RECALLING RHYTHMS OF THE PAST
Director explains relationship between dance, music and memory
What if you were asked to recall and repeat every dance you ever danced? Or even just a few? That’s the premise of Wallflower. The show, from boundarypushing North England theatre/performing arts company Quarantine, tasks three performers with sharing some of their body-rockin’ memories — the good, the bad, and the misguided — with the audience. We chatted with Richard Gregory, one of the founders of Quarantine and the director of Wallflower, about keeping the show fresh, what he’s learned about memory, and his go-to dance-floor number.
Q Considering the performers have been doing it for over a year, how is an element of spontaneity retained?
A It’s a strange thing. When we first started rehearsing and making the piece, the performers’ big concern was that they’d run out of memories. But what we discovered is that every time we do it, somehow new memories are unearthed, and they always take them (the performers) by surprise. I think that occurs because what is happening is a kind of a conversation of memory between them. One person will remember something and that will trigger something in another performer. They’re remembering a range of dances, because the dancers come back from very different backgrounds. For example, Jo (Fong) has danced professionally since she was in her teens, she’s now in her mid-40s. She has a vast history of performing as a dancer to draw from. Whereas James (Monaghan) would describe himself as someone who can’t dance. But he has lots of personal memories of dancing. Sonia (Hughes) is not a trained dancer but she’s a fabulous dancer. She’s one of those people, if you’re at a party or a nightclub ... you’d want to dance with.
Q What have you discovered about the relationship between music, dance, and memory? About, for instance, the idea of “muscle memory?”
A I’m a little bit suspicious about the muscle memory idea, to be honest. It’s a phrase people use
and certainly dancers use. What I’ve witnessed, and this is from an artist’s perspective not a scientist’s, is the imperfection of muscle memory, and the imperfection of memory in general. There’s something that occurs when they start to dance and start to remember, particularly if it’s a choreographed piece. There’s almost a sort of out-of-body sense of what the body should be doing. Particularly for Jo, when she tries to return to a dance or approximate it, you’ll see her getting deeply frustrated that she can’t find or remember the exact movement.
James has a number of dances that are very much a way of reminding him of an event in his life or a moment in his relationship with friends or his partner. There, it’s not necessarily about the physical detail, it’s something about the trigger, the reminder of the experience of dancing, and the music as well. That explodes for him an enormous amount of recall and detail about that event, sometimes almost putting him back in that place.
Another thing that happens is you’ll see someone like Sonia, who’s in her early 50s, do a dance that her 15-year-old body had danced.
There’s something quite extraordinary about that.
It’s almost like being able to see two people at once in the same physical space. You can almost see that teenager.
Q Is there a song that you can’t resist, that lures you onto the dance floor every time?
A There’s an English band called Wire, they have a song called Outdoor Miner that was always a favourite. Would that get me up dancing? Possibly. Possibly it would.