This transcript is from an interview that was first published on 9th of March 2020. This transcript has been edited slightly to help with clarity, the audio of this episode and more information can be found here.
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We started by talking about his move from Australia to the UK.
Lloyd Newson: I was dancing with a company called One Extra Dance Theater that was run by Kai Tai Chan and he had wanted to perform in London, so he brought the company over to London. They gave us some money towards flights, and probably about fifteen of us turned up. It wasn't the most organized, wasn't even a tour. It was performing at the Place Theatre, so I had to hang around for quite a bit. And then eventually we did the program we'd been doing in Australia there. And I decided because I had gone to Melbourne University and studied psychology and social work there, and I’d done classes in contemporary dance and then I'd gone across to New Zealand and worked for a year with New Zealand... New Zealand Ballet were doing a joint tour with Impulse and I was part of Impulse Dance Theater. And it made me very aware working alongside a ballet company that I needed to do extra training because I did not have any formal training as such. I worked with Margaret Lasica as part of the Modern Dance Ensemble. So when I got to London, I thought ‘well actually, why don't I just do a solid year to fill in the gaps?’ because, you know, during the four years I was at university I’d done a lot of dance classes. And I then applied for a scholarship. Well, I auditioned for the London School of contemporary dance and they gave me a scholarship for a year. And that was great. And midway, Merce Cunningham and Cage were doing a two-week residency and I got selected for that. And a woman called Emlyn Claid who was running a company called Extemporary Dance Theatre which was really a repertory company that did lots of emerging choreographers. They were the first company to do a Michael Clark piece, outside his own company that is. They did work with Karole Armitage, David Gordon, Ian Spink. So it was a great opportunity for me to just be exposed to all sorts of different approaches, choreographic approaches, and I did that for four years in the UK. And I’ve of course formed DV8 Physical Theatre. And 30 years later, I put it on hold because 30 is not enough time to devote oneself to one company.
Andrew: In terms of putting DV8 on hold I guess there was a particular point in that 30th anniversary? What was it that felt that you had done enough or that it was tiring or what? What was it that made you put it on hold? (03:13)
Lloyd Newson: I think as you approach sixty it focuses the mind and I started asking myself ‘is this how I want to carry on with the rest of my life?’ And DV8 had a very small office team. Fundamentally, there were three people in the office plus myself. And I'm currently remounting Enter Achilles on Rambert Dance Company. Rambert has, in the office, about 25 people, yet DV8 got larger audiences than Rambert did per project. So you can imagine the pressure on three people in the office plus myself to realise audiences that are greater than Rambert considering their backup. Basically they're near on 10 times the staff we did. And the toll of that is pretty huge. And when you find yourself in projects, getting in the office at eight in the morning and leaving at nine at night, and you're lucky if you've had 15 minutes or half an hour break for the whole day, there is a certain point when you go ‘maybe there's a bit more to life than work’. So, come the 30th anniversary… the last couple of years, I think, with DV8 were very tough in the sense that I had, you know... when I said ‘look, we really need more staff to my team’ somebody said ‘well, you've always worked like this’. Well, there's a thing called accumulation and aging. I hate to break it to you, but I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to carry on with this level of energy. And what was great is that I and my partner went to Australia at the beginning of 2016. And we initially thought we'll just go there for nine months. We'll see how it goes. And if I feel refreshed and I want to go back to running DV8 or we want to go back to the UK. But we had a great time in Australia, and I really enjoyed not working. I spent probably six of those months in 2016… one point I had a bit of an identity crisis (‘who am I if I'm not working?’) and ran around teaching instead at some institutions, but I very quickly let that go because it didn't take much to work out who I was and how much I liked reconnecting with my family. My parents are still alive and having more time with my partner and friends and joining a book group and exercising regularly or things that I had neglected for decades. So that's how things were and then Helen Shute from Rambert approached me if I'd be interested in remounting the work called Strange Fish and we tried at one point to recast that work. And generally I don't have a rep; we make a work and then we don't redo it again. And we couldn't find people that were as good as the original. I thought there's no point in doing it unless it's better than it was originally. So we didn't do it. So consequently, when Helen approached me, I went ‘well, I'm not going to touch Strange Fish. We've tried that one.’ But I think Enter Achilles is an interesting work and she liked Enter Achilles and, in fact, one of her dancers in her company had started dancing because he'd seen Enter Achilles, and, strangely enough, Helen she’d seen Strange Fish which made her get involved in dance and start dance training. So there was a bit of a history there. And subsequently, I'm now in the middle of production weeks with Enter Achilles for Rambert. (06:48)
Andrew: What is it like returning to a work that you created in 1995? That was the first season, is that right?
