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January 17, 2006
Hello From Brussels!
{Originally authored in September 2005}
Well, where should I start? I suppose I'd better tell you a little about where I come from and what it is exactly I'm doing here in Brussels....
I come from Nottingham - land of Robin Hood - and it was there that I first popped on a pair of small satin shoes and started attending a local ballet school at the tender age of four. At sixteen it was off to the big bad city of London to train more intensively (think slave labour and you're getting close) at the wonderful Central School of Ballet! On graduation in 2003, after 3 long, hard (but boy, were they fun!) years at Central I breathed the biggest sigh of relief when Norman Douglas invited me to work with him on his new creation for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The overwhelming relief of not being launched headfirst into the bizarre world of the unemployed dancer (battling against OAP's in lycra for a decent place at the barre down at Pineapple) compensated for the fact that, in order to take on the work, I had to cancel my planned holiday in Spain!
Things didn't end there with Norman, and I later got to work with his company theensemblegroup during its 2004 project in Edinburgh, where I had the chance to work with some truly insipring dancers and choreographers including Cathy Marston and Christopher Hampson (both of whom have been regular diarists for ballet.co for years!)
This was a turning point for me. For the first time I was working with choreographers who asked the dancers to improvise rather than just remember and reproduce steps and this was a totally new experience. I loved the idea of being involved in the creative process and when it came to making duet material many of the dancers were also highly experienced in contact improvisation (which I'd never even heard of at this point). I became completely fascinated by these dancers (some of you may know Jenny Tattersall and Dylan Elmore) who could move between giving and taking each others' weight and throwing each other around endlessly in a totally spontaneous but completely captivating manner. It took a while for me to get my head around the idea that without any advanced verbal planning these amazing duets could evolve totally organically, simply from the mutual "listening" of the dancers.......... WOW, I was hooked!!
So to keep my rambling to a minimum, that was when I decided to ditch the pointe shoes and break free of my bun-head mould, and I haven't looked back since!!
Anyway, it was back in April this year that I first heard about a new project called D.A.N.C.E. (Dance Apprenticeship Network aCross Europe), a 2-year professional development programme under the artistic influences and directorship of Angelin Preljocaj, William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor and Frederic Flamand. I'd seen work by all of them previously and loved them. I remember in particular the first time I ever saw Random Dance perform. I was completely transfixed by the bizarre and extraordinary ways the dancers moved themselves and thought to myself "That's what I want to be doing"!! So when I heard there was going to be an audition in London for this new apprenticeship scheme I thought, "Hell, that would be amazing!"
This is me - Jessica Wright (©)
Now, any of you out there who've ever been to an open audition will know what meat markets they can be, so, expecting a bit of the old push and shove, I was pleasantly surprised that the audition wasn't too much like a scene from Fame. But what I hadn't counted on was the fact that they'd decided to have fourteen other auditions in countries across Europe......... BLIMEY!! They saw over 900 people while I waited anxiously during May until I received a call inviting me to a final selection 3-day audition along with about 60 others in Aix-en-Provence.
.........And what an audition it was!! Aside from the fact that I managed to lose my passport at the airport and arrived hopelessly late (doh!) the experience was an amazing one, and gave us a taster of the work of each of the 4 choreographers (and left us drooling for more!!)
And so, three and a half months on, having had 5 fantastic warm-up weeks in Marseille which involved learning the choreographic methods of Wayne McGregor and Angelin Preljocaj, as well as speaking lots of bad French, bonding with my new group of European friends, and discovering the lack of any night-life whatsoever in Marseille, here I am in Brussels, still not quite able to believe my luck at having got my hands on the dancer's equivalent of a golden ticket for Willie Wonka's chocolate factory!
And what a relief it is to finally be here!! I'm settled into my lovely apartment overlooking a park with fountains (very continental!) and won't have to pack up and move again for another 8 months. We've just finished the first week of the programme here - working with Flamand material - another eye-opening experience! And we've still got Forsythe to come, as well as Aikido and Digital Cinema workshops all in the next few weeks- I'll keep you posted! Meantime you can check out some photos of the final selection audition and of some of our workshops in Marseille on the D.A.N.C.E. website.
But before I sign off I should also mention (if I want to keep on the right side of the people with the money) that we all have a grant from The Leonardo Da Vinci Fund to help us to make ends meet. I was also lucky enough to receive additional financial support through the Arts Council of England's Grants for the Arts. This came as a massive relief, having spent most of my summer squirting perfume in Harrods at people with too much money and not enough taste in a desperate and not hugely successful attempt to save some cash! Thank you Arts Council!!
Take care
Jessica
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