© Richard Thompson Marie (dancer) in reviews Sally Marie (company) reviews Sweetshop Revolution reviews www.sweetshoprevolution.com

It’s taken 16 years for Sally Marie to become an overnight success. On graduating from the Central School of Ballet in 1991, she burnt 30 pairs of pointe shoes as a symbolic funeral pyre for any hopes of her career in classical dance: a decision she still regards as “no loss to the ballet world”. Today, she has been recognised as a uniquely-gifted performer with a nomination for the Spotlight Award for Best Female Artist (Modern) in the 2007 National Dance Awards and voted best female performer in the same year by ‘Dance Europe’.

Her story is a typical tale of the little girl with a passion to dance, growing up in a place (in her case, Taunton) where dance training equals ballet or ballroom with nothing in between. She was always in love with music and wanted to “be able to dance like playing in a string quartet”. With very little propertraining Sally “fluked” a place at the Central School of Ballet by missing the formal audition process to take her turn alone, the first time she had ever danced with a real pianist. Aware that she was “way behind technically”, she was surprised to overhear the invigilator say that she wanted her in the school. A few years later, the same teacher (Carol Gable) explained that Sally had the most extraordinary determination that she’d ever seen. This represents lesson one in Sally Marie’s philosophy on life, which is best explained in her own words: “my love for dance is so great that even if things get really bad there’s just never a way I’m going to do anything else – when you feel that strongly about something the world stops to give you a hand here and there”.

Having got this lucky break, the ideal of becoming a ballet dancer faded over the next three years in the extreme circumstances of the Central School’s regime: “we’re talking flying eagle en pointe here; I got through, but it wasn’t good”, she recalls. But the determination seen at interview got her to the finishing line. The stats are interesting in their own right – of 25 girls selected for her first year, only 8 made it to the end of the course, and 16 years later she is one of only three still dancing, none in ballet. By the end of her time at Central Sally Marie was taking five Graham classes a week and despite an unsuccessful audition for Rambert in her final year she was very aware that any future for her in dance must lay in the contemporary world.

In her own words, “emotionally uncontrolled and terribly injured - I had to inch down the stairs on my bum for most of the third year” she “fell into the delightful pit of failure”. Here is lesson two from the delightful world according to Sally Marie, to find joy where most others would find only despair; it also exemplifies how her language is peppered with remarkable one-liners that are an interviewer’s delight.
 

On graduation, she looked around the dance world and couldn’t see anyone like her (“I’ve always been a big girl, built more like an American Footballer”) and so concluded that she couldn’t see a place for her in the dance world, “but there was no way that I could give up or stop or go to university or any of the things that everybody else did”. So, after the ceremonial burning of the pointe shoes, her love of ballet was channelled into working as a Royal Opera House usherette for two years. At that time she saw it as articulating her failure but now looks upon it as a necessary sabbatical: she hardly danced but read copiously (Tolstoy and Proust) and saw as much free ballet as possible: she remembers that “it was wonderful working at the Opera House then, it wasn’t all organised like it is now – you could get away with a lot!”. It was a time to indulge in watching “the progression of extraordinary dancers become even more amazing”: a comment that typifies her quest to get the very best from dancers performing her own work today.

In 1993, Sally moved to New York for 18 months and here the passion for being directly involved in dance was rekindled. She took classes at the Ailey and elsewhere, thriving on the support of teachers who really cared for her, rebuilding her enthusiasm for dance through their energy and critical inter-action. She remains passionate about this key early period of a dance career: “We lose an awful lot of young dancers because they are lonely and lost and have no money after they leave vocational training – they miss the artistic connection and collaboration. I went through a lot of this myself”.

It was this belief in collaboration that attracted Sally to dance workshops and – on her return to the UK – she put every penny into attending as many as possible. She says that “it never occurred to me that anyone would give me a job as a dancer – it never even crossed my mind to go to an audition”, but instead of the intense competition of the audition process she steadily grew through the collaborative interaction of workshops. “Every one was a revelation – I’d walk home joyfully with feet on air”.
 

It was at one such workshop that she got her first performance break when Luca Silvestrini offered her a spot in a Protein Dance piece. Sally is typically modest about the talents that won her the role - “I had short red spiky hair at the time and I guess that I just looked right”. From then on, her unique style has won a steady stream of work although most offers have come from directors seeing her perform, rather than through auditions. On one occasion she took up a contract in Wales but injured herself falling over a piece of scenery on the first morning and was “sacked over a bowl of chips”, during the lunch break. True to her principles, Sally was nonplussed by this apparent misfortune and her ‘che sara,sara’ attitude was rewarded a couple of hours later when Sean Tuan John asked her to become a big, pink, fluffy bunny rabbit in his work ‘Lick My Heart’ about two sexually dysfunctional mental patients. This juxtaposition of rejection and acceptance on the same day is another example of joy triumphing over despair and the opportunity to work with Sean, whom Sally describes as “a most intelligent, thoughtful, diabolical, risk-taking, amazing choreographer”, has clearly shaped much of her subsequent development.

Another mutual attraction formed with Jasmin Vardimon: having been in love with her work Sally found that Jasmin “loves big women” when she won through an audition of 50 dancers to join her company. Another audition she won against tough competition was to play the lead role in Luca Silvestrini’s ‘B for Body’, the audience’s choice as a Place Prize finalist in 2006. Although she was “so scared to be wearing just my pants in front of 300 people every night” and ‘B for Body’ didn’t win the top Prize, Sally’s impressive mix of pathos and humour was certainly one of the most memorable things about the whole Festival. Body
 

From way back to her time at Central School, Sally had choreographic ambition but wanted to wait until she had something to say. Sally has many heroes (listing several during the interview) and gets very excited when talking about Ashton’s ‘The Dream’ and MacMillan’s repertory, which she sees as the finest cross-over work between classical and contemporary dance.