Lloyd Newson: Yes, it was first made in 1995. Before I actually agreed to do it I did say ‘hang on, I want to do some research to see if the themes are still relevant’. So I did a lot of Google searches and the great thing is nowadays you can go Newcastle on a Saturday night or Manchester on a Saturday night and I started seeing exactly the scenes that were very similar scenes to what were in Enter Achilles. So there are certain things that don't go away. You know, blokes going out on Saturday night with a sex doll tucked under their arm, inflatable sex doll, blokes being drunk and having standoffs with one another. What else? Suicide. Men’s suicide. Men are three times more likely to commit suicide. They're much more likely to be… 85% of homeless people are men. 70% of homicide victims and men. So it seemed to me that there still was a very big issue around masculinity which is at the core of what Enter Achilles is. And while there have been some things clearly that have moved men along, including the feminist movement, more recently Me Too, to make men more conscious of their behaviour, I still feel that there is a lot that men can do in terms of examining themselves. And, interestingly enough, just in the States there’s been studies on women’s studies and gender studies only recently masculinity studies starting to… courses in that and I think that, as a result, that's a reflection that the issue is pertinent and it's necessary to address and I'm sure not only men but a lot of women will will certainly feel the need for that, probably more women journey for that than men. I think a lot of men go on until they reach a crisis and… in a funny way a bit like me with DV8, a certain point where I thought ‘I can be a superhero. I can handle all this work level and I can run a company on a shoestring.’ And there’s a certain point when you think ‘what is the cost of that?’ (09:06)
Andrew: It must be quite difficult, I guess, if you're making work on an original cast, an original set of people, to then find dancers or performers to remount a work like that. You indicated that with Strange Fish. I was just wondering how do you do that? How do you start finding people? Or do you have to move the work along as well?
Lloyd Newson: You do have to adapt the work to a degree and a lot of my work, probably, is different to traditional dance choreographers in the sense that I'm looking for people who are very interested in manipulating permutations and combinations of phrases and steps so that it's not necessarily about subject matter but it's more about creativity in phrase-making. Of course, I'm absolutely interested in how you generate interesting movement phrases, but my work is much closer to acting. So there's always going to be an intention. And you've got to find people, one that understand the connection between the meaning and movement, and a lot of dancers don't, particularly if they're very highly trained in one particular style, they're often a victim of moving in one particular way, and they've lost their understanding of body language. So they might be able to get their leg very high with a beautiful pointed foot or do multiple pirouettes. But they don't necessarily understand what most human beings actually understand. When somebody walks towards them and their head’s cocked a bit at an odd angle or there's tension in their body, most people will read that. People will see something from the and often do something in their body or move across the street because they recognise something. It's incredible how many dancers, when I ask them to take a quality or to express a sensation or emotion, they're actually unable to do that. And the second thing is because I'm interested in body language invariably you start getting into personality. And so I have got to find people who do have strong personalities and come across as individuals on stage. I'm not interested in everybody in unison doing perfect arabesques in unitards looking the same. I remember a dancer from Netherlands Dance Theatre asking me to come and look at her in a performance with the idea that she might come and work with us and she sent me a photograph and then when they all came on stage, all in their hair up in buns in unitards, I just couldn't pick her up from the other 25 women on stage. They all looked really similar. You won't have a problem when you come and see Enter Achilles. So I feel that we've found a very successful cast to replace the original and I'm really pleased with them. I think they've worked really hard. We did spend six months and we did look at 600 men. And we did four auditions in the UK, two in Spain, one in Amsterdam and one in Australia. So we searched high and low. But I think we’ve got a very good team. (12:15)
Andrew: I'm interested in what you said in terms of dance training forcing out or pushing out that idea of body language and how people read bodies. What is it about a discipline that should be all about communicating to people that then removes those things that we associate with emotion or reading people and bodies? Why does dance do that?
