Amy Bell's Forecast for dance
Amy Bell has a challenge for dance. Dance training – like many other things in our lives – is deeply disconnected to our subjective sexuality. From an early age, dancers are taught to be elegant feminine moving bodies. But what if we threw in sexuality, female masculinity and gender fluidity... Would we move differently? Is there such a thing as moving 'more naturally'?
Amy Bell in The Forecast, image by Hetain Patel
Amy Bell is a dance artist whose work embraces performing, making, teaching, writing, dramaturgy and curation. Her theatre solo The Forecast will premiere at The Place on Tuesday 6th March. Developing from ideas on unruly gender embodiments investigated in her installation piece TOMBO(Y)LA, the performance takes an ironic look at identity in flux. In June, she will present Splayed, a festival of disruptive femininities also at The Place, where she is a Work Place Artist.
We spoke to Amy about her practice and the innovative and subversive power of queering dance.
PB – Amy, how did you become interested in dance? What is it about dance that keeps you passionate about your practice?
Amy – I loved the feeling of dancing around as a small child, so like most people that got me started. I still love that feeling but sometimes it doesn’t seem enough. Dancing can feel too painful, too insubstantial and if you blink, you’ve missed it and it’s gone. I like that in Buddhist thought these three features, un-satisfactoriness or suffering, insubstantiality and impermanence are the bare facts of existence. Apparently we can only hope to understand or be with existence if we comprehend these three facts, not logically but through lived experience. Obviously we can try to accept these three ideas our life long whatever we do, but making a life in dance gives you really intense exposure to such difficult but potentially liberating truths.
PB – Your work speaks a lot about queer, as a state of being, creating and performing. What can queer and dance do for each other?
Amy – I think queerness is innately creative so I think whenever there is a coming together of queerness and art there will inevitably be innovation and subversion. Dance, at its best, can make space for interrogating norms and conventions around body, gender, sexuality and society on a profoundly subtle level of physicality and fleshiness. It can move and shake our bones, our cells and the queerest experiences we have are often the visceral ones we feel in the gut. Dance, when it is good, can tap into that directly and change us very deeply. At its worst, dance has suffered from a history of domination by white cis gay men apparently invested in upholding the heteropatriarchy. This tradition still persists and so I think there is a huge amount to be done to challenge queer invisibility in dance, especially for women, trans, non-binary people and around intersections of race, class and physical ability. I would love to see the queering of dance and the discourses around it go much, much further.
PB – In 2014 you discovered that your body and movement had incorporated norms that feminised and desexualised you. (I’m thinking of the conclusion to your article “We’re queer. We’re…where?”) You asked yourself if you could ever escape this and 'move differently'. Has your movement changed in the past three years?
Amy – Yes, you reference an article I wrote when I realised the severe disconnect there was between my felt gender and sexual identities and my dance practice. I realised that through my training and professional life, which I had enjoyed immensely, I had never really been invited to or able to fully bring these elements into being in my dancing. They perhaps 'leaked out’ by accident and were always there but were kind of inert, an elephant in the studio that nobody wanted to acknowledge. I had no physical vocabulary for a really important part of myself, I didn’t feel fully seen as a person and I didn’t see people like me reflected in the artists around me. For me, conventional dance training is feminising. Dance is also often very desexualising for women in particular, in so far as it neglects their subjective experience of sexuality in favour of an objectified, male orientated one. Even somatic practices can be quite neutralising in terms of gender. So I began to wonder if my training had not been some sort of long process of erasure of my female masculinity, of my queerness. We all know how campness dances but what about butchness?
After writing that article I endeavoured to uncover my inner butch or my desire in movement, trying to research and reclaim something lost, neglected, maligned. This was liberating but it was a struggle. I questioned whether I was queer enough to ask these questions, whether nature or nurture had made me move the way I do. Would I have always been the way I am now, or was it dancing since childhood that made me that way? Could I be different? Can I be more ‘naturally' me? These are impossible questions. After working on this for some years, and perhaps grieving the loss of ’the unlived life’, I am still questioning but I am less angry, frustrated and ashamed about the lack of queer female visibility in dance and the paucity of language we are left with to express ourselves. Importantly I realised that I do not have to have all the answers, I do not have to be a flag bearer for queer women. I am just one, ever changing product of my environment and I cannot be what I am not. Instead I realised that my questions around all this are in themselves interesting. This released some tension, gave freedom in the body to move and provided the energy to make. It was out of this that I created TOMBO(Y)LA my installation piece and The Forecast which premieres at The Place in March.
PB – Your work with Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences is very interesting. You wrote 4 articles, one for each city the performers travelled to thinking of 4 key words: Process, Identity, Activism and Museum.* Are you still thinking of these terms in your practice?
