The Monthly interviews the Artistic Director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, Steve Batts – Part 2 – Working towards establishing Echo Echo Dance Theatre

How does Echo Echo emerge out of your commitment to dance?

For about 6 or 7 years I was part of a dance company with a couple of colleagues based in Oxford called Jointwork Dance Group.  We produced work, there was a little bit of support from arts funding organisations, which we performed at festivals.

We also took our work to Middle Schools, at that time there were Middle Schools which looked after children from the ages of 9 to 13, and it was there we developed some really interesting participatory work. We also started developing work using inclusive practice for people with physical and learning disabilities.

Beyond that work, I started teaching because there were very few people around who were prepared to teach the things I was interested in.

Are you developing your craft independently?

No, not really. We had a strong connection with the emerging Physical Theatre scene at that time. We collaborated with a theatre, Pegasus Theatre. They had started off in Oxford as a youth theatre and then moved to become a more general theatre.

I was taught and directed by people from Complicite, people like, Jos Houben Simon McBurney, Marcello Magni and I learned a lot and I was heavily influenced by them.

After a while I was invited to Amsterdam to be part of a project, and this was the first time I had ever been invited overseas to do anything. The Jointwork Dance Group had come to an end naturally and so I thought I would just head over to Amsterdam and see what happened. I left my house, packed everything on my bicycle, took the ferry over and then cycled to Amsterdam. I was supposed to be in Amsterdam for 3 months and I ended up based there for 6 years.

What happened in Amsterdam?

I was part of starting up a company called Sidetrack. with the woman, Natanja Den Boeft, who had invited me to Amsterdam in the first place. We worked together to produce a few shows.

While I was living there, I was able to go to the School for New Dance Development as a visiting student. They had a programme where you were not really on the books, and you didn’t have to do the assessment. You would be put with a group of students who the administrators thought you would fit in well with.

Now up until that point I had been developing auto-didactically. I would throw myself into something, work through whatever it was, either by myself, or with colleagues, in the studio, and then sort of move on to the next thing. At this dance school, I was doing a class in the morning, another in the afternoon and then after that I would be working on people’s pieces as well as doing some teaching. After 2 months I had enough to last me a number of lifetimes. That was in 1989 when I was 28 years old.

I was asked to teach Contact Improvisation at the school, and I was also teaching the Alexander Technique, privately. (In Oxford, I had trained to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique over three years 1984-87 and it has been a massive influence on all of the strands of my dance practice) so I was able to make a living. Then shortly after that I met Ursula Laeubli and we hit it off. She was finishing her course and she asked me to be part of her graduation piece. When that was over, we decided we wanted to keep working together and so in 1991 we created Echo Echo Dance Theatre Group.

What was the basis of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Group?

We both had very strong experience of projects where people were always looking over their shoulder to what was coming next. People were always distracted. It was as if people couldn’t commit to any form of long term partnership working, that they couldn’t form long term creative relationships. Our starting point was that we wanted to create a situation, a structure, where everything was based on long-term partnership working. We were also quite politically driven and we had an attitude towards ethics and principles. And I think we had similar thoughts regarding dance generally. We weren’t driven by money or status, but rather making good dance productions.

What happens then?

I had developed a relationship with an organisation in Potsdam, former East Germany. It was based in the squatter scene, autonome, they had started an independent arts project, a theatre and and dance project, in a squatted factory in Potsdam. I went there with a company which had been invited to perform. I was the lighting designer and technical person. I got talking to the people who ran things and they invited me back as a dancer/teacher/choreographer.

I developed a wonderful relationship there, the organisation grew to the point where eventually they were recognised, they were given a building which they could renovate. That project is still going today, and is called Fabrik

Ursula and I developed lots of relationships from there, relationship sin the Ukraine, Switzerland, Estonia, Russia, Germany, Holland and I kept a connection with Ireland. We worked relentlessly for years, we were based in Amsterdam and then later in Switzerland, but we were mostly always on tour, always on the road.

Eventually, after 6 years, we wanted to find a base.  We were on a performance and teaching a tour of Ireland with Fabrik, and we ended up in Derry. We performed at the Playhouse and it was suggested that we could base ourselves there. At that time, this was before The Playhouse was renovated, it was damp, broken windows and quite run down. This was 1996 and we organised ourselves and we moved there in 1997.