As a performer, Sally soon recognised that there is no magic formula for turning movement into dance but she saw that each successful choreographer has their own specific flavour. So far, her own choreography has consisted of just two sessions at ‘Resolution!’, one of which (her solo ‘The Extra’, a fascinating piece about love and loss) was invited to be shown at the ROH 2 season in 2006; a few workshop pieces including two minutes’ at ‘Touch Wood’; and one group piece, Dulce et Decorum’, shown at the Place in 2007.
 

What makes her special? As a choreographer, it’s undoubtedly her passion for theatre - right at the beginning of our interview, she says: “I love being on stage more than anything else in the world, it is the most pure and intense way to speak to people”; and she has a huge sympathetic affinity with her audience. Everyone watching her work receives a present; for one set of performances in Hoxton she got up at 6.30 every morning for a week to bake cakes to hand out; in ‘The Extra’ it was a lapel badge; and for ‘Dulce et Decorum’ ice creams were handed out during the performance followed by a post-show raffle! When the first show of ‘Dulce’ had to be cancelled through injury, Sally personally met every audience member to explain the situation instead of leaving it to the house staff.

She certainly has the quality of quick improvisation. When I reviewed ‘The Extra’ at the Linbury I wrote about the evocative ending which saw her disillusioned character walk slowly off the stage to find a seat in the audience – which appealed to me because it seemed to be suggesting the thin line between an extra and the audience in theatrical terms. It turns out that the actual ending involved a noose dropping from above but when no noose appeared, Sally had to contrive another ending on the spot!

There is also that indefinable mark of individuality that identifies quality: her work hallmarks her own performance strengths as a poignant comedienne; she’s like a female Chaplin in dance. As a choreographer, Sally has adopted a peculiarly English quality in her work, picking out the moments between moments, the pauses between sentences in movement terms. She sees this as being part of her “English heritage” (although she is proudly half Welsh) and speaks of a “growing up” that any English person will recognise – the mysterious silences in teatime conversations before grandma says “…….well, actually”. It’s a part of the same Englishness that invented all the games, or at least (in terms of fair play) all the rules for games. And in this context, it’s very appropriate that her first major work focuses on the role of women in England during the war, drawing its title from the great English war poem by Wilfred Owen.

The concept of this piece began with the idea that men go to war to protect their women and it’s clear that this thinking was influenced by her own attitudes to the Iraq conflict. She sees her work as being about the mass contradictions between repressions and freedoms – she speaks of the image of a pretty woman in a floral dress suddenly punching out to represent this dichotomy. The piece also looks at the humour and contradictions of human nature. It examines issues of political apathy, people’s ambivalence to suffering and their joy in destruction; as Sally says, “examining our feelings as we read of violence in the morning papers contradicting our enjoyment of watching it as entertainment in the evening.”

In making the work, there were lots of problems learning how to control her belief that “intuition is the truth” and a week out from the premiere she found herself with a piece that was 150 minutes long because she hadn’t been able to control her choreographic impulses. This led to some desperate slaying of material in the days leading up to the premiere and she is still not satisfied with the outcome, although (from a critic’s perspective) it was a remarkably powerful work. She took her three dancers on a trip to Auschwitz to prepare for their parts and the strength of this emotional journey roars out in the final sequences.
 

Sally is reworking ‘Dulce’ for a tour (by her new company called Sweetshop Revolution) next year – although only three out of a proposed ten venues are yet secured (her home town of Taunton, Colchester and Manchester) but she’s now working with Sally Trist, a leading dance agent and so it seems only a matter of time before the tour is complete. A shortened version of ‘Dulce’ will be part of a triple bill on Britishness at Spring Loaded and Sally is also working up the solo entitled ‘A Violet Smile’ she developed with Tamzen Moulding for ‘Touch Wood’ and will hopefully enter the 2008 Place Prize in her own right, although touchingly this most obvious of routes only recently occurred to her.

The reason it has taken Sally all these years to make it overnight is partly due to her belief in not saying something until she knows what to say (perhaps another legacy of all those English teatimes) coupled with the sensible need to learn enough from others, but mostly I would judge from her own innate shyness. She openly says that she is “very naturally insecure about myself” and her conversation is littered with disarming self-deprecation –so much so that she pulls herself up in the middle of the interview and says that she must stop being negative, but in the next breath she describes herself as a “blob extraordinaire”! She openly admits to being “not too comfortable with myself in relation to the world” but this isolationism has led to a deep appreciation that the most “moving thing can be the simplest hug”, an ideal shared with another of her heroes, the film director, Mike Leigh.

Sally Marie has a dream to capture these “little tiny things in a movement language of my own” although, not surprisingly, she adamantly professes to “not succeeding yet at all” in this endeavour. But I’ve no doubt that the steely determination spotted by her teacher in that lonely audition almost two decades ago is burning as bright as ever underneath all of this natural humility. A person with this much passion for dance and performance, who can substitute joy for despair and treat both triumph and adversity as equals, thoroughly deserves the world to give her a helping hand towards success. In our scheduled half-an-hour chat which stretched easily into two hours, the ideas and images that spilled from her, suggest enough mouth-watering choreographic output to fill up many years to come.