Lloyd Newson: I think the thing about dance, often the structure of a dance class is that generally everybody should move the same. Not should but does. So, when you’ve got a ballet class, you're getting everybody to have the exact same type of mannerisms with the fingers, the lift of the elbow when they’re doing port de bras, the extended foot and pointed foot. Everybody is aspiring to an ideal. And we know what that ideal is like, we’ve seen Sylvie Guillem, we know what a perfect arabesque, we know how high a leg can go, you know, we’ve seen it in people. So everybody's aspiring to that and as a result, everybody starts working... looking very unison.
There is a newer movement in schools, which is sort of against that, but unfortunately, it's often informed by release technique. And it gets so internal, and so lacking discipline, at times what they call somatic, which is such a general term, and that’s, for me, how the dancing ends up looking so generalised and so nonspecific. And while I've said to people ‘I need you to be able to do an arabesque but I'll never ask you probably to do one on stage’ and I need people who can move in many different ways who are not locked in one way and one practice. And I felt like a lot of people who have gone to the schools have… there was a sort of moment when Hofesh Shechter, Akram Khan and myself were very concerned about the dance training in the schools here. It was back in 2013. And we tried to have a dialogue with particularly London Contemporary because that's where I'd come from. And I'd been invited there by a teacher who was also deeply concerned about the standard of dancers that were coming out and they weren't fit for work. I mean, in the sense that weren't ready, fit and ready for work. And it created a whole “brouhaha”, but Robert Cohan, at the time, who founded the company is on the board said to me that for 10 years he'd been concerned about the standard.
I’d also heard… Nadine Senior, who founded the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, had written to me and said that she heard my concerns and also worried and a lot of the other major choreographers had privately said they were concerned about not being able to get people from these schools because they weren't... they just weren't ready for work. Many of those choreographers didn't want to be named. And we tried to have conversations for 18 months with London Contemporary, but unfortunately the management at that time played a lot of games and tried to not respond, not engage. We had to try and meet with the chair at all got sort of, you know, rather silly in terms of something that really could have been, had they been open… we were more than happy to work with them to try and find ways to employ their people because that’s basically what we wanted to do… the three contemporary dance schools. And that's not to say that there weren't good dancers being trained at the classical schools, for people who were interested in doing choreography that was, you know, more balletic. And I remember Matthew Bourne saying that he was getting more dancers from the musical dance… music schools than the three conservatoires we were concerned about: Laban and Northern, the Northern Contemporary Dance School and the London Contemporary Dance School. So, what’s been great since then is that group of people running London Contemporary… well, they’re no longer there. Let's just put it that way. And I feel there's… you know, that was seven years ago, so there’s a new fresh wave of people. And I think that they have definitely addressed the concerns because people on the board were talking to me privately saying they were very concerned about the standard. So things have moved on. And I think there has been a sort of return a little bit more to ensuring that release technique doesn't dominate. I’m not saying that it doesn't have its value, but that it doesn't dominate every form of training at these schools or isn't all-pervasive. (17:04)
Andrew: It must be interesting looking back over your career and seeing what shifts have occurred both, I guess, in training and people that are coming out of the schools, but in the industry more broadly. I imagine there's quite a lot of different waves and things that have occurred. Are there things that you look at now and you think ‘wow, that would have never happened’ or ‘that's changed a lot’, for better or for worse?