Amy – Well to some extent I was thinking about those areas of practice before Performing Gender and found them transformed through the experience of the project, but yes I have also kept thinking about them and have moved on since writing the articles. Firstly I suppose I am asking myself what kind of activism am I participating in, what do I stand for and how am I living that or embodying that? I think these questions have become even more politically urgent for all of us in recent years and we have to keep revisiting them constantly. For the museum article, I suppose that was a meditation on how artists engage with institutions and as a freelancer I am having to navigate the politics of that on a daily basis, especially when I am in multiple roles with the same institution, as I am with The Place for example. In terms of process and identity yes, I always see the formation of body and identity as ongoing processes and my thoughts and practices around that are… of course, also always in process.
PB – Last September, we saw this year’s Performing Gender – Dance Makes Differences performers during their first workshop in Ljubljana. We talked to dancer Roberta Racis about exploring identity and sexuality through choreography and dancing. Moving from the stage to our everyday world, in what way does this investigation affect your everyday life and that of the public?
Amy – Something that has been important to me recently is to create a greater continuity between my everyday life and my work especially in terms of my gender and sexuality. Searching for this creative alignment, which is anyway always in motion, helps me begin to move towards greater authenticity and freedom both in life and performance. It also brings challenge. I feel like the artists I really admire find incredible ways to create routes of continuity for the energy flowing between their life and work.
PB – You are a writer and poet and you often think of text-based language when making choreographic work. With your installation piece TOMBO(Y)LA you investigate your body through a conversation about gender: it’s very interesting the way you use language in dance. What is the relationship between text and movement for you?
Amy – I wouldn’t call myself a poet but yes, language has become very important to my work. I very much enjoy the slippage of meaning that occurs when the body in movement is set against words. The playing out of this tension is always happening to us in every moment, our bodies are often saying something very different to the words that come out of our mouths. There is something so human about it and I enjoy exploring this interplay further through choreographic structures. In TOMBO(Y)LA I conduct relatively natural conversations with people while at the same time I am engaged in improvised movement scores. The piece often happens in gallery or public spaces where people might feel alienated by contemporary dance. The conversation, since its register is familiar, draws people together and allows a playful, subversive, nuanced physical undercurrent to bubble up in our exchanges. In the work I am also asking people to give language to their physical, bodily experience of their gender identities, a place where language often breaks down. I love the way that movement, set against this search for verbal expression, prompts people to feel into embodied memory, sensation and a more visceral or grounded search into their own somatic experiencing and into mine.
PB – Tell us about your work The Forecast. The connection made between life and forecasting is fascinating. Although we can make predictions (and everyone loves making predictions, sometimes to an obsessive degree), we can never be fully sure what tomorrow will look like. Where does this idea come from, how did the piece develop and what should we expect?
Amy – So I was thinking about how identity, body, sexuality and gender, people are always in flux. I was thinking how difficult it can be to accept and work with that. Our very human need to know, to put down solid markers in the face of chaos, to predict, convince, to name are useful and yet ridiculous. I was also wanting to work with personal material around this and find ways to open it and make it relatable to people who did not share my experience.
I approached composer and musician Jamie McCarthy and visual artist and dramaturg Hetain Patel to work on the project with me with a view to, amongst other things, finding larger metaphors for all of this. For many years Jamie has been working with long durational drone structures which often take inspiration from cloud movement and the weather systems and when Hetain then proposed some studio tasks to me including one which connected a TV weather forecast and gender, something clicked and I knew quite quickly this was a direction I wanted to take. I love that struggling with the unpredictability of the weather is something that we can all relate to on a very concrete level and I thought it was a lovely way into thinking about our internal, bodily or psychological gender weather. As for what you can expect from the finished piece, I think its a pretty goofy, personal but hopefully poetic piece. I hope to share the absurdity and humanity of trying to ride the storms of gender and sexuality as they play out across the body, but you’ll have to decide for yourself what you make of it of course.
PB – How did your collaboration with The Place come about and what is it like working with their team?
Amy – I’ve been connected to The Place since I trained in the building at London Contemporary Dance School. Since then, they have consistently taken an interest in and supported my work at various stages and worked with me in different capacities. So collaborating more fully on The Forecast and on Splayed feels in some ways very organic. I have recently formalised this relationship a little bit more by joining Work Place, The Place’s artist development programme. The relationship also sits well with other partnerships and collaborations I have elsewhere.
PB – We are very excited to see Splayed, the festival exploring disruptive femininity taking place in June 2018. What are you hoping to achieve with the festival? What are the goals, expectations and perhaps also the risks? How will it be structured?
