Interview: Charlotte Darbyshire of I THINK WE SHOULD START OVER at Fall For Dance North

FALL FOR DANCE NORTH, the annual international dance festival, returns this year between September 26-October 7 with two signature programs featuring four international companies, two Toronto companies, and Ballet BC, as well as the premiere of a CBC documentary and an indigenous-led competition in the field of Jingle Dress, the Tkaronto Open.

The signature programming at Meridian Hall includes South African choreographer Mthuthuzeli November, two US companies, Gibney Company and Charlotte Ballet, and two UK companies: Ballet Black, which celebrates dancers of Black and Asian descent, and Candoco, a company that has created an international conversation around the connection between disability and dance. BroadwayWorld Toronto spoke to Charlotte Darbyshire, Candoco’s artistic director, to continue this conversation in advance of the company’s Canadian debut, and to let audiences know what’s in store during the festival.

BWW: Candoco’s presence stood out to me because of its focus on the intersection between dance and disability. As a person with a disability myself, I’m always fascinated by the possibilities surrounding the incorporation of disability into dance. I was wondering if you could speak to your company’s background and the ethos behind it.

CHARLOTTE: Candoco Dance Company was founded in 1991 by two artistic directors, Celeste Dandeker-Arnold and Adam Benjamin, both dance artists.

Celeste had been lead dancer with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in the seventies as a non-disabled dancer. And then, she had an accident, on stage at the Manchester Opera House. She became quadriplegic, and had thought at that time that her dancing career was over. But many, many years later, she met Adam Benjamin through the spinal injury hospital that Celeste was connected to. He was an artist in residence, and through conversation, they found their experience of dance was very different. They asked: What are our movement possibilities now? What if we were to share some time and some space in the studio, and build the conditions in which we can feel safe enough to find our way to explore new possibilities?

And it was a very tender, intimate, space of unknowing. Which is such a beautiful, but not always easy, place to be in. Very quickly they recognized the potential and the infinite possibilities. So they opened up a weekly class to other dancers that Adam and Celeste knew, and other disabled people involved in the spinal injury unit at Stanmore. And it took off. There was a lot of interest.

Then, they were invited up to Yorkshire Dance Centre to do a week's residency. I was a first year student there, and I was given the week off to go and do this workshop with 20 others, disabled, non-disabled people, dancers, people from all different backgrounds and ages. It was a very rich and curious open space. We created a piece that week together that we performed back at Northern School to a standing ovation. We discovered that this is a place where movement really speaks to us on a human level, and it felt like new languages were possible, new relationships, new perceptions. It was a very exciting time.

And so I was with the company for the first 8 years as a founder member and dancer. I never expected to come back as the director, but it did influence everything that I've done ever since.

I care deeply about the ethos, which is really about this encounter, as you say, the intersection between dance and disability, between one person and another, and the embracing of our very different experiences. Very different perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, desires, bodies. We've always tried to look for where the artistry of the dancers meets with the artistry of guest choreographers to see what we can create. In that sense, we've been expanding perceptions of what dance can be.

BWW: I love what you said about it being a space of unknowing. Everyone is very vulnerable because we don't even know what we don't know, and what we’re going to find out.

CHARLOTTE: I think there is a vulnerability. I didn't use that word, but I use the word tender. There is a vulnerability when we don't know. But it's also such a vast place of potential, isn't it? Creativity and new possibility. And even now to this day, 32 years later, I can still touch into a similar place. As we've evolved as a company, there's much more experience in some ways in the room, as more disabled dancers have gotten training. Not as many as would like it; there are multiple issues still. But I can still touch into that place of mutual discovery and mutual learning. The feeling is that what we are creating or discovering together neither of us could do without the other. That's the spirit of the collaboration and the exploration.

BWW: Is there any moment of that sort of creation and discovery that has stood out to you in your history with the company? Something that you thought, “this is really special”?

CHARLOTTE: Oh my