Lloyd Newson: I'm not sure that… look, for me, it's always great to have people who come and work with me who have, you know, skills in multiple different areas. I've worked with people who've trained in different things. If someone has also got breakdance skills that could be a benefit to our work process. For me, it’s… as many skills as you can bring to the project makes you more versatile. We had a wonderful performer called Ira Siobhan who was great because he had been inspired by Michael Jackson and had then gone to London Contemporary and he was brilliant to text and a great actor, so when you've got someone like that you have some very rich in front of you. Hannes Langolf also, who's been with me for the last 11 or 12 years and as the creative associate on Enter Achilles started off in lyrical jazz in a small German town and he's very, very rich in many different dance techniques. So for me, that is great because that shows he has a versatility that I need. Because when I'm making a work, if I need to say something I'll use whatever means necessary. Yes, I have a penchant for movement, but if I can’t say it in movement then I need to be able to say it in song or, you know, circus tricks, or not necessary tricks… skills, acrobatic skills, whatever means is available to me. (19:20)
And sometimes I feel that the model, the old model, the repertory company, whereby dancers would often go in and work for quite a few years in a rep company experiencing different choreographers, that doesn't happen as much now. I’m talking about the contemporary world. There’s another model with the balletic world. And so what I've sometimes found is that people are a bit slower to adapt or imitate if they haven't had that repertory exposure because we had to, you know, change our style in the morning, then in the afternoon the different choreographer comes in, and you would really have to reconfigure ahead. So while we might not have been, some of us might not have been as good technically or proficient in one style, we were, you know, good across the board. And sometimes I miss the speed that people can pick up the style and imitate something and then of course, in the end, try and make it their own. And that's a gross generalization. Look, there's lots of... I can already think of lots of exceptions to that. But certainly, I found for myself, having done the rep company really beneficial and very enriching for me as a choreographer in the end, because I got exposed to, I think... by the time I started making my own work, I'd worked with over 30 different choreographers. And that was a good foundation, rather than what often happens now you see somebody that's talented and the minute they leave school, they form their own company. And sometimes I think, you know, maybe they miss out on part of their education that could make them richer in the long run.
Andrew: I’m mostly thinking in terms of how the “arts industry”, to use that terminology, has shifted and changed as well. I think, obviously, companies come and go and what have you, but the arts world at the moment... funding, publicity, or even reviews, arts journalism, there seems to be a whole lot of shifts around the place that arts has in society. Arts Council kind of objectives. A lot of box ticking. I just wondered if that whole infrastructure has changed somewhat as well? (21:48)
Lloyd Newson: I think it's very easy to get caught up in box ticking and I remember the Arts Council having different priorities. Every two years they changed and sometimes it was specifically racial diversity, or it could have been disability or it could have been age or it could have been accessibility. And for me what felt really important all the time was just to do good work. So, yes, we heard what the Arts Council said, but we did not become… we weren't held ransom to it. And it felt important just to make good work and for me to pursue the things that interested me. And that approach worked well for us. I didn't feel that we were ever penalised for not adhering strictly to the sort of “tick-box” category of that, you know, two-year/four-year funding period. And I would encourage most artists to pursue, you know, things that they feel passionate about over getting too caught up in what they think is the funders’ interest at the time.
I remember once somebody approached me to run a company. I'd been in that company and they asked me to come in for a meeting and they went ‘well, we've done audience surveys, and they said they would like to work like yours, particularly this work and this work, and we would like you to run the company doing work like this’. The minute you asked me to do that, you're dead. I've got to keep being fresh. I will make work that will change and I need to make work that changes. And the minute you want to try and put me into a box, that's when it won't be interesting work anymore. And I could have stuck with the early DV8 days, you when men were just… there were men, you know, flinging ourselves combatively. Of course it was underlined with politics in the late-80s. And then I decided to make more poetic work because I was tired of that come 1990 and I worked with Wendy Houstoun who became the sort of principal performer in the company for a few productions. And the work became more poetic and I needed to do that, and then come about 2007 I felt I'd pushed and shoved movement as much as I could in terms of experimenting and I needed to do something else. And I started investigating language and mixing movement and language and what was really great is that reinvigorated my interest in movement, when you start doing verbatim work alongside movement, when I felt really no one else was investigating that to the degree that we were. And now I'm interested in going back and re-looking at Enter Achilles and we have bought some text into it. However, I still feel there's some really pertinent issues, social issues, which also... not only realizing that many of the themes still carry on 25 years later. Masculinity is not going to disappear in the next, you know, hundred years. And for me, it's trying to bring in some of the social issues to do with… they're just whispers, are now within this piece but the Me Too movement. The issues about masculinity that are currently being discussed in light of that. In 2019, the American Psychological Association came out with guidelines for its counselors with regards to trying to mitigate what they call, and this is in inverted brackets, “traditional masculinity”, because they saw many of the masculine ideals as being counterproductive to men's emotional growth and health. And that's clear… not all masculine ideals, but certainly they felt that a lot of men were suffering and causing harm to themselves and/or others trying to aspire to those superhuman ideals. In fact, there's a great quote from… Do you know Brené Brown, at all? Let me see if I can find it. Yeah, we'll keep talking. I'll see if I can find it on my computer somewhere. (26:27)
Andrew: It's interesting that so much of your work does have a theme or underlining exploration of men, masculinity, sexuality. Is there a reason that this theme keeps reoccurring? What's your passion around that exploration?
