photo © Judita Kuniskyte We’re back at Pavilion Dance South West with the choreographer Ieva Kuniskis, fellow performer Nick Minns and composer Dougie Evans working on They Live Next Door. What is it going to be like, after a year and a half? Would it mean starting all over again after such long interruption of the creative process? It did take us two days to retrace our steps, but it was immediately apparent we hadn’t lost any of the ingredients crucial to Ieva’s work. The intimacy and trust Nick and I had developed when meeting and getting to know each other for the first round of rehearsals in March 2015 hadn’t been lost, in fact it felt like there hadn’t been a break at all. In my experience these kinds of connections occur very rarely in life, professionally or privately. I had truly missed our research into who these two men are.
Once you invest so much of your personality to the degree we did, it becomes a necessity to continue down that path. All the prodding into our vulnerable selves, all the scrutinising of our actions had paid off. I think we all realised this week that the relationship between the two men had been set last year already. Caught in the bubble of stickiness* it feels at times like we are creating something along the lines of Satre’s Huis clos. But far from being each other’s hell Nick and I find ourselves increasingly dependent on each other. Who are we as individuals? What are we to each other? Now and here in this studio space or anywhere and at any given time… Can we get out? Would we want to? Delving into so much detail means that every step, every sequence is filled with purpose and meaning.
There’s a third man in this duet, who has actually been there all the time with us. Who is this person (composer and musician Dougie Evans) without whose interactions/interferences we now can’t go on? Seamlessly fitting into our interactions in the studio there is no way of telling whether he is writing music for our dance or are we merely the product of his imagination. Anticipating his fingertips to be bloodied any moment now on his steel-stringed guitar, as he goes through another repetition of our Man Waltz or Balkan Tango**, I am beginning to suspect that Godot does actually arrive in our version of Becket’s play!
So, we are facing yet another question or rather a whole set of them before we meet up again at The Point Eastleigh next week; but as long as we are facing these kinds of problems I am not worried. Ieva’s work is taking us into the immensely intriguing world of finding the essence of what we do, searching for genuine solutions to her ideas. I am curious where this process is going to take us all. There is something scary and at the same time strangely satisfying when you are stripped of all disguises and masks. Once liberated of these tools we seem to depend on so heavily in our everyday lives we arrive at something sincere, beautifully and also painfully pure.
Moving on now in Ieva’s bubble to The Point, Eastleigh and Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, by the end of which Dougie will surely be using the piano strings as a harp to take us to celestial spaces…
Mark
* Ieva’s term for the contextual and emotional space between Nick and I
** musical terms invented by Ieva and Dougie
There’s a third man in this duet, who has actually been there all the time with us. Who is this person (composer and musician Dougie Evans) without whose interactions/interferences we now can’t go on? Seamlessly fitting into our interactions in the studio there is no way of telling whether he is writing music for our dance or are we merely the product of his imagination. Anticipating his fingertips to be bloodied any moment now on his steel-stringed guitar, as he goes through another repetition of our Man Waltz or Balkan Tango**, I am beginning to suspect that Godot does actually arrive in our version of Becket’s play!
So, we are facing yet another question or rather a whole set of them before we meet up again at The Point Eastleigh next week; but as long as we are facing these kinds of problems I am not worried. Ieva’s work is taking us into the immensely intriguing world of finding the essence of what we do, searching for genuine solutions to her ideas. I am curious where this process is going to take us all. There is something scary and at the same time strangely satisfying when you are stripped of all disguises and masks. Once liberated of these tools we seem to depend on so heavily in our everyday lives we arrive at something sincere, beautifully and also painfully pure.
Moving on now in Ieva’s bubble to The Point, Eastleigh and Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, by the end of which Dougie will surely be using the piano strings as a harp to take us to celestial spaces…
Mark
* Ieva’s term for the contextual and emotional space between Nick and I
** musical terms invented by Ieva and Dougie
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