Rambert Dance Company tackles difficult subjects in its performances and this is reflected in the approach of its workshops as LESLEY FINLAY found out…
‘Creating a piece about sleep is a massive challenge.’ This is the verdict of dancer Jonathan Goddard, the star of the Rambert Dance Company’s new and ambitious work Awakenings. The production is based on the book by psychologist Oliver Sacks about his work with patients suffering the mysterious sleeping sickness in the 1920s.
Rambert, like many performance companies now, works closely with schools and colleges in the areas they visit to offer workshops and other educational events to give students an additional insight into the work.
Ink Pellet spoke to Joce Giles, the company’s head of learning and participation to find out more about what Rambert offers. He told us: ‘We want to give young people an all-round experience of our work. There are lots of dance providers but what we do is to show that dance as an art form is collaborative by its very nature, so music is a very important part of what Rambert delivers. We have live music at every performance and a lot of new music commissions, so to give a real understanding of what we do, we bring in music and visual arts too.
‘For our Awakenings tour we have made some documentary films in which dancers and the creative team talk about the work, and these are given to the teachers in advance of the workshops.
‘Students will learn some of the choreography of the piece and in Awakenings they will use a lot of the text to develop the movement using word play. In this story, there are lots of moments when people come into contact with each other, have some kind of recognition, then it’s gone [as they fall back to sleep]. So we do a lot of duet work – students will create movement independently then come together to engage with other dancers in the workshop. And we try to thread this through the workshop.’
The theme of the ballet may seem ambitious and unusual but this is often a characteristic in contemporary dance which is a very free and evolving art form. The Rambert’s artistic director, Mark Baldwin, is fascinated by the relationship between art and science, which makes for a deliciously innovative mix that can be passed on to schools.
Joce explains: ‘Mark is interested in how the arts can work with science. He’s done two quite large productions that have taken this as a starting point. His first piece as artistic director in 2005 was Constant Speed, which was part of Einstein year, then in 2009, he created The Comedy of Change as part of the Darwin 2000 celebrations. We developed a lot of education activities to go with The Comedy of Change. We linked up with the Teacher Scientist Network who spent a couple of days with our education team and Professor Nicky Clayton from Cambridge to work on the workshop programme. The science teachers observed one of our normal dance workshops then we had a ‘knowledge transfer’ session exploring what they are looking to achieve for GCSE science. We discovered parallels in the processes of creating choreography and developing an enquiring mind. As a result, we developed movement experiments, to work on problem solving, to see how subtle changes on how you might approach a creative task or movement can have quite a big effect. It was a concept rather than facts. It was encouraging people to experiment.’ And this is, of course, precisely what you do in science.
One of the key outcomes of the workshops is not necessarily the acquisition of new dance moves but a confidence in working on ideas and developing them. Joce says: ‘We’re passionate about working with people with no previous experience of live theatre in general and giving them that understanding. Contemporary dance is not the easiest thing to engage with if you’re coming in cold. We’re quite passionate about trying to demystify what it’s about. It is a developing art form but it is also attractive to young people because it is so flexible, there are no set rules. It’s lovely to see young people in such a short space of time learn something, especially when they’re working with quite serious pieces like Awakenings or The Comedy of Change. They’ll do a workshop and this will help them to engage with the work when they see it, as they understand there is often no clear explanation or narrative. It’s about articulating their thoughts and ideas from the piece.’
For further details about the Awakenings tour or any of the workshops, including teacher INSET sessions, visit www.rambert.org.uk
IMAGES: Awakenings 7 re-sized (c) Eric Richmond/Street Genius by Robert Gladwin