Lloyd Newson: Well, I think I've explored a lot of different things. Just For Show was about the surface of things, and how I feel that sometimes some people feel it's better to look good and be good. If Only was this sort of notion of believing in… is it better to believe in something than nothing? Religion has always been in a number of my works because I'm not a great fan of religion. I've seen it being very oppressive to women and gay people. At the same time I also acknowledge that my partner's family, his uncles and aunts, he had two Carmelite nuns and a priest amongst these aunts and uncles and some of his brothers and sisters still remain practicing Catholics. So I realised for some of them, it's been helpful, but it's also been complicated. And therefore religion has been a huge running issue throughout my work.
For me, really, the work I make is to somehow resolve the conflicts I observe in society. I made a work called Can We Talk About This? which was about Islam and freedom of speech because I would find that many of my left-wing friends... and I am from the left, but I probably now neither identify as left nor right, because I feel that the left has failed to protect some of the very basic tenets of what I consider to… of human rights. Sometimes they've put religious rights or cultural rights before human rights and for me, human rights should always trump religious or cultural rights that should be… I don't believe in cultural relativism, I believe in universality. (28:47)
And I remember going to the Houses of Parliament to hear a discussion about probably cultural relativism, really. And there was a pediatrician who talked about how she would often be told that she had to respect certain cultural customs because exactly they were that and she said ‘No. So if a child is covered in black cloth because that is the cultural norm and gets rickets because of, you know, lack of sunlight, then I need to object to that. If some child is going to lose their clitoris, I will object to that. There's nothing I can respect in this cultural practice.’ And that thing about putting universality and welfare of that individual above cultural religious beliefs.
Sorry, just going back to that quote when we were just talking about masculinity from Brené Brown, it’s from a book called Daring Greatly. Brené Brown did a lot of investigation on… interviewed women and finally men started saying ‘well, if you really want to understand the issues women have and women have with men, then why don’t you start interviewing men?’ Anyway, this man… this is the quote from her book, and it reads: ‘he pointed towards the back of the room where his wife was standing and said: “my wife and daughters, the ones you signed all those books for, they'd rather see me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall off. You say you want us to be vulnerable and real, but come on, you can't stand it, it makes you sick to see us like that.”’ Unquote.
So I think there's some very complex issues about masculinity and sometimes people throw the term “toxic masculinity” around very easily. I'm not sure if you've heard recently about this Islamist terrorist on London Bridge, Usman Khan, where two guys waylaid him until the police came, and one had a narwhal tusk that he’d ripped off a wall and the other one had a fire extinguisher. These were men. All the people that came to prevent this guy from doing any more damage or stabbing or killing any more people were men. They weren't women. And it's not to say that women could not do that. But it was the men who came forward. Now if that's toxic masculinity, then I'm fine with a bit of that. But of course, I do understand what the term means. And there are lots of issues and the fact that men perpetrate so much violence is not good for society nor for them.