Amy – I am also excited about Splayed! You can expect a week of subversive and super engaging work and events! The festival is geared towards disrupting conventional notions of femininity through experimental movement, performances, discussions, a free zine. With this project I wanted to address the fact that there is amazing work going on at the moment rocking what we think we know about desire, identity, power, violence, gender binaries and embodiment. Having these works rub up against each other in a relatively mainstream dance context will hopefully set some sparks flying. I hope that there might be a wider debate about dismantling the norms of physical expression and a celebration of the range and richness of individual experience.
PB – You are a performer, choreographer, writer, researcher, curator and teacher. How do you juggle all of these roles and tasks?
Amy – The tensions, overlaps, fissures, frustrations and overflows between all these roles and the range of people I meet as a result are really what keep me going. It’s creatively exciting but it’s also a survival strategy.
PB – Your work is very inspiring and it belongs to a larger conversation of young and contemporary artists who are changing what dance looks like especially in terms of femininity and masculinity. I’m thinking for example of Irish performer Oona Doherty and Canadian dancer Dana Michel. How strong is the national or international network of artists dealing with queer issues? What is the state of this network and how useful is it for you in your practice?
Amy – I don’t think there is a network as such but many shifting constellations of relationships that exist in time. Some of them have more power and economic heft than others. Some of them are as simple as friendships and acquaintances. In any case it is obvious for me that the constellations of artists and organisations I move in within the UK and international collaborations and projects I have been part of such as Performing Gender, ChoreoRoam, the Lisa Ullmann Travelling Fund or my work with several artists based in Italy have been absolutely instrumental in my artistic development and have given rise to many other really fruitful relationships and collaborations springing up all around. This dynamic ecology is bigger than making good or better art but about cultivating, basking in and struggling with cultural understanding within and beyond borders. This seems to me particularly powerful around queer issues. When one has had the experience of being marginalised or rejected close to home, of feeling other, making connections, finding acceptance and broadening one’s horizons in the wider world is immensely positive. Obviously in the UK at the moment, the practicalities of maintaining such cultural exchange with other countries is in a chronic state of uncertainty due to Brexit. This is intensely depressing for me but perhaps it can be the provocation we each need in creating other models of cultural interaction outside of the soon to be dismantled ones.
PB – We are living in a moment in which gender, queer and sexuality are terms that are being discussed and explored creatively. In your opinion, how can we continue to investigate and expand these issues without falling into repetition, stylization or trend?
Amy – I think acknowledging the inevitability of repetition, stylisation and trend is a great material to work with! I mean no one wants explorations of queerness to become empty or valueless but queerness has always been about subverting and reclaiming cliché, failure, mainstreaming, superfluidity, convention and overexposure so I’m not worried. I think so long as artists are aware of those cultural structures you mention and position themselves according to their own values and interests then I think queerness will continue to be important, just perhaps in ways we can’t imagine at the moment and perhaps we won’t like at first.
PB – Future plans or projects?
Amy – I run a course at Siobhan Davies Dance for young makers called Next Choreography, and this will culminate in a fantastic day long festival of experimental work on July 22, 2018. I’m also planning to tour The Forecast and TOMBO(Y)LA in 2019. Meanwhile I'm continuing to juggle teaching, performing other works, outside eyeing and whatever else comes. I’m also grateful to the Dancer’s Career Development Fund for supporting me to pursue some study in psychology this year which I’m looking forward to.
* (You can read the articles here http://amy-bell.com/writing/)
Amy Bell, Photo by Elisa D'Errico
Amy Bell – The Forecast (London Premiere)
Tue 6 March, Wed 7 March 2018
The Place
17 Duke's RoadLondon WC1H 9PY London, UK
Commissioned by The Place. Supported by Arts Council England, Tanzhaus Zürich Yorkshire Dance
Book tickets now or visit the Facebook Page Event
Choreography and performance: Amy Bell Sound and music: Jamie McCarthy Dramaturgy and animation: Hetain Patel Lighting design and production management: Lucy Hansom Creative consultant: Peggy Olislaegers
Amy Bell is a dance artist whose work embraces performing, making, teaching, writing, dramaturgy and curation. Her theatre solo The Forecast takes an ironic look at identity in flux and her installation piece TOMBO(Y)LA investigates unruly gender embodiments. Amy’s performance work comprises theatrical, installation and site-sensitive projects for a range of artists in the UK and Italy, including Tino Sehgal, Lea Anderson, Maresa von Stockert, Alessandro Sciarroni and Chiara Frigo. She has curated experimental events for Rambert and Yorkshire Dance and will present Splayed, a festival of disruptive femininities at The Place in June 2018. Amy is a Work Place Artist at The Place.
For more, visit her beautifully designed website: Amy Bell
Find her on FB: @Amybelldance
