TEXT BY ANDY HOWITT
Dance can change lives, I have seen it with my own eyes.
Excellence does not have to walk hand in hand with elitism.
Don’t be afraid to make the first mark.
Working in different spaces to make the work.
Finding different funding partners to make the work.
Working with different communities to create my ideas.
Being open, creative and inspired to new ways of working.
Making the work about location and history.
True cross art form collaborations.
Changing people ideas of what dance is.
Searching for ideas that make me think outside the box.
Returning to making and performing solo dance work.
Getting lost within the creative process.
Still feel scared walking into a group for the first time.
Like a dance detective or a builder’.
You can never be right or wrong.
Having a choreographic framework and craft to work within.
Storytelling is very difficult within the dance form.
As an artist who started in the 80’s, I have been through lots of different processes and scenarios, working with different ages, bodies and minds. I have worked with many talented artists to help create a collective vision, with festivals, companies and funders, including. National Dance Company of Wales (Diversions), TAG Theatre Company (Glasgow), and YDance (Scotland), CityMoves (Aberdeen), Ausdance Victoria and within my own company HowittMoves, and out of my own studio, Commercial St Dance.
I have worked in hospitals, prisons , schools/colleges and in remote communities, with asylum seekers and people with different emotional needs. These experiences have fueled my energy and passion for dance as a tool for change, health and well-being and a commitment to artistic excellence.
I don’t think I chose to go down this dance path, but nobody was really working with these groups at the time and I felt it was worth exploring, to go to where dance had never been before.
At the 2014, Arts and Health Conference in Australia, I presented on my keynote topic ABCD (All Boys Can Dance). The aim was to communicate that boys learn differently and discuss how boys can become open to being a male dancer and what needs to change in today’s society to allow it to happen. I believe understanding that boys learn at a different tempo and manner, you have to mix it up with different styles, physical games, competition and strict creative tasks. up the tempo/ up your game. The process is finding a new level for them to aim higher , to be more creative with your tasks and their skill base, more athletic approach.
Allow them space to fail and take risks, without judgement or told off for being too wild. This may lead to new ideas. Control is needed and barriers and rules built from day 1 and don’t go back on them. They are looking for male role models in their life to shape their life.
In the lunch break I got chatting to two heads of arts in health programs at major public hospitals in Melbourne
We came up with a plan for two weeks' creative residence in Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and me to become the first choreographer in residence at Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH).
Working with VicHealth as part of White Night 2015, they commissioned me to curate 12 very different community groups to perform as part Of I Could Have Danced All Night throughout the event from 7pm -7am.
Funding allowed me to employ 6 dancers to collaborate on the projects. The result was a dance work inspired by the staff and space in the RCH, looking at the true meaning of love. The Hand Dance inspired by Hand Hygiene and a film called your life in your hands filmed on top of the heliport at the RMH.
Throughout this period a lump appeared on my neck. What was really interesting was at this period in time I was full of energy, lots of creative ideas. No pain and I was working full out on many different projects that were my Focus. But now it had to change to being about my body, my future and my Life.
I went to get it checked.
Then in 2018, I became the person I was teaching, I was diagnosed with stage 4.5 Cancer.
On the 13th of February 2018 was the start of my journey, my story with Cancer.
The shock, fear and my untold future played on my mind walking out after being told you have cancer.
Your mind goes blank.
You lose a part of you.
The old I has gone.
Tears don't flow.
It is raw.
A deep sense that you might die, I had to wait six hours before I found out if the cancer had spread below my neck. If it had, I would not be here now and a different story told.
Over 123Days throughout the chemotherapy and radiation. Every day, I choreographed a gesture or motif to reflect my emotional state, the level of pain/trauma I was going through. In a sense, I went back to the only way I could process that journey: my body. Telling my story. They are very strange images depending on what part of the cancer cycle I was on, from steroids to methadone. As I could not eat solid food I was fed through a tube for over a month, the weight just fell off me, this was the thinnest and weakest I had ever been. As the pain got harder to cope with the more the images became clearer and the anger and frustration and the disintegration of my body and mind.
At the end of the treatment, I notated the images and started to process the physical journey over 123 days and how it matched my emotional journey with the 3 major bouts of chemotherapy and 37 hits of radiation with my face mask on. Looking at the images they tell a very striking story in the way they play with different qualities.
Beauty and pain.
Angular and soft.
Abstract and very personnel.
The shape of the body and the space between the bodies.
The intense moment of truth with each image hit me in a deep connection, some images were very personal like telling my boys, and I had cancer, to a moment of pain when I coughed up my feeding tube or comical when eating some food it came out of my nose. I lost over 20 kilos in weight lost control of my body and my left side will always be stiffer than my right. The doctors say there is the old you and the new different one after cancer. The personnel, solitude that takes me back to that point in time, that moment of fear or hope on the same spot at the same time in the same space.
I discussed the images with Emma from RMH. We decided we should go into a short rehearsal process to get the ideas out and to start the process and make the mark. We collaborated with Emma O’Brien (vocalist) Blair Harris (cellist) Robert Draffin (Dramaturge) – I chose 30 of the images to start with to explore from a creative viewpoint the process was very creative bouncing off all the other artists in the church space in the hospital grounds. I walked the same movement pattern over and over getting it back into my body the same shape over and over getting deeper into the moment, hitting it from a different viewpoint and focus , finding how the shape and image might grow from low to high, how it could blossom out of my body
A gasp into the shape
A scream into the shape
A stark controlled sustained movement
Using improvisation, we created passages linking the motif together With each image, gesture or motifs, I decided to add some simple but effective choreographic tools using Staccato, rebound and sustained movement to allow the 123Days to flow into one choreographic phrase. The hospital building, the white walls, burnt face, the staff, the procedures, the length of time and the effects of the treatment, all had a profound effect on me. The moments all feel very real within the movement process, they flow in a linear sense but with a disjointed puzzle effect
During the presentation we had a showing of the work, performing during the presentation, I performed a simple gesture that took me straight back to that moment in the Peter Mac Cancer Hospital crying and shaking with deep rooted fear that I might die. It was the first time in my life that a movement connected so deeply with me I felt it shake me from the ground up.
What has remained for me from the process is the body being stripped down, an image in time reflecting the truth that allows me and the viewer a way into the deep raw and very personnel movement ideas how the body can fight and try to grow and heal itself.
123Days photos are like a linear journey
How you link the images is the key for me, as each shape of that moment is very strong and personal l
Does it need to happen linearly?
Does it happen on a strict time measure?
Does it happen on the spot?
Does it make you feel what I felt?
Sharp.
Precise.
Repeat.
Fold back on itself crumble then rise again
Overlapping tremble into the empty void
As I write this we are in lock-down, the world has changed, to the staff at Peter Mac Cancer Hospital Thank you.
TEXT WAS PRODUCED BY ANDY HOWITT AS PART OF A NEW INITIATIVE OF DELVING INTO DANCE PUBLISHING WRITTEN CONTENT THAT EXPLORES DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF DANCE FROM A RANGE OF PERSPECTIVES.
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