So I would hope that doing Enter Achilles, it's an interesting time and I think in light of... also with Brexit, it has reawakened the class divide in Britain. I have attended some of the marches, you know, in terms of research for this piece, and to be amongst a Tommy Robinson protest march of 10,000 men and looking at the men and realising many of them are very similar to the ones that I have on stage. But in the same breath I am somebody from a working class background. My father was a mechanic in the Air Force, he then became a coal miner. I have huge identification with the working classes. And this is not a simple combination of the working classes or of masculinity. And the flip side, of course, is that we've got a prime minister we've just elected who has referred to women as “hot totties”, he's referred to the opposition leader as “a big girl's blouse” and someone that needed to “man up” and referred to gay men as “bum boys” and “crop tops”. So the notion of masculinity isn't refined, or restricted, I should say, to working class blokes in pubs. Nonetheless, that is where my piece is set. (32:48)
Andrew: It’s so interesting, because these conversations and issues are so nuanced and there's so much depth there. To explore them in physical theatre dance is also for me really interesting. Why is that mode such a good one for exploring these issues? I know it's not the only mode. But in terms of… I don't even know what that question is.
Lloyd Newson: I think one of the things that I observe as a gay man and just this morning when I was reading some tweets there was a gay man who sort of said ‘every time I show physical affection to my partner in public, I always have to surveil the situation to make sure that it's safe’. And as a gay man, I think that I am constantly… I quite like the idea that I have to be aware of certain things that other people will not be aware of, or they will take for granted. And I like the fact that I'm forced to reassess situations from a sort of, you know, not a, quote-unquote, normal situation. What I often admire and enjoy is watching the camaraderie, the physical contact between blokes, and the ease with which they communicate with one another. And I also observed how that can very quickly change. This whole work Enter Achilles was a result of my own Achilles snapping and three NHS hospitals failing to diagnose it properly and then finally it was operated on, it got a cross hospital infection and there was a hole in the back of my leg for about a year. But what was interesting was the people that came to visit me in hospital while I was recovering from this infection were primarily my female friends. My male friends, you know, would pop in once, say, over six weeks, but it was about doing things with them. Our relationship was about the physicality, you know, going out and doing things together. They didn't have that emotional… I don't want to say intelligence, but just sort of that emotional vocabulary to deal with things in the same way my female friends did, which is what instigated this whole piece.
So for me, I think what's great about going back to your question, the physicality that I see in men... oh, sorry, I was about to say when I finally realised that my foot was infected, because there was all this puss running out of the plaster on my leg I went to the excellent A&E and two blokes had come in and they were best friends, but they been in an argument and it had escalated and the other one had glassed the other guy in the face. What is it about two friends that can be best buddies and then end up sticking a glass in the other person's face? And the statistic: there are 80,000 glassing instances... that doesn't mean they're all violent but out of those probably 5,000 caused physical damage to a person. That's about 100 blokes a week in the UK that have irreparable damage as a result of some type of glass attack. That's very significant.
We do have pint glasses in this piece, we do have that huge physicality. If you go to a football match, you watch how the blokes move. Go to Tommy Robinson March or go to a pro-... we sent a videographer up to the north of England (I couldn't make one of the marches) and he videoed blokes and sometimes it's also just the look that you get from these blokes. He was an ex war veteran, this guy who was videoing. He felt very nervous, I asked him to go into pubs, and he said ‘look, I just go into pubs with the cameras just too…’ too frightening for him. And this is an ex war vet. Just the look, the power of a look can be incredible. So, for me, it's, you know, blokes in pubs, and I'm not sure if you've ever been in a pub when there's a football match on it is hugely physical. Also about contact, you know, going back to contact dance, how men can touch one another can't be too delicate. It's about the quality of the touch. And of course, that lends itself to contact duets so that, you know, rather than just do an abstract contact duet, because it's a good quote-unquote “blow man”, as one of my improv release teachers used to say. If you actually have an intention with it, you can actually add meaning to it very, very easily. And I think in light of the whole contact between men, what is acceptable contact between men and women? So it brings up all sorts of physical images. When can you hold another man's hand? As a result, we've got a rope duet high up in the air. It's fine to hold another man's hand if it stops you from falling to the ground and breaking your legs. But when you're standing on the ground holding that hand, it's another story. It feels like for me there's a massive amount of physicality, you know, magazines that now… Men’s Health that have perfect bodies. The whole issue about steroids and big chests. The whole pressure that women felt for a very long time through many women's magazines are now being peddled through the media. I think it's a perfect medium to explore issues around masculinity and to question things about masculinity. (39:04)
Andrew: I'm wondering if you're looking back at your work, are there aspects that you think people miss or that they don't see? Or that you wish people would see another aspect or another part of your work or your canon?
