BWW Interviews: David Harradine, Artistic Director of FEVERED SLEEP
By: Carrie Dunn Mar. 13, 2012
Hello David - how did you come up with the concept for this?
We were invited by Wellcome Collection to make a performance piece as part of an exhibition about x ray crystallography and the Festival Pattern Group - a group of scientists, artists and designers who collaborated together during the 1951 Festival of Britain, using images from crystallography to inspire designs for a range of materials such as ceramics, wallpaper and fabrics.
It was a very broad invitation and there were lots of possibilities, but I had been doing a lot of work around light and photography and performance, so I was interested in seeing what connections there might be between these things and the science of crystallography. I wanted to make a dance piece as I had also become interested in exploring how you visualise movement, which in a way means visualising time; how you record something that is in constant flux; how you remember things that are constantly changing and disappearing; how you hold onto traces of bodies that have already become absent.
All these things seemed to me to be about visualising invisible things, which is exactly what crystallography is: a scientific process that enables us to see the invisible arrangements of atoms within a molecule.
So the concept wasn't mine, as such; my task was to find a way to make a connection between my practice, and Fevered Sleep's areas of practice, and this very different field called crystallography, which is also something we've always been interested in: finding links between areas of investigation in science and in the arts.
How much did you know about the science behind crystallography and long exposure photography prior to the commissioning - and did you have to do a lot of research to make it come together?
I knew nothing about crystallography, but I had been doing a lot of work with light and photography, including a project in which I collaborated with photographer Greg Piggot to make a room-sized camera which we used to make a series of long exposure portraits of people, presenting this in an installation setting.
I'd also been exploring pinhole cameras and movement, so all the things on the art side were familiar to me. I'd spent a lot of time mixing chemicals in darkrooms, but other than that the science of the project was new.
But as soon as I started to read about x-ray crystallography, I could see all the ways in which it connected to what I was doing already: because it is a science based in light (x-rays); because in early crystallography photographic paper was used to capture data; because the preparation of a sample being examined involves processes of growth and stillness and concentration - all of which felt choreographic to me, and familiar; and because the final stage of the crystallography process is on of analysis and interpretation - which seems to me to mirror the task of an audience looking at a more or less abstract dance piece, or a blurred and abstract pinhole photograph.
All my work - all Fevered Sleep's work - grows through extensive research. I see the making of projects as nothing more than the process of working through questions, developing ideas, and seeking answers; a project that didn't demand deep and collaborative research (which might be with other artists, with scientists, or with all sorts of people) would be a hollow project for us.
When it comes to choreographing something like this, how do you go about conceptualising the movement, bearing in mind the need to also create shapes that work for the photographic element?
The movement in Stilled is entirely improvised, although it's improvised within fairly strict rules. I was interested in the structure of crystals, and this became the starting point for the conceptualisation of the choreography.
A crystal is interesting because it has the same structure in all spatial dimensions: it's a structure that repeats on all planes, and it's a structure that repeats across scale, from the very minuscule to the massive. In a crystallographer's lab a crystal might be grown from a "seed" - a starter of some sort which encourages crystals to grow around it.
I wanted this to be the basis of the choreography, and so those rules are simply about making that happen. Any of the performers can start something, and it might be something as simple as a rotation in the shoulder.
What's interesting is how this rotation then grows and develops - how it travels from body part to body part, or from body to body; how it changes intensity and rhythm, how it multiplies, how it appears in different planes, different directions, different spaces; and how it can become a game, appearing at intervals in the piece, perhaps 2 or 3 or 5 or 8 hours after it first appeared, a memory, a return to an earlier idea.
The relationship between the performers feels very intense because of this: they're all really watching each other and aware of each other, looking out for an opportunity to start something or to join something that someone else has started.
The other aspect of the choreography, as you say, is to do with the needs of the cameras, and this is another kind of game: a game between movement and stillness. Because pinhole cameras are so basic - just a lightproof box with a piece of photographic paper inside, with a pinprick of a hole in one side which acts like a lens - it takes a long time to get enough light into the camera to make a picture on the paper, and in Stilled this is anything from 4 to 50 minutes, depending on the intensity of light.
If one of the dancers moves in front of a camera, they disappear. Or if they hold their legs still, say, but move their arms and torso and head, then the image will show a pair of legs disconnected from the rest of a body.
The performers can play with the cameras, and as the photographer in the piece I can also "direct" the movement to an extent by placing the cameras in particular relation to the dancers: I can try to make them still, or to hold a particular body part still.
That said, I never know what the images will look like until they're developed, and part of the pleasure of the piece is to try to decipher the photos, to work out what they are showing, and how much time they might contain.
Tell me a little bit about founding the company to begin with - what gave you the idea?
I co-founded the company with Sam Butler in 1996, a year after we graduated from Middlesex University. The course we'd done was really focused on devising, and it was very cross-disciplinary, so we studied theatre, dance, music, visual art, and explored many ways of making work.
The company was really just a way for me and Sam to carry on exploring the process of making, and we've always been more interested in exploring ideas and using our work as research than we have been loyal to a particular artform: so we work in theatre, installation, film, publication, dance and photography, and we're always looking for new ways of working and for new ways to develop ideas.
Our work with dancers is relatively recent, but we've found the expectation of narrative in theatre work really limiting in the past, so dance has been a way for us to explore images, ideas, space, light, sound in a more formal, conceptual way, and it's been a really exciting process of discovery. I think the role of an artist is simply to be present in the world, to be hyper-attentive, and to be a deep thinker, and to make work that tries to articulate those things that might otherwise go unnoticed, or to find ways of communicating thought and sensation through means that are poetic and metaphorical rather than descriptive or explanatory. Well, that's what we try to do in our work, anyway!
Do you have favourite collaborators, either in terms of other companies or individual performers?
We tend to work with the same people again and again, because once we've found someone who's interested in our way of working, we find we develop a shorthand and a language that allows us to work more deeply on each new project.
Of course, given all the different kinds of things we do, we find ourselves working with very different people on different projects, but at the moment some of our closest collaborators are performers Robin Dingemans, Petra Soor, and Laura Cubitt; lighting designer Hansjorg Schmidt; film artist Charles Webber; musicians Jamie McCarthy and David Leahy; book designers Valle Walkley and dramaturg Synne Behrndt. It's an international line-up of really brilliant artists and thinkers, and a group of people who have helped us make some of our finest work, including Stilled.
STILLED is a durational performance work by FEVERED SLEEP, one of the UK’s foremost independent theatre companies whose headquarters are at the Young Vic. ‘STILLED’ is performed by Robin Dingemans, Valentina Formenti, Sachi Kimura, Matthew Morrison and Petra Söör at Siobhan Davies Studios in London on Saturday March 17th between 1pm and 8pm. ‘Stilled’ is simultaneously a dance piece and an exhibition of pinhole camera photographs which are taken of the performers in action and then exhibited throughout.
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