Inside talk: a conversation with The Work Room

Although producers and directors at the organisations hosting artist residencies with CROWD regularly attend and participate in the various dialogues happening online, their voices are much less present in the blog documentation. Hence this series of conversations getting a feel for what is emerging from the relationships with the residency artists, and how the organisations themselves are shifting in relation to community and socially engaged dance practices.

For this conversation, I (Maddy Costa) was joined by Anita Clark, director at the Work Room, and Luke Pell, who facilitated the CROWD residency as part of their role this year as the Work Room’s artist support programme facilitator.

Anita: We have been involved as a partner in CROWD right from the beginning, in the initial conversations about the shape of the programme, but didn’t host a residency in the first year. My understanding from the documentation, and from a gathering of everyone involved in CROWD in Nottingham in autumn 2021, was that the approach we took of putting artists into trios, with six weeks together more or less back to back, involved quite a commitment from their side and was perhaps too intense for a first meeting between artists; and that the residencies had really benefited when there was active facilitation. These became key considerations in the second year, but maybe in changing the structure we’ve lost a bit of that sense of a cohort, a collective.

The pairing of artists is a risky approach, with a fair amount of luck in it, but in our experience has been fruitful. We know that Alex McCabe and Stefanie Schwimmbeck (CROWD residents at the Work Room in 2022) have met up since and are still in touch. And Anni Puuperä and Natalia Barua left their residency here with a strong sense that they would keep in touch and ideas of how they would like to do that.

Luke: The residency we designed for Anni and Natalia sought to follow on from their experiences in Varjakka and recognised the very different nature of the context: they’ve gone from what was – for them – in many ways a more ‘remote retreat’, with a very different rhythm to their day-to-day, in a very particular village community where they could be totally immersed, to an urban setting where Natalia has her home and her family, and so is surrounded by her daily life. 

How do the questions they have been investigating about rest and care, arising from their first residency, change because of that shift in context? And how, with that, might we also bring in some further thinking around care in a wider world context, recognising one’s privileges? At the Work Room facilitation is responsive and works with the moveable feast of things: that felt really important in this case, to encourage breath and space to just be with each other and let things unfurl. The messages we’ve received back suggest that there was a lot of resonance and learning for them about facilitation and care, coming out of this light-touch approach, where we try to bring as best we can what the artist might need and cultivate the conditions for that, with that always being led by the artists, and our job being to respond.

Anita: I believe really strongly in what Liz Lerman calls ‘hiking the horizontal’: you don’t have a hierarchy where community dance and participation is of a lower level to the work of professional dancers on stage. That’s something that really drives me. The kind of experiences that artists who work in community settings require – things like time to research, to renew and practice – wouldn’t be questioned so much if they were choreographing most of the time in another context. So I’ve always approached CROWD from that place: being able to offer that kind of experience, which is space away from delivery, time to reflect, time to interrogate approaches, to build a sense of peer exchange, and to be open to different contexts.

Luke: If we think about a UK or European community dance context, and some of the 1970s/1980s models where the dance animateur went out from companies ‘to gift or bestow’ dance to others based on their training, perspectives and experience, I think we are in a really interesting moment at this time where artists working in and with community are doing some important work in recognising and redressing power dynamics. Who should be taking responsibility for what? Who needs to do what work, on themselves or with themselves, before/after/when/if working with others? Attention to what Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha refers to as care webs feels really pertinent: both Claire Lefèvre and Rajni Shah also spoke to this in the ‘digital discourse’ sessions. Some people might consider practitioners taking this time to focus on reflecting, replenishing and orienting themselves, as indulgent, but actually it’s really critical work in terms of being more astute and alert to the intricacies of what we need to navigate in the now, that perhaps hadn’t alway been in the past. It feels like a change in the field.