NuProjeks

Image: Breakin Convention

What is NuProjeks?
Rebekah: Who knows? (Laughs) NuProjeks is a collective of individuals and companies. Basically artists within the dance industry, as well as dancers with potential, coming together for various projects. Our creative dance projects and concepts can last either weeks, months or sometimes years.
Elle Church: And these projects are constantly changing and evolving.
Rebekah: It’s refreshing for the different artists and dancers involved to be able to add their take to things. The styles we work with range from contemporary dance to popping, hip hop and street dance. The ages we work with range from eleven to the over-thirties.

How would you go about putting together a project?
Rebekah: The pieces are generally never pre-choreographed. We just come together in a space or in our studio, and let whatever’s in our minds come out and we work from there. It is spontaneous. My role is a sort of director or overseer. I come in and I say, “I want this, like this, and then to go like this and maybe it’ll go like this” (Does abstract hand movements.)

What spurred you to begin NuProjeks?
Rebekah: It all started in 2011. It came off the back of me leaving London after chasing my dream and all that jazz (does jazz hands) and realising that I didn’t want to be that commercial dancer, always dancing behind people. I wanted to let my mind come to the forefront. The first project I did was a theatre production with dancers between the ages of 10 and 25, called Soul Sight, which was all about letting each dancer find themselves through dance. That’s what NuProjeks is about; finding ourselves through different ways. Last night we found ourselves through dancehall.
Elle: I didn’t find myself.
Laura Savage: I found myself! (Laughs)

How can the general public get to see you guys finding yourselves?
Rebekah: That sounds kind of rude! Well, our latest project was The Hip Hop Gorillas which involved Elle, Laura and Pijus going to Boomtown Festival dressed as gorillas and danced in various places, harassing drunken festival goers.
Elle: We’ve got Unite the Scene coming up, which is just a lot of dance collectives based around Nottingham coming together, and we’ve also just done the Breakin’ Convention down in London.
Rebekah: In the meantime, we’ve just put a film out on YouTube from Jux Real, a project we showcased in February at Lakeside Theatre.
Laura: That show was an amalgamation of past and new works. We were also involved with YouDance, a big national dance festival which was hosted in Nottingham this year which focussed heavily on youth dancing and getting young people involved.

How many people make up the NuProjeks collective?
Rebekah: We don’t have a project running currently, we’re mostly focussing on collective training, which is about ten, maybe eleven of us. And now that we have adapted this building space into our studio, we have a sort of ongoing company. Somewhere for people to come together weekly. Before, I’d just ring up people, and hire a space for a particular project. Now, we all train together with different offshoots of the collective. We have Tribe, an all-female company, and OffSpring, our youth company.

How do you find dancers to be a part of NuProjeks?
Rebekah: For the younger members, I’ve been doing open workshops and classes, and if I had projects I’d find who was interested and then get them involved. I would get in touch with people that I’d worked with before or seen in the past.
Hal Mayer: I’d trained as a street-dancer, then did a bit of contemporary at college and one of my teachers was involved with NuProjeks. When my old group split up, I was in a bit of a limbo. Then I had the opportunity to join NuProjeks, and felt as though it was now or never and just got involved.
Elle: I first met Rebekah at the Soul Sight audition in 2011, but was still at uni so couldn’t make a real commitment and was a little bit gutted. Then once I’d finished uni, I got a call from Rebekah asking if I was still interested and if I wanted to join Tribe. I’ve been here ever since.
Laura: I did the Nottingham’s Got Talent audition, for the Olympic torch relay performances that happened in Market Square and Rebekah was on the audition panel. Then she approached me about Tribe, and we did DanceAid together.
Pijus Kreivenas: I got involved with NuProjeks little by little. I was doing lots of things all over Nottingham, teaching dance mostly, and I’d heard a lot about NuProjeks before, but it was just a name and I didn’t know what they were doing. There was an event where me and Laura did a duet, and she invited me to come down to NuProjeks.
Aisha Webber: My friend used to be in NuProjeks, so I went to watch them perform in Broadmarsh. Then I saw that they were advertising open sessions for younger dancers which I went to and ended up in the OffSpring project.

You’ve recently hosted the second After Hours Sessions, a dance battle event with local musicians and artists. How do these events benefit NuProjeks?
Rebekah: Music and art are massive in Nottingham, so creating an event which incorporates these as well as dance can only help the dance scene. Collaborating with local artists and musicians will bring the light onto young, talented dancers, because the local dance scene hasn’t quite got the same light over it yet. It’s strange because going out of Nottingham we’re seen and we’re heard, but in Nottingham no one really knows who we are yet. So when we get to collaborate with musicians, like OneBomb, who had just done Glastonbury, and graphic artists like Matt Vardy who’s part of the Mimm Collective. It’s great to have these under the same roof as local dancers battling. It felt like a sharing of artists.

A lot of people would have been exposed to dance, especially hip hop and street, through the recent slew of talent competitions on TV. Do you feel this has taken away any credibility from dance as an art form?
Rebekah: It has, but having been a part of that commercial side and now being involved with this side, I know they’re two different worlds that aren’t going to merge. The underground we are part of and the art form that we believe in needs to be parallel with the TV world that is so overly exposed. Also, TV is only a 2D experience, so people don’t get the same sense of the emotions or feelings as with a live show. When you’re in that kind of atmosphere it’s totally different. That’s why I believe in this world I’m in at the moment, more than when I was in the commercial world, when you’re hidden behind a camera.

Going forward, does NuProjeks now need more exposure?
Rebekah: It’s never been about getting us out in the lights, but more about finding the people to collaborate with, so the After Hours Sessions were and are a great start to those collaborations.
Laura: If people have any ideas for collaborations or if someone is thinking it’d be great to work with a dance group for this or whatever, then we’re open to stuff like that.

So collaboration is at the forefront of building NuProjeks?
Rebekah: Yeah, definitely. Because NuProjeks is a collective of individuals, then if someone was after a group of guys I can be like, “guys go and work with these drummers.” Or if a classically trained violinist wanted some contemporary dancers, we have dancers who can do that. It isn’t just about pushing NuProjeks, it’s about pushing the individual dancers within it.
Laura: NuProjeks also thrives from the different individuals within it, we learn different skills from each other. And if we go off to do projects, we come back and share what we’ve learnt which helps the collective and everyone involved develop.
Rebekah: Although we’re currently getting to perform in shows like the Breakin’ Convention, which is a massive opportunity for a Notts-based dance collective, we’ve still got to get down there and rehearse every day, so it does cost. We’ve either got full-time jobs or in full-time education, so if we could get funded or sponsored then it would be amazing.

Where do you see NuProjeks in the next five years?
Rebekah: It’ll be whatever it is now. I don’t see us in a big, shiny studio. I don’t see us winning Got to Dance or Britain’s Got Talent. But I see the individuals who we’re working with being who they are and being able to be who they want to be professionally. I want to see Elle as a massive, contemporary dance artist. I want to see Aaliyah Byrne being a Hollywood dance diva and Rayon Valentine becoming an established dance choreographer. It’s a collective. If we get more people coming in, I want to do the same for them. Rather than being a big company or brand, NuProjeks is more of a ladder for young, local dancers.

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