Natalie Maria Clark

What inspired

In June 2014, after the high of creating my last show Apt Y Idos (which was also staged in Q Theatre’s Loft), I knew I wanted to do more choreography but for a while I wasn’t sure what it was about.

The name arrived into my head before anything else, while I was doing a bit of free-writing in 2014, reflecting with some heavy nostalgia on a memory from the previous year. So you could say this show has been brewing in my head for almost three years.

The memory: One cold but sunny July morning, I arrived home from a night with someone I’d liked for a long time, full of energy and anticipation. I went for a sleepless, adrenaline charged run through the city. I remember thinking, as I ran down K Rd: ‘Wow, this is the world. Beautiful and awful all at once. I was kind of in love and kind of depressed. I had both nothing and everything. And there it was.

As I wrote about this memory, the overwhelming ache of both having and needing Everything Anyone Ever Wanted manifested on the page.

Your first works were called

then arranging them into some sort of cohesive order, with a lot of refining and editing throughout.

Do your emotions find expression through your choreography?

For sure. Generally I give tasks to my dancers based on an idea or image I’ve seen, thought, or felt, and I will ask myself, ‘how does this feel, physically? How could I get my dancers to embody this in movement’?

What inspired you to explore movement and dance?

opportunities to choreograph on our classmates, was when I realised that choreography specifically served me in terms of expressing my thoughts and feelings in a very unique way.

The name of your company, Black Sheep, is evocative. Do you feel like a black sheep?