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Cathy Marston
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While other choreographers perhaps waxed and waned Cathy always seemed to deliver a goodie for Dance Bites. Having danced and choreographed in Europe for much of the 1990's she returned home last summer (2000) and, charming woman that she is, agreed to write a diary for us with hardly any arm twisting whatsoever!
Link to previous column.
Link to later column Wow...what a month! Probably the busiest and most stressful I’ve had for a while! It started off wonderfully at a spontaneous New Year’s Eve party at Christina Arrestis’s house… obviously fuelled by a fair bit of champagne, I was surrounded by most of my close friends whose support and ability to make me laugh got me through the three crazy weeks that ensued… On the 2nd Jan, I was back in the studio at the Opera House for the last week of rehearsals for ‘Sophie’ – one half of the evening I presented at the Linbury Studio Theatre this month. Before Christmas, we’d had problems because Antonia, who was dancing Sophie, was injured. Luckily, Jenny Tattersall had been available that week to come in and ‘be created on’. The plan was that we would teach Antonia the choreography in the first few days of January. Well, that was fine in theory, but two days after we got back, Karl, who was playing the three men in Sophie’s life, sprained his ankle… I should have known really - very predictable, but you just hope everything will be OK. Anyway, we continued to work on the technical aspects of the piece which were complicated enough to be getting on with. For anyone who wasn’t able to make the performances, I should explain that the ballet involved four video projectors, three screens that moved up and down, a set, a commissioned score and a lot of people trying to make all of these elements co-ordinate! It was useful to have extra time to make all of this work and, thankfully, Karl made it back for the performances; but I have to admit that the time we had to work on the dance was a lot tighter than I feel comfortable with! The other half of the evening was a piece with Royal Ballet dancers called ‘Stateless’. Luckily, none of these dancers went off injured, but we did have the problem of there being so many Nutcracker performances that we just couldn’t rehearse! The ballet is made up of twenty- two variations, which are all solos and duets for six dancers. Although these had all been choreographed and were on video – which is like our second memory – I still had to link everything together and there was just no chance to do this! In the end, we had a four-hour rehearsal on stage and while Simon was lighting ‘over us’ I gave each of the dancers a book that I’d made them: each page was a plan of Simon’s lighting state for all twenty-two variations and I had drawn little arrows and letters all over them indicating who was doing what, where and when. It felt like a very bizarre way to choreograph and involved a lot of trust because everyone – the dancers, designers, stage manager and pianist - had to believe that what I had directed them to do was going to work. It was really a ballet that existed only in my head until the last two stage calls when we managed run-throughs! In the end, however, despite all the hitches, the performaces went well. It was the first time I’d presented a whole evening of work and, despite the anxiety, it felt wonderful to see all the people who had come along to support me; and even better when, after the performances, I heard so many of them talking about the pieces – what they liked or disliked and why, and also about the subject matter of ‘Sophie’s Choice’. I was not really able to watch either piece objectively as I was still too close to them, but the morning afterwards I sat over breakfast and thought to myself that I was proud to have taken some risks, to have brought so many exciting artists together, to have made an audience actively watch dance and want to express their thoughts afterwards, and yes – there were many moments of choreography that I am proud of – and that’s always the hardest thing to say! I was grateful for the chance to play with film and dance – to be able to try different ways of combining the two media. Some things worked wonderfully and others didn’t meld as well, but that is the point of my position as Associate Artist – to be given the opportunity to continue working on ‘choreography’ in terms of movement-making and dance, but also to be able to experiment with other artists in a way that would be too risky for a larger commission. I think I really did that – and it was very exciting!
In the last two weeks since the Linbury I’ve been working at English National Ballet, re-staging ‘Facing Viv’ which they will perform at the Sadlers Wells in April and then on tour, as well as creating a short piece for a performance that ENB will do at Westminster Abbey in May. It will be a concert by the organist Dame Gillian Weir with choreography by Tom Sapsford, Sara Matthews and me. As it’s not for some months, I’ll talk about it at a later date, but will just insist now that you come to the Sadlers to see ‘Facing Viv’ – it should be a good evening as it’s all new work by Wayne MacGregor, Patrick Lewis, Hampy and me. As at Royal, ENB has beautiful movers who perform the classics very well indeed, but I strongly recommend you see them dance in a different context too – they’re really great!
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