The Monthly interviews the Artistic Director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, Steve Batts – Part 3 – Establishing Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company in Northern Ireland

How do you go about moving and establishing Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company in Derry?

Just as we were about to move to Derry, Ursula was offered a job working with a friend of hers filming on a cruise ship. I ended up moving to Derry by myself in January 1997.

I think there were two reasons for moving. I left school in 1979. At that time people kind of automatically just went away if they got the exam grades to go on to study. The longer I was away I felt that I never really resolved that feeling of not making a conscious decision to leave.

I felt that I had a strong visceral connection to the landscape. I can remember very distinctly when we arrived here in 1973, we were coming to join my Dad who was already working here, the road from Antrim to Ballymoney. I can remember, vividly, being connected to the sights, the smells, the rhythms of the country. There are lots of sights that are etched in my memory.

Also, the Peace Process was also starting to take shape, and that was a very interesting time. We decided to stay for at least 5 years and then when Ursula arrived in June or July 1997, we sat down at one point and discussed what we were planning to do, and we thought we would stay for 10 years.

We were housed at the Playhouse for 7 years and then we moved to the Waterside Theatre when the Playhouse was being renovated.

What themes or ideas does Echo Echo look into through its work?

I think there have always been certain elements which have stayed with us, although perhaps we have tweaked things, developed things, a little, since our early days I think that certain elements which were part of what we were doing early on, have always been there.

The first thing I think is important to say is, that we look at dance in a particular way. So, rather than dancing being about the symbolic representation of things or symbolic gestures pointing towards ideas, or themes which are externally framed and dance is used to demonstrate those themes or you extrapolate from that framing, instead, we go the other way. We have realised that through dancing, through the most mysterious and visceral activities, ideas and themes about life, about situations we all find ourselves in, natural themes, emerge through dance. It isn’t instrumental.

How is that approach realised in practice?

You have to develop an antenna, or a weather vane, to be able to catch things which are not yet explicit. Even more than music or linguistic art forms, dance is a receiver more than a transmitter. You have to have an intuitive compositional understanding, and I would say a rigorous understanding, of the form, in order to allow things to emerge through the process of dancing.

That is not to take away from the broader issues in society and culture which inform our thoughts and demand our attention, but I do think it is a mistake to think of dance instrumentally in terms of demonstrating political positions or cultural themes. I think that sabotages what is incredibly powerful about dance, where forces and spirits, which are around the place, enter and emerge into form through human movement.

When you start with that approach, and you are then putting those things into a performance space or into a class or into a creative project with children, it isn’t necessarily a straightforward thing. It requires and demands a lot of skill, experience, attention, and analysis. The point though is to liberate this intuitive, creative process rather than to instrumentalise dance.

Echo Echo frames what we do as Poetic Movement and that is for a very particular reason, because the influences on our work are perhaps more strongly to do with music and poetry than they are with the traditions of dance.

Why is that?

Basically, the two strong streams in contemporary dance practice are hyper-objectivisation, which effectively turns the body into a machine. You spend your time trying to recreate particular moves associated with the particular style of dance you are involved with. It seems very mechanical, you are sort of outside your body trying to replicate specific movements. We don’t think that is very creative and it is embodied in a hierarchical social structure which many dance companies operate under.

The natural reaction to that is hyper-subjectivisation. These are the somatic practices, very therapeutic orientations, where you become interested in composing your own private experience rather than composing dances.

And you use neither of these approaches?

What we are doing is to make dancing about real movement in real time where there is poetic intent in the work. Dancing, in our view and in our work, has grammar, syntax and structure that we can get better at inhabiting. It is the activating of the somatic experiences, and the deep inter personal experiences, and the exploratory experiences, into a compositional framework.

That gives us a basis for work which is extremely broad, where some of our work will be pure movement, dancing to music or even dancing to silence, or we make pieces which are very theatrical, a clown show or telling stories with children. Or it could be a Christmas show with a narrative form. But all are informed by the conception of Poetic Movement.

So, not looking at themes or issues, not pointing out specific things, but allowing things to emerge through the act of dancing and, as I said earlier, that means it can emerge in all kinds of compositional frameworks. The approach is relevant and effective in a very wide range of different contexts – working with all sorts of people – professional dancers, older people, people with disabilities of many kinds, with kids, with musicians, painters, actors. It is a way to activate the poetic sensibility in movement, which absolutely everyone has, though it is often buried, suppressed.