THEO CLINKARD
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Ellie: Theo and Ellie… date the…
Theo: 17th of May, 2017, Islington. E: So tell me Theo, your thoughts behind making something for an audience that is specifically bigger than you had before. T: Well the plans to potentially make this work [This Bright Field] should we get funding, started about four years ago through dance4. And the invite was specifically to look at dance on a larger scale and how it might be done differently, read differently, designed differently. And knowing that commission was coming up, I made Of Land and Tongue, my last company work, for an audience of about sixty. So I did a very proximate, intimate show with reduced audience, and fell in love with all the detail and texture and tone that’s readable at a proximate distance. Once I’d made that work I realised how important that was to me and could I somehow, with this larger scale piece, somehow deal with… I dunno, I don’t like the word intimacy. I think it has lots of other connotations other than proximity. For me, in this sense, it’s just that you’re near. I was reading, going on a bit of a tangent here, but I was reading Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin, a really instrumental book for me, by a Finnish architect who talks about how we experience spaces through our whole selves and it seems quite obvious, but he’s kind of commenting on how in Western culture, a lot of what we experience is attending to the ocular, the visual sense, and he’s making a case for the fact that our whole beings are affected by the spaces we inhabit and how touch is historically low down on the scale of the senses, it’s lesser than. And he also articulates the haptic experience that you have through looking. So if I look at a piece of cold metal, let’s say, I’m having a touch trigger, even though I’m not touching it. So I think something about the proximity with the piece, because I’ve invited the dancers to be dealing with touch, and they’re often working in duet form, that the audience’s experience might be through their whole body, not just looking. Or in combination. <
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T: I think there might have been something about setting up for surprise, but I still feel like I’m first and foremost dealing with movement, and not necessarily movement as a carrier of expressive emotional intent, it’s not like Tanztheatre, but I do think all the elements of text and song and props and light and sound and costume are all available to me and I just like to play with them and see what they might evoke or reference for people. I think it’s not radical experimentation… I look at the work I made and I can’t really see any signature. And I know there are themes like empathy that interest me no matter what I’m making, because I’m on some level always thinking about what I want to put in the world, not in any grand way but to keep connecting to why we put something on the planet, why it exists. But the element of surprise … I think … I know that I’m mischievous as a person, but I also really like formality … I can’t take myself too seriously for too long … it’s not necessarily humour I’m dealing with but I quite like charm and I quite like poetry and maths and science as well.
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This Bright Field by Theo Clinkard premieres tonight as part of the Brighton Festival.
Headline image: Chris Nash
Images /1, /2, /3: This Bright Field in rehearsal, Stephen Wright
Posted: 24 May 2017
Headline image: Chris Nash
Images /1, /2, /3: This Bright Field in rehearsal, Stephen Wright
Posted: 24 May 2017