Collectif AHHHH on improvisation and their time at LCDS

Studying at London Contemporary Dance School isn’t only an environment that equips students with the skills to be independent makers. The experience also provides opportunities for students to meet like-minded and different individuals, to collaborate on shared artistic interests.

One such example is Collectif AHHHH, a collective comprising friends Mia Dupin, Sarah Bender, Lila Abdel-Kader and Guillaume Lolliot who created Collectif AHHHH in their third year as BA students at London Contemporary Dance School. Here we find out more about the collective and their time at LCDS.

Q: Why did you create Collectif AHHHH?

A: We became friends during our time at London Contemporary Dance School and realised that we had similar ideas in our vision of dance and common desires of projects and performances for the future. Coming from France and Switzerland, we share the same interest in building a closer relationship with the place we comefrom and creating performances in a local environment.

Q: What is the ethos or mission of Collectif AHHHH?

A: “Dance, improvisation, theatre, composition, and other art forms crossing our path.”

As a collective, it is important for us to gather, work collectively, help each other and above all, enjoy ourselves. Freedom, frivolity and play in our creations are also what matters the most to us. Most of our creations start from crazy talks, we laugh about it, but in the end, we see where this can go and we make it happen.

Improvisation has always a big place in our creations, to initiate movement material, stories, or specific situations. But we also use improvisation as a philosophy in the everyday life of the collective, as a way to let our imagination and our desires (even the craziest ones) be alive.

We love discovering and experimenting with new things, especially when they come from other artistic fields. We draw our inspiration from other art forms such as cinema, literature, music and performance. We are a nomadic, non-hierarchal collective, and it is essential for us to travel and change places to meet new people and exchange our ideas.

The environment in which we create and perform, and the audience we want to reach are driving forces of the collective as well. We work mainly with site-specific; we create in certain spaces, and we adapt our creations and ideas according to the place we are in.

Q: Tell us about your recent projects.

A: During our time in Switzerland, we’ve done three different projects: On improvise as part of the live exhibition Découv’Art, (Dé)looking in Lausanne, and Chez-nous as part of Fais Comme Chez Toi Festival.

On improvise involves Giullaume, Sarah and Lila performing three times for 10 minutes each day. Time isn’t a constraint in this piece, and we interact with the audience as much as possible.

(Dé)looking is a performance suitable for all audiences which mixes dance, theatre, improvisation and comedy. The piece puts the characters and their stereotypes in the foreground of the space and is also playing with the proximity of the audience watching the piece as if they were the customers of the hair salon. We started rehearsing this project almost one year ago, in December 2021, in LCDS studios. (Dé)looking is a piece that we want to continue developing in different cities, and in other hair salons in the future!

Chez-nous is a piece specially created for Fais Comme Chez Toi Festival in Sion and was also a piece we started creating in our third year at LCDS. The festival allowed us to perform in front of a big audience, to have a lot of feedback on our work, and to meet cultural and stage directors. This was the opportunity to forge links with professionals, and to create a platform of exchange for all the artists.

Chez-nous started with lots of research: improvisations, poems, objects, words, texts, and our own memories. All those resources allowed the performers to embody the piece and to have a rich flow. We were then able to arrive at the theme of Chez-nous which is the house, being home, memories, remembering, stories, intimacy, inside, everyday life, automatic, habits... We hope to take it to other places in the future.

Q: What parts of the BA course at LCDS most informed your practice now as collective?

Firstly, we met each other at LCDS! In general, we think our BA course opened us to different practices and various aspects of performance. It taught us to be bold and try everything.

Specific improvisation modules were invaluable, especially with Laura Lorenzi and Seke Chimutengwende. We all chose to do the ‘Improvisation into performance module’ in third year, and we got to improvise together and that really informed our practice now as collective. The composition modules with Lola Maury, Sue MacLennan and Jovair Longo, and the site-specific module with Rosemary Lee also informed our practice.

Choreology is also now anchored in the way we see performance, and in the way we make creative choices in our collective, and so learning about this in second year was amazing.

Q: What are you most excited about for Collectif AHHHH?

A: We’re really excited about exploring new spaces to perform and can’t wait to see where our future collaborations will go. We also want to keep the ethos of the collective alive, always.

Q: Where do you see Collectif AHHHH in five years’ time?

A: We still hesitate... either performing on the moon or The Place’s rooftop…

Follow Collectif AHHHH on social media: Instagram and Facebook.