Behind the scenes with Candoco Dance Company
It's fair to say that you wouldn't necessarily associate such a commercially successful choreographer as Arlene Phillips with the more rarefied world of contemporary dance. But Candoco Dance, the company of disabled and able-bodied dancers, has teamed up with the former Strictly Come Dancing judge to perform her new piece for two people, You & I Know. After showcasing the work at festivals across the country, Candoco Dance brought it to London as part of the 2016 Greenwich International Festival this July. It may seem like an unexpected move, but Arlene Phillips's career is anything but strictly ballroom. Before she was cajoling capering celebs into pointing their toes, she found fame in the 1970s with her dance troupe Hot Gossip. Over the subsequent years, Phillips's work has been prolific and varied, including choreographing hit music videos (Duran Duran's The Wild Boys), the 1982 film version of Annie and musical theatre productions such as Grease, Starlight Express and Saturday Night Fever. It's a world away from North London where, ever since its establishment in 1991, Candoco Dance has been creating works that challenge audience perceptions of the dancing body. Its members refuse to be coy about disability and difference, but also demand that exceptions aren't made. Esteemed contemporary choreographers like Javier de Frutos, Siobhan Davies and Hofesh Shechter have lined up to work with the company, which reached a wider audience in 2012 when it took part in the Paralympic Closing Ceremony in London. So how did Candoco Dance comes to work with the doyenne of jazz dance? Artistic co-director Stine Nilsen says the company management had already noted how passionate Phillips is about dance for everybody and finding opportunities for young people, "so a couple of years ago we asked her to be a patron of the company. Then we were thinking about which choreographers to work with for our 25th anniversary. We wanted to challenge ourselves and keep audiences on their toes. Arlene has particular way of expressing herself [through] pop music and that was interesting to us – we were thinking about creating something for the outdoors and attracting a broad and varied audience for dance. So, we chatted to Arlene and asked if she was interested.” The answer was, of course, a yes. The universality of love was the starting point for You & I Know, but the piece is a love duet with a difference. “Love is an emotion that we all experience in different ways, it's complex and we relate to it across the whole spectrum of our lives,” says Nilsen. “The set-up of the woman trailing after the man is often a given, but the piece plays with that assumption. Here, the woman is strong and the man is dependent on her.” The work isn't afraid to inspect the humdrum, banal aspect of love either, as dancer Joel Brown points out: “It's a narrative that charts the journey of this relationship, how things that were once so exciting become mundane, how the couple drift apart but still there's something keeping them together.” It clearly touches people, he notes: “Audiences have been very warm in receiving it. There's a lot of exciting partnering work, it's high energy and the music is really good. But people also follow it emotionally. Lots of audience members have come to thank us after the performance.” Choreographers working with Candoco's dancers often need to tailor the movement very closely to the performer's body. It's a very different approach to setting down swathes of movement for a musical theatre chorus to pick up. So how did Phillips and the dancers go about creating the work together? “Each of the four tracks used in the piece has a different emotional quality and Arlene asked the dancers to improvise and come up with their own ways of moving, their own vocabulary,” explains Nilsen. “We use improvisation a lot in contemporary dance, but not so much in musical theatre.” Phillips came with a vision too, says Brown: “She very much had a narrative mapped out, she knew the songs she wanted to use and came into the studio with the arc of the piece made.” Dance can often be perceived as a bit of a niche interest. But Nilsen hopes that Candoco Dance's free festival performances, often occurring in town centres, will bring the art form to a wider audience: “Narrative in dance is more abstract than the narrative of a TV drama. It's not as directly easy to interpret. With You & I Know, the music feels familiar and that's a way to access it ... There's something beautiful about going out and having that proximity to the dancers, of inviting the audience to be involved.” Candoco's work also compels the audience to acknowledge and reflect on their own physical presence, he explains: “The dancers don't have the same bodies as every audience member. These are performers with strong beautiful bodies but, yes, they do have a disability at the same time. They're nevertheless supremely able to do the dancing they're doing – it might not be the normative way of moving or dancing or being.” Although it's not the company's aim to make political statements, current benefit slashes are having a direct practical impact on its work, notes Nielsen: “Access-to-work schemes are being cut and that means we foot the bill. Expenses are higher than they would be for people who can use public transport and have easy access to buildings.” But, he says, it's imperative that Candoco Dance challenges “old-fashioned perceptions of disability” and “makes a case for diversity as the way forward. These performers are visible and that's important.”