Lloyd Newson: Well, I think what sometimes happens is that people come to my work and rather than look at how it is made choreographically, you know, how I've moved somebody to a certain place, what are the details of the gesture, sometimes they get caught up in actually the content of what I'm saying. So the reaction is ‘oh, I totally disagree with that’. And it was great when we did Can We Talk About This? because it was verbatim and because the words were from people who had firsthand, lived experiences of the issues of living… many of them were either progressive Muslims or ex-Muslims whose lives have been threatened because they dare either leave the religion or condemn the religion because of its misogyny or homophobia. Or said something that was deemed to be blasphemous, and their lives had been threatened. And a lot of people responded to that work in all sorts of different ways. It was so diverse. I can't even begin to explain how people can come to the same work and have so many different perspectives. And most of the time, I feel they’re bringing something more about themselves than what was on stage. But I'm always intrigued when people don't actually look at how I have manipulated a group, or choreographed these fine details, but just respond to the subject matter and like ‘oh, I like that’ or ‘I hate that’ or dismiss it in one go. And sometimes I wonder if I had just put on some nice music and people weren't talking or you didn't know what the subject matter was and I abstracted it, they would then engage and they would then see all the sort of subtle patterns and choreographic movements.
But I think nonetheless… I always feel like you want to play to the highest level and you want to assume that everybody in your… you want to get to the smartest level. So I do what I do and I spend a huge amount of time looking at subtle movement as we do when we're looking at the text and how we deliver the text. And we've spent a huge amount of energy over the last sort of… from 2007 to 2015 doing text analysis, getting dancers to be as precise with the text as they are with the movement and, for me, that's great, that feels like... we know the details in there. I think a lot of people who have got a good eye and good head also see that as well. Sometimes I have to say to people… they come up to me and they want to say that they liked it or they didn't like it and I'm not generally that interested, really. I make the work from my perspective, for me. I’m not really that concerned, which is why, for decades, I didn't read reviews. But if they want to come sometimes I just say ‘well, what do you think about the movement construction?’ Just to make them think about something different other than just ‘do I agree with that subject matter or not?’ (42:17)
Andrew: That’s an interesting thing too, because art should, in its very best, be challenging. And that doesn't necessarily always mean that you're going to find it entertaining or safe or light or nice. And I think sometimes people ignore the power of something that challenges them or they find it uncomfortable or sit there and... challenging. I don't know, something about art being safe or all of a sudden becoming a safe space. It's really interesting at the moment.
Lloyd Newson: I used to say for a long time that I thought that dance was the Prozac of the art forms. And I think there is a problem because we train in such a regimented way and because there is an aesthetic that dominates our work, that often complex or ugly or difficult issues are glossed over because people are pointing their feet and look very lovely, you know, the concept of contemporary dance being lovely bodies doing lovely things to lovely tunes in lovely costumes, and there's a lot of that. So I wish that I would see more dance... movement. I don't really like the word “dance” per se. I prefer the word “movement” because I feel like dance is a subset of that too. I want to be able to use any type of movement. I remember years ago, when Pina Bausch first brought her work to London and probably about a third of the audience walked out and some muttering ‘this isn't dance’ and for me it was all dance. Every movement, every gesture can be dance. Just because it wasn't on a regular beat to a regular tune doesn't mean it's not dance.
