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Josephine Jewkes,
Swansong Diary | |||||||
Josephine Jewkes, dancer with Rambert and formerly an ENB Principal, writes each month on the "dancing life". Here is a link to the previous column in the series.31 July - Back to the studios after 3.1/2 weeks' holiday. Betty Anderton gives an excellently steady and simple class with the emphasis on placement to ease us back into shape. The schedule reveals that I am due to start working on the role of the Victim in Swansong. This ballet has become a modern classic acclaimed world-wide and I was lucky enough to be at ENB when it was created, and watched many performances by the (for me) unsurpassed original cast: Kevin Richmond and Matz Skoog as the smilingly sadistic guards and Koen Onzia as their Victim. Koen's passion and vulnerability radiated through the stretch of his long limbs, the arch of his back and the tilt of his tousled head as he incarnated the prisoner's yearning for freedom. Chris Bruce's starting point for the piece was a book titled "A Man" by Oriana Fallaci (now out of print) in which the sufferings of prisoners world-wide documented by Amnesty International were embodied in the story of a fictional Greek freedom-fighter. Reading this book, watching films like "In the Name of the Father" and "Midnight Express", as well as reading books such as hostage Brian Keenan's powerful "An Evil Cradling", all these bring home to me anew the truth of this very special piece. To dance it is both an honour and a challenge. (I had in fact prepared it ten years ago at ENB and was due to be the first female Victim, but injury prevented me from performing it and so I do feel that I am completing some unfinished business but with the added advantages of a deeper understanding of contemporary technique and a maturer experience of life). Monday 4 August - Rehearsals start in earnest and now I find out how much (if any) of my work of ten years ago remains in my body memory. Not much, it would seem. Images, fragments only. I very quickly realise a paradox: the intricate., unexpected and apparently technically difficult choreography of Jiri Kylian (Petite Mort, No More Play) which I had never danced before proved very straightforward to learn (I had not expected it to be) and though tricky is not difficult for a well-trained ballet dancer to perform. On the other hand, the choreography of Chris Bruce, with its signature combination of precisely-detailed and flowing movements remains (after ten years) difficult for me. His own long limbs and soft muscle tone led Christopher to devise a very personal movement vocabulary requiring great co-ordination and absolute precision. Combining his knowledge of classical ballet with the Graham and Cunningham techniques, the key to Bruce's style is the way in which the back initiates each movement in a most unballetic way but which recreates a classical impression due to its long lines. Classical dancers beware! - copy the impression of the shapes and you are left with a puzzlingly awkward empty shell: each movement has to be broken down to analyse how the torso is working and then all falls into place. Thursday 7 August - I was born with two left feet. Friday 8 August - As we string together phrases of movement I realise just how painful and puffy it is going to be. My Guards (Steven Brett and Sheron Wray) manipulate me with well-practised brutality and I feel dazed and battered after only a couple of minutes. The first seven minutes or so of the piece are generally acknowledged (by members of the Victims' Survival Club) to be the toughest: percussive music at breakneck speed and a flailing, protesting, cartwheeling Victim battle it out, the slightest slip dooming you to flounder behind the (recorded) music like the audience clapping to the Hornpipe on Last Night of th Proms. Today the music won hands down. Much of the problem stems from my classically-trained legs crumbling beneath me from the strain of dancing with the knees bent low to the ground. My thighs are unused to sustaining this state for long stretches of time, and they turn to jelly under me some yards before the finishing line, so to speak. Saturday 9 August - Daft as it may sound, I get nervous for my Swansong rehearsals. I have ideas and images in my brain which have not yet been translated by my body. Blanks and brain-locks result and I am easy prey to sudden draining collapses of self-confidence, triggering off more blanks and brain-locks. I have the great good fortune to be taught the role by Bruce himself who is still able to demonstrate the essence of his movement more beautifully than anyone else. He is endlessly patient and encouraging as I galumph my way through his steps. His faith in me in touching. Looking back I see a familiar pattern emerging. When I undertake a new part I seem to go through several stages:
Thursday 14 August - After yesterday's frustrating rehearsal where I apologised to my amused Guards for "wasting your time", I hit on the idea of videoing my rehearsals in order to review my corrections in the evening at my leisure. This evening's viewing was most illuminating. It also brought home to me just how much information is packed into an hour and a half's rehearsal. No wonder my brain aches. And not just my brain! My thighs are becoming accustomed to the workload now, but my shins are black with bruises where I mistimed some manipulations with my Victim's chair, my back is rubbed raw from practising shoulder turns, I burst a blood vessel in my finger during a lift and my torso hurts where scar tissue from an old injury of two years ago is being broken down daily by the masseur.
Friday 15 August - Barely two weeks after my first rehearsal, today I did my first run-through of Swansong in the studio. Judging from the video, my improvement from yesterday is gratifying. Of course, there are plenty of technical points to work on but for me they come all-of-a-piece with artistic interpretation. I had conceived my Victim as being someone who resists her captivity and torture in every way: someone with an heroic soul and moral force. Chris Bruce has quite other ideas. For him, the Victim is deeply vulnerable, a "Pierrot figure" as he says, Petrouchka, the eternal Fool who excites the audience's pity and moral outrage by his gentle, innocent suffering. When he demonstrates this he is indeed heartbreaking, because this was Bruce's great strength as a performer. Perhaps as a woman I took my vulnerability for granted and wanted to emphasise the other side for a more complete picture. My own career has also been against the odds and so I suppose I bring this attitude with me! My challenge now is to make Chris's conception of the piece truly my own and he is pretty adamant about this, concerned that otherwise the ballet will appear "sentimental and overblown". He prefers to infer a message rather than shout it from the rooftops. In fact there is also a personal subtext to Swansong which is Chris Bruce's farewell to his dancing days, where he is released from the physical and emotional torments which we all undergo in order to achieve our highest standards. Back to "To struggle, to seek, to find and not to yield" in fact (Homer quoted by Brian Keenan). Sunday 17 August - Dead-heading the roses this evening, an image comes to me of a 'key' moment (for me) which is where the guards leave the stage for the first time and the prisoner sees the blazing diagonal of light arrowing into her cell for the first time: sunshine, freedom, death, Heaven, whatever it is the prisoner walks towards it and reaches out her hands to it. Chris wanted a natural, unballetic walk for this moment: Everyman in his loneliness. I had therefore adopted a slightly broken shuffle of the feet, but now the image I see is of the twisted and tortured shoulders hunching slightly to diminish the pain but the 'soul' of the Victim reaches out towards the light through the breastbone. (This is also a conflict between the open, youthful ballet carriage and the careworn shoulders of old age and retirement). I think this is it, my moment of falling in love....! (To be continued) | ||||||||
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