How did you get involved in the CLASH project?
Mags Byrne, from DU Dance, and the artistic lead on the CLASH project, got in touch with me partly because we had worked together before, and because the project was a fusion of different artistic and dance styles, bringing contemporary dance culture, street art culture and Hip Hop together. She thought I would be a good collaborator to marry those different styles together in an authentic way.
What were the key ideas underlying the project?
When Mags and first sat down to talk about the project, we wanted to hold a mirror up to the world to all the social issues and the causes which are affecting everyone throughout society. And sometimes people can feel very alone, or they can feel overwhelmed through social media, with people shouting about this or that thing on your feed.
There is so much information that it can be hard to know where to start. Du Dance were able to meet with their Youth Steering Group and that meeting was very productive and they identified perhaps a dozen things they thought were important. So we knew from the beginning that the project was about more than just one thing but a number of issues which were important to the participants.
Those could be pressure son mental health, stress, the pressure of schoolwork, the question of image, the need to project an image of success, of looking a particular way, and from there the questions of racial division, cultural barriers, and some of the older participants were concerned about ageing and about people not listening to older people. So there were many underlying themes to this project.
How did you translate those ideas into Dance?
The exciting thing about this project was, there was myself and Mags as the creative leads on the project, but there was also other choreographers who worked with their groups to create a dance piece to a piece of music that the group had selected. They would send us a video of what they had been working on and the challenge for us was to then to look at the issues being addressed and work out how we would marry everything together.
For me as a choreographer, I work by finding a piece of music that I like, that I think captures a mood, or a theme that we want to address. We were looking at the theme of how technology distracts young people and we created movement to a particular song that suggested that young people were being hypnotised by devices, by technology. I do try to keep things very simple, keep directions to the young people to a few words so that they are very clear what they are aiming to create.
When I meet the group I am gig to working with I might play them some music, see what they like, what they react to, and then we go about engaging in some trial and error to see what everyone’s capabilities are, what enthuses and excites them, and there is a dialogue, a conversation created between me and the group and work together to create a piece.
The project seemed incredibly ambitious with many moving parts – a huge cast, the space and the music?
I thrive on the big projects, I love it. It’s not a 9 to 5 approach. We were working till 1am some nights with the rapper, because we had to make sure he could play the character we needed him tom play. We had a week to get the set in, which included the skate ramps in, and all the cast had to come in and rehearse. WE had to get everyone used to the environment, we organised our run-throughs and it was wonderful to see so many creative people express themselves, all working towards the same goal. It was a fantastic project.
What will your next dance project be?
I’m not sure what I am working on next. I have just relocated back to Northern Ireland after having been living after having been living, and working, in Newcastle in England nearly 20 years.
I am looking at developing more dance activities in Tyrone where I am located now, in schools and with communities, and in the broader sense I am looking to work on Hip Hop Dance Theatre around Northern Ireland and in the South as well. We will see how that goes.
