The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Daring dance:
Wasteland
“I’m from a small coal-mining village called Grimethorpe, on the outskirts of South Yorkshire,” says Gary Clarke, artistic director of the Gary Clarke Company, whose new dance performance Wasteland will be touring to Dundee Rep this weekend. A sequel to his award-winning 2015 production Coal, Wasteland explores the rave culture which filled the void left by the coal industry.
“Grimethorpe was home to one of the deepest coal mines in the UK,” Clarke continues, “and the mine was the reason the village existed in the first place. It was a vibrant village when I was growing up, we had miners’ galas and fairs, and jobs and shops – we don’t any more. I saw my village collapse and fall to its knees as a result of the coal mines closing.”
Grimethorpe Colliery closed in 1993, and Clarke saw many of his peers – bereft of work and purpose – take a wrong turn in life. It was around this time, however, that he discovered art and creativity “as a coping mechanism”, using the anger felt in the village as an energy.
“I would put on my brother’s rave music and thrash around in my bedroom, as the only way of expressing myself as a teenager,” he remembers.
Clarke went on to study at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, carving out a career as a choreographer, but always felt uncomfortable about the perceived lack of working class voices in the industry.
The widely-acclaimed Coal, created to mark the 30th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, was intended as a piece of social and political history using movement which would also act as a corrective to that trend.
“It was during one of the post-show discussions for the tour of Coal that a hand went up, and it was my brother, who’s seven years older than me,” recalls Clarke. “He said, ‘Gary, what about us? What about the children, what happened next?’ I thought, that’s it, there’s a sequel here – that was the beginning of Wasteland.”
This is the follow-on story, set 10 years after the Miners’ Strike, and it charts “the downfall of industrial Britain”, says Clarke. “In this desolate landscape with no prospects, the illegal rave culture acted almost as a saviour for our generation. We got all of our frustrations out on the dancefloor, amid these abandoned warehouses which were now home to a new community.”
These parallels are drawn by Clarke using the movement of six dancers, with multimedia elements including archive footage, a rave soundtrack, and a brass band and singers performing miners’ hymns, as well as EX-KLF member Jimmy Cauty’s “smiley riot shields”; shields used in the strike and now decorated with acid house smiley faces.
“My work has been described as dance-documentary, it’s a vehicle for entertainment and education,” says Clarke. “It’s based on real events which are part of the fabric of this country’s history, so I want people to learn something about that, or to transport them back if they were there at the time.”