of mine introduced me to the Alexander Technique, and that changed everything.
It changed the situation with my back, it changed my attitude toward life, it didn’t completely solve my back problems but it did give me a method of coping with it, and it put my commitment to dance in perspective. There was a huge change in my attitude towards dance and how to do it. That was the moment my life altered, that was in 1983.
What was that attitude?
I started to think of dance as a much more somatic, embodied process rather than a presentation of symbolic gestures, or a competitive process. I saw it as more to do with experience and less to do with shapes or objectification. Maybe I started to think about the need for more of a balance between the subjective and the objective around that time.
I started to explore lots of other different ways to achieve these thoughts, I learnt about improvisation, contact improvisation, release technique. I had some wonderful teachers and that process lead me, to start working professionally, and later, with some colleagues we set up a small company called Jointwork Dance Group in Oxford. That company, in a small way became quite successful; we did some wonderful projects.
And that is what brought about my connection to dance, and I still think that the things that I loved, music, sport, poetry, theatre, all of those things are brought together in dance for me rather than being part of a particular idiom or a particular tradition like Jazz Dance or Traditional Irish Dancing I have dabbled in lots of different styles and I am interested in them, but my journey has led to me working in the particular way I have described.
See part 2 of this interview here
