28 Jul Guest Blog | Impermanence Dance Theatre
KSF Artists of Choice is open to artists across the disciplines of dance, theatre, musical theatre and film. Over the next few weeks, we will post guest blogs from some of our 2016 grant winners about how the grant has impacted their work. Applications will be open in early 2017.
Name | Impermanence Dance Theatre - Daniel Hay-Gordon
Project | Baal
Year Awarded KSF Grant | 2016
What does the KSF grant mean to you and your project?
This will be the first time that we will collaborate on an entire project not only with each other as dancers and choreographers, but also with a director and actors. To expand the company but still maintain Impermanence’s ethos of non-hierarchy will require time and support, which is just what the KSF grant will help us to get. Mentorship will be really helpful, as we will need to work in ways that we are not used to.
What inspired your project?
Director Tyrrell Jones, who helped us with past work acting as an outside eye, approached Impermanence. He has long wanted to direct Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal, which is not often performed as it requires very poetic and visual staging to fully interpret the text. As a company we are drawn to evocative imagery and atmosphere but are less adept at presenting a clear narrative, so we hope that Tyrrell’s Brechtian knowledge and our suggestive scene-setting can be of great help to each other. The play is full of sex, darkness and depravity - and the fact that Fassbender and Bowie have both played Baal adds to its appeal as well!
Talk about your journey prior to the receiving the award. What kind of difficulties or roadblocks did you encounter along the way? How did you overcome them?
We’re a non-hierarchical dance company formed of a group of close friends, and to overcome the difficulties that arise from such a scenario we have had to keep continually improving the art of conversation and ensemble decision-making. We’ve had to take pleasure in our differences and find a way to collaborate that adds strength to the work rather than watering individuals down, creating a unified company identity albeit made up of multiple ideas. A vital part of our development has been learning how to run a company, something that has been helped by working with people with more knowledge than us, and the generosity to pass on what they know. A difficulty which we have experienced before and which we hope this project will help to overcome is how to maintain equality when collaborating with artists of other disciplines.
What would you say are the most defining moments of your career thus far?
This year and last year we began the creation of new work by spending several days with the wonderful Lea Anderson, to help sort out how we work together and to realise what might be holding us back. Since spending time with her our ways of working have improved hugely and productivity is on the up!
Do you have any advice for emerging artists?
You’ve gotta submerge to emerge! Persist and don’t get bored of yourself.
Read more about Impermanence’s project here.
Impermanence discuss the project here.