News Story
Internationally renowned choreographer and designer Theo Clinkard is working with our 2024-25 cohort of MA Dance: Performance for their first performance in The Place theatre, and they are devising a unique experience for audiences with A Great Unsettling — a large-scale installation event that considers how ambiguity can both absorb and unsettle us.
Across four hypnotic hours, the thirty-strong cast will edit and reveal each others inner worlds to simulate the slippery and layered complexity of our feeling landscapes; particularly those moments that allude definition.
Theo is currently interested in how choreographic work can act as a host for multiple realities to coexist simultaneously, enabling a diversity of perspective and experience for both performer and witness.
We caught up with him in between rehearsals to get an insight into the co-creation process of this piece and his experience working with our students.
Can you tell us a little bit more about A Great Unsettling?
I wanted to create a different set of circumstances within which I am making, so I am for the first time playing with duration and also pushing the tiered seating back and having the audience sit on the edge of the open space, in a single row of chairs. It creates a very focused space, one where you can recognise detail, and I am excited to see how that affects our watching. The audience are free to come and go, and the dancers will have a different experience performing and holding space for that long.
We are working with a set of plywood stage flats, so the space is very rarely revealed in its entirety, and the dancers use the capacity of these panels to be agents of how they are seen, almost like editors. They are editing our experience of watching.
Movement-wise, we've been playing with how we might transform the way we see ourselves, the way that we're seen, drawing different emotional landscapes, characters even, sensations, feelings, imagining that through the way they engage as dancers, the performers can almost paint the space around them.
I love people-watching and my work often acts as a portrait of its cast. Currently, I like working with performers to consider how the things beyond the immediately visible, like their imagination and creative choices, can be part of their portraiture. We have been talking a lot about investment in the movement material and the quality of movement. How their attention affects an audience' attention. I would like the audience to sense and feel what they're seeing in their own bodies, so in my creative process, I’m looking for these moments.
What's the story behind the title of the piece?
I was thinking about the ordinary and the extraordinary, the expected and the unexpected, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and how when something is slightly off or different to what you expect, it is a very physical, unsettling experience. Sometimes something is not quite what it seems, but it's familiar enough for us to have an expectation, and we've been playing with that, with movement material, with sound and costume.
The space is also unsettling, in that it's literally, physically never settling, at any point. There is a lot in the world that's unsettling right now. I want my work to reflect what's going on in the world, not in a direct, literal way, but as a sense or feeling that is reflective of the times. That is part of my responsibility and my interest as an artist.
What are the challenges but also opportunities with creating a durational piece?
I think that there's a different kind of watching that can be elicited through duration, a softer embodied gaze perhaps. I think a dance can teach you how to watch it in its first few moments, so I am conscious of how we guide an audience into the long-frame. I like making work with a really high expectation of audiences and trusting them.
My work is not all singing, all dancing, bells and whistles or offering everything an audience thinks it wants. There is a lot of dance that commodifies itself, and I would like to challenge this culture of “shopping” dance in how we receive it
I am interested in how we can be a good audience and how we, as makers, can encourage audiences to be open and inquiring. I think durational work and practice-led work encourages a lot more of that rich experience. I like work that needs you to be there and participating in your observership.
How have you found working with our students?
It is a large group of 28 people which is both exciting and challenging. I am really trying to make sure that I'm genuinely including everyone and ensuring everyone feels supported. It is a really international group and we realised that because of our many different backgrounds we have many different points of reference, so trying to find a common language for this work is key as it’s largely improvised and ideas-led.
You're a returning project leader — you've been working with London Contemporary Dance School for a while now. What is important to you about teaching the next generation of dance artists?
I want to encourage the students to not think of themselves as needing to fit into a mould that was made by those of us who were performing and creating 20 years ago, but to actually create their own languages or ask different questions and respond to the world that they are part of right now. We are living in radically different times to when I started working, and it would be unfair of me to use my own experience as a template. I would like to encourage their resourcefulness and maybe a kind of punk spirit. There's such a broad spectrum of dance happening in different places, different contexts and with different values and it’s a shift that schools like LCDS are responding to brilliantly.
Your own career is a really good example of what we often call, 'portfolio career'. What advice would you give people entering the industry now?
On a very practical level, try to find cheap rent or more affordable locations to live. Explore different strands to your career, different art forms, and other roles - side hustles. And don’t perpetuate the idea that the only work of value is art making. There are plenty of other jobs that people do that fulfil them, that are contributing to society and feed back into the way you create your work. There’s all kinds of lives, so carve your own path. For years, I said yes to every opportunity that came my way.
If I could go back, I would be much more focused on what I genuinely care about and what I really want to do, what fulfils me on a day to day and who I share rooms with. As a wider culture, we need to think about how we ensure sustainable careers and longevity and we need for our funding bodies to support this better, endless generations of artists are exhausting themselves and burning out. Go for the long game.
The space is also unsettling, in that it's literally, physically never settling, at any point. There is a lot in the world that's unsettling right now. I want my work to reflect what's going on in the world, not in a direct, literal way, but as a sense or feeling that is reflective of the times.
— Theo Clinkard
