Kneebone - The Dance Project  

 

TC Howard from the Kneebone book publication

 

Dance has always given me a bridge to connect myself with others and to the world around me. Moving, sensing, feeling, belong to us all and as a young girl, unable to decipher what I needed to say and who to say it to, it offered me personal dialogue with my inner world and the world that moved around me. I see, so often, how it expands our experience and vision of who we are, how it draws people together and talks a powerful universal language. We carry with us our life-shaping events and our epic everyday adventures; our bodies can ‘dance’ these and transform them when words aren’t always enough. We dance who we are. 

 

It has been the greatest of privileges to share a rare journey of curiosity and discovery with such a diverse and committed group of women. Rachel Kneebone’s profound work has compelled us to move, urged us to respond, and impacted on our creative selves. We’ve become a company, an ensemble of dancers, each with an individual voice and a collective sensitivity; creating work to share, to mean something and to remember. The ripples from the impact of this creative chapter we’ve shared I’m sure will continue to resonate with us for some time to come.

 

It is impossible to predict, when you are stood at the beginning of something - when you are at the top falling in or at the bottom looking up - what lies ahead. Once you’ve said ‘yes', but it didn’t feel like you actually made a decision, and you nodded like it was always intended to be and moved towards it with an inevitability, and a knowing that whatever happens next will be important in some way.

During the process of making and discovering the work I would sometimes find myself looking around the room, taking in the array of women; women from different cultures and backgrounds and of all ages. Trying in some way to feel and to measure who they were, trying to ‘comprehend’ the immensity of what they carried with them. All their collective histories, wisdom, joys, struggles, fears and hopes and even the daily obstacles that many of them had overcome just to get in the room. We had found ourselves together, heading ‘somewhere’, we had all said ‘yes’ and had made an unspoken pact to continue the journey together. It was not always a smooth ride and the way forward had not previously been cleared. But for me it was a room full of optimism, an abundance of personalties, a treasure chest. Through the laughter and play and the difficulties, we shared a lot of ourselves and not necessarily with spoken words. This was not just dance; we were making and bringing something to life. Even if we didn’t quite ‘understand’ it or could hold it as you can with something ‘known’ or solid, we somehow knew we had stuff to say.

What I hoped for, and what evolved, was a room, a creative space where real life could still happen; an exciting place of possibilities, where personal thoughts and experiences could be transformed and a collective identity could emerge. It needed to be a safe place where you can take a risk, be you and dare to be ‘more’. A merging of worlds, a new set of rules, a break from convention and a shared purpose.

 

One of the most elusive parts of the show that finally emerged late on in the process, but is one of my favourites, is called Vistas, Portraits and Parties, where fragments of stories co-exist and stack up to build an ever shifting landscape. In the vastness of the Town Hall the audience have to actually move their heads from side to side to catch full sight of it. Rituals are repeated (but are never the same), tantalising glimpses of secret lives pass by and others are sketched in the distance. During the show, at the start of this section I placed two chairs in the centre and perched myself at the side to wait, but the ‘Vistas Portraits and Parties’ had already set itself in motion. I let go of all responsibility in that moment, held mesmerised, watching our world go by. Proud to see the women I had come to know taking ownership and sharing who they were  - but also seeing them anew, for the very first time.