It’s hard to imagine a more perfect start to the Nottdance 2015 festival than this new double bill by Rosemary Butcher. Celebrated as one of Europe’s finest and most consistently innovative choreographers, the festival’s themes of our place, our history and our bodies are embedded in Butcher’s works. She is also known for presenting her works in gallery spaces, as well as for using a mixture of mediums including film, photography and live performance.
Butcher’s career spans four decades and remains heavily influenced by early years spent in New York where she studied at the world-renowned Martha Graham School. While there, she also encountered the collaborative work of The Judson Group, which was made up of artists whose experimental methods helped define modern dance in the latter half of the 20th century.
She now has more than fifty works to her name, all of which have been part of her ongoing journey of discovery. You get the sense that her work will never be ‘done’.
Secrets of the Open Sea is a black and white film installation and was exhibited at the Contemporary in large cinema screen format. Although new, the programme notes that the piece also ‘deals with the development of language used in now-archived work’.
During In Conversation, a panel discussion facilitated by Vida Midgelow (Professor in Dance and Choreographic Practices at Middlesex University), with Rosemary Butcher and two of her previous students, Florence Peake and Joe Moran (now artists in their own right), Butcher says that when she started out video didn’t really exist as a means of recording work “and it just seemed so expensive”.
Secrets seems to be about revisiting and recapturing some of those, until now, lost creative processes in order to commit them to archive, as well as using them to inform new work. A lone dancer, Lucy Suggate, is captured from all angles, which conveys an impression of her as isolated and vulnerable. It also allows the viewer a 360-degree perspective and is strangely captivating. The soundtrack is certainly reminiscent of the sea – should you wish to close your eyes, as some chose to while they lay on the gallery floor, you would be transported there.
Test Pieces, a live performance with four dancers, also invited floor dwelling and seemed to me the perfect embodiment of modern art as dance: the collision of visual art with performance art, presented in an art gallery. “It’s one of the most beautiful performance spaces I’ve ever come across,” said Butcher of Nottingham Contemporary, explaining the difficulty of finding a space with exactly the right structure to present work.
This is high praise indeed given the spaces her photographic exhibition, Memory in the Present Tense, at the Bohunk Institute reveals her to have presented work. It’s on for the duration of Nottdance and worth a look to learn more.
During In Conversation, Florence Peake in particular contributed some enlightening thoughts including the fact that she had recently worked with a sculptor who confided in her “an envy of the theatre” due to the fact that people come in, sit down and watch the whole piece as a captive audience in a theatre, compared to drifting in and out of a gallery when taking in visual art.
Another revealing moment was the admission from Peake that during her time in Butcher’s classes she would sometimes “hear an instruction from Butcher, not understand it, but then do it anyway”. Her point (despite what seemed like relieved laughter from some audience members possibly thinking ‘it’s not just me!’), was to highlight Butcher’s technique of inviting her dancers and students to call upon their intuition as part of the choreographic process. This, she said, was something that spurred her on as an artist, as well as Butcher crediting the technique, and her teaching generally, as important in informing elements of her own work.
It must be said that Butcher’s works are an acquired taste but there’s no doubting that they serve to provoke the kind of thought and discussion that makes Nottdance a festival to be recognised, celebrated and cherished as a important part of the dance calendar.
Rosemary Butcher’s Secrets of the Open Sea and Test Pieces were on Thursday 5 March 2015 at Nottingham Contemporary.
In Conversation took place at the Bohunk Institute on Saturday 7 March 2015
Memory in the Present Tense runs until Sunday 15 March 2015 at Bohunk Institute
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