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Cathy Marston
'ROH2 and Scotland...' | |||||||
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She has been writing for Ballet.co since 2000 and still finds time to dance as well, currently with ARC.
Link to previous column.
Link to later column Again, I think I'm late in writing this... time is just flying by at the moment...I'm writing this at the ROH – it's Saturday morning and I actually made it to class today which is good as next week I put on my dancing shoes again with Arc... I have to say I'm rather worried as I've not been doing a lot of training for a while, but I'm sure it'll come back in the next week or two somehow! I can't remember the last time I wrote a diary entry but I suspect I was in the middle of working on my last Linbury evening – Broken Fiction, Unstrung Tension and Traces. Well, it all happened and seemed to go very well! Traces was the hit of the evening if you judge these things by the volume of the woops! It was lovely for me to see the piece again and I was amazingly touched by how the dancers had taken ownership of it and took care of it themselves while I dealt with last minute cast replacements - as usual! In a similar way to Facing Viv with ENB, the piece had come together during the performances last time, so during the revival rehearsals there was a lot of 'Oh I love this bit' and 'Oh this is when we see each other and then my favourite stroke and pull...' Of course, some of the original cast have left the company so newcomers had to be brought in – I even had a second cast on for a show – and it was wonderful to see the 'oldies' like Christina Arestis and Ricard Cervera taking the younger ones under their wings and coaching them in details we certainly hadn't had time to delve into last time. Although I enjoyed the chance to revisit Traces and Unstrung Tension, one of the most exciting moments for me was in the General rehearsal for the new work – Broken Fiction – when the musicians turned up. For those who didn't see the show, Broken Fiction is a duet of about twelve minutes, loosely based on Hanif Kurishi stories. It's about a couple who are caught up in a loop of Wednesday night encounters and basically studies the shift in dynamics between them as these trysts occur again and again. The idea came about because I had wanted to work with a group of musicians lead by the cellist, Matthew Barley, on a piece of music they had commissioned by composer, Dave Meric. The music just inspired me to move initially, but listening more closely to it I couldn't get out of my mind the picture of a man in a bedsit, a tap dripping, thoughts constantly repeating in his head. Anyway, I got into this Wednesday night idea but of course the problem was, in a twelve-minute duet, how to convey the fact that the encounter you are witnessing has happened with slight variations, many times before? Well, the dancers and I decided to be experimental with it and worked on a loop that shifted a little in each repetition that they would perform as the audience came into the auditorium. Initially, we imagined it would happen as the musicians tuned up and audience chatted/settled; then, when the house light went down, you would feel that now you were paying attention to a particular night – but you would be aware of the history. However, when the musicians arrived, they had misunderstood the schedule and thought they were being asked to improvise during these 'preludes.' They were quite excited about this and as I'd heard them improving in concert before I don't know why the idea hadn't already occurred to me... Anyway, they did, and in that first run-through I can't tell you how excited I was! We kept it, and in the performances it was very interesting to see how it worked – each night was very different... I know I'm not the first to have activity going on as the audience enter – I saw the Frankfurt Ballet do the same thing a couple of weeks ago, but nevertheless, it seemed to throw people in quite differing ways. The first night was awkward because we had technical difficulties, so the House opened late and therefore the loops ran on about ten minutes after 'start time'. People didn't seem to like this – perhaps it was the repetition or the lights still up on them; however, on the other nights it ran until about three minutes past and then the feedback I got was that people wanted more... I actually thought it worked in terms of what I set out to do – create a 'history' for the actual 'piece' and I think we could probably get the timing of it just right if we did it again...
Anyway, right after the shows I went off to Scotland to a place called Cove Park which is an 'artists' retreat.' As I've written so much on the Linbury, I'm going to limit myself on this story, but will just explain that it's an area of beautiful land near Loch Long with fantastically unusual accommodation (pods from the BBC Castaway series), where about seven artists at a time can go to think/talk/ponder... whatever you like really. I went with a team I had chosen of a composer, designer and dramaturge in order to thrash out a particular idea I have for a 'biggish' narrative piece. It's just in our heads at the moment – well, actually, we have it on paper with an example CD now, and will be looking to find a company to commission it. If I start talking about it now, I'll be here for the weekend... so will just finish by saying that we think it's potentially great and I am feeling very excited and inspired... so these retreat things really do work!! ;-)
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