Rosie Kay is what you might call an intellectual choreographer – she doesn’t see the point of taking on a subject unless you have done your research and had some experience of it. For her latest piece, which explores war and its affect on the body, she joined a battalion and trekked across Dartmoor with a 70lb rucksack. Her approach couldn’t be more considered for what is a current and sensitive issue – and the piece will premiere at next year’s International Dance Festival Birmingham. We spoke to Rosie Kay about the work, her success at the last festival, and her plans for Rosie Kay Dance Company.
Kay’s last piece Double Points: K – a duet she danced with Morgan Cloud based on Italian choreographer Emio Greco’s Double Points: Two - was shown at the International Dance Festival Birmingham 2008 before touring across the UK. It was a physically demanding piece – Kay danced for a full 30 minutes on stage at each performance and had to do cardiovascular training everyday to maintain her stamina. At the festival, it was performed alongside Greco’s original piece. She said:
“As a choreographic night it was really interesting because you could see the details that I had taken and multiplied. But it was quite intimidating.”
The music to Double Points: K was in three parts, starting with electronica, followed briskly by Bach’s Concerto in A minor and then contrasted by heavy pounding dubstep beats. The piece was well-received by critics as well as Greco’s dancers. Kay said in an interview she had ‘Rosiefied’ the piece. What exactly is ‘Rosiefication’?
“My pacing and timing is very specific – with Double Points it’s quite a blast and I’m impatient to make dramatic shifts in timing. The biggest shifts are in the music and I allow myself to really work with the music, particularly the Bach. I took Greco’s physical exhaustion theme and I tried to push it further in my own way. I hope it has a bit of sense of humour within the work as well.”
Prior to Double Points: K, Kay’s pieces for Rosie Kay Dance Company (formed in 2004) were more theatrical and decidedly funny, such as The Wild Party which enjoyed success at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006. Kay says she now is moving away from the “choreographic” and “pure dance” basis of Double Points, to a more studied and layered piece.
Through the Rayne Foundation fellowship, Kay was given some time for research and a year ago she spent a placement with 4th Battalion The Rifles – an infantry battalion based at Salisbury Plain – to see soldiers in training, and later Headley Court where injured soldiers go to be rehabilitated.
She has brought together composer Annie Mahtani (who worked with her on Supernova), theatre director, Walter Meierjohann, dramaturg Petra Tauscher and visual artist David Cotterrell who also spent time with soldiers in Afghanistan with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
She is yet to set the choreography, but has gathered her team of collaborators as well as her research from her time with the 4th Rifles. The piece will contain five dancers, four men and one woman, two of which have had military training and will look at three parts:
“The physical training from a civilian to a trained soldier and transforming the body to respond automatically, which is very much like rehearsing a dance. Then I’m interested in the second part; the transformation when they come back. The bit I’m not trying to do is their experience in Afghanistan.”
The dance is called 5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is The Frontline, the name stating Kay’s key message and pointing to her desire to show the humaness of war. She said:
“A soldier’s life is in some ways a purely physical life, so it translates very well into dance. There’s a lot which is identifiable for the public – the marching and drilling view of a soldier they see – and that is all very rich with movement potential. Attack and defense is all choreographic.”
Kay is aware of how prominent the subject is in the media and is incredibly conscious of not wanting to create a production which trivialises the war or present it in a crass, stereotypical way:
“The war seemed so anonymous to me and this bothered me so I started looking into this research. It was very different to how I imagined it from the outside, and I got to know real people. What I want to try and do is get across the realisation that this is humanity and bodies getting attacked. War is human, it’s not separate. Eventually we might make politicians answer why we are at war and what we’re doing.”
While Kay doesn’t want to force her political opinions of the war on the audience, she does think choreographers should be brave in putting forward a message:
“There’s a perfectly good place for dance to explore dance, but not all artists want to be like that. I want to communicate about what it is to be human and what’s alike in one another -and I hope to try and change the world very slightly in my own way – if you don’t feel like that then why are you doing it.”
Brought up in Scotland in a family which she calls “quite political,” Kay says it is partly personal interest which takes her down different avenues in her research. She wants to know her subject and layer many references in the work. She also spent years touring with companies all over Europe, and feels audiences there are more open to experimental and intellectually demanding dance works on stage:
“Dance can sit in a place outside of society. It can make dance about dances but, like theatre, it can talk about subjects too and I shadowed three MPs (Claire Short, Ed Vaizey and John Barrett) to see if dance could say big things about political subjects. But David Cotterrell and I have such a sensitivity that we wouldn’t want to make a huge piece of propaganda about the war. Hopefully the piece is more considered because we know people involved in it.”
Kay said she does sometimes take a step back and worry about approaching the subject, but thinks the depth of her research means she has to say something about it:
“Hopefully it will be very intelligent and I want to be brave. I’m looking forward to getting started. I have some great international dance collaborators with me, so I feel this work will be strong.”