But I do feel that there is a lack of tough, hard, provocative, thought-provoking work in the dance world. I think there is a lot of work… it’s part of the reason I left Extemporary Dance Theatre in the end. I felt we were conning the audiences. I would see what was written in the program. I would see what the critics wrote. And they were the days when I was dancing with Extemporary, when I would read reviews, and there was so much bs going on, honestly, in the program notes, and it was a bit like a Rorschach… listening to critics talk about a work was a bit like a Rorschach inkblot test where people would project whatever they wanted on it. Here I was: the dancer in the rehearsal room. I knew what the choreographer’s intention or lack of intention might have been, whether they were just really interested in just manipulating and they were fascinated by movement and dynamics, and that would have been fine if that was in the program, you know: ‘I'm really interested in in manipulating movement and creating the most originalism I can make’. That would have been honest. But then to sort of say that it was about, you know, neuroscience or the death of my mother or something else and you go ‘whoa, where did that come from?’ Or yet again another thing about space-time construction, the perception of the human body through... ridiculous! I can't even find the words to talk about the absurd... the obfuscation and rubbish. It’s a bit like Sokal who was a scientist and neuroscientist and wrote… basically, used a lot of jargon and wrote an article and published it. And it was published in a number of respected articles. Then he called it out and said it was complete nonsense. I feel that happens a lot in our world, and I just wish people would be a bit more honest about what they're making rather than trying to pretend it’s something else because fundamentally I feel that’s dishonest to the public. And what I would like to say is... and what I'd like to feel like I do, and I'm not saying all my work is wonderful and I’ve made a couple of real bummers in my life. But at least what’s in the tin is written on the outside of the tin. And I feel that I want very much to make unpretentious work. And at the same time, I want to try and make it complex and that is a struggle, particularly in movement, because most people use language a lot to express themselves. We're doing this interview in words, we're not doing a movement. If I was doing it in movement, you'd get a sense, maybe, of what I was trying to communicate. But it's a very hard thing to communicate complex, really complex issues in movement alone, which is, in the end, why I, for the last decade or so of my life, get involved in words and why there are some more words in this version of Enter Achilles. There's not too many because I think the work stands without that. But yeah, I had to resort to using some more words than the original production.
Andrew: And finally, I guess you're revisiting Enter Achilles and you’re touring that. Are there other works or other projects on the horizon? Or is this the one that's consuming you for the next period of time?
Lloyd Newson: Well, for me, one of the things that I said earlier was it was really important for me to reclaim my life. And I’ve really enjoyed doing that. And also, when you're running a company, making work, you're fighting all the time, you're fighting for exactness. You're fighting to make sure that the set will arrive, you're making sure that the dancers are at a point where they're ready to perform the work. And I'm really enjoying, in my early 60s, to chill out a bit and look at the beauty around me and not always fight.
Over the years, I've been asked by a lot of companies to make work and invariably only Rambert allowed me to go off and audition and find dancers that were not in their permanent company because of the specificity of the type of work I make. So they're the first people who said ‘OK, you can find your own dancers and we will give you the time’. They've given me four months to rework this work. No other company will do that. The Australian Ballet takes, what, five and a half or six weeks to make a full length work? But for me, if you're doing movement research and investigation, you're trying to find new ways to say things you do need time, you do need that time. Very few people have been able to offer me that. So I probably could feel assured that not many people will be able to offer me the conditions I need to go back into the studio. But the great thing is not having to, at the same time of making a work, not having to do all the other things to do with running a company, with funding and sponsors and having to clean studios even and do applications, and being the HR department. The great thing is doing the work for another company, they can take care of all that. So I think probably I won't make much more work. (49:28)
Andrew: That must be so liberating creatively as well not have to hold all that space for other things in running a company.
Lloyd Newson: It is and also to be really honest, I don't think I'll make a work from scratch ever again. I'm done with that dark space where you've got to make something out of nothing, and the fear that's associated with that and the struggle and, you know, I did that for four decades in total and it's time now to have some fun. I feel a bit guilty even saying that but not to feel I've got to hold this huge company above my head. My arms no longer want to do that. They want to do other things. So I'm not sure whether or not I will… somebody else will come to me and I'm interested. I have found it interesting to revisit the work and sort of re-envisage it and think ‘OK, how can we modernise it? How can we make sure it's not dusty?’ And we've changed the costumes. Mobile phones weren't really that common when we made this. Smoking in pubs you were allowed to do. All those things have changed. As I say certain social issues have changed. So it's been interesting giving the work, you know, subtle inflections. So, who knows, but I certainly know that I want a life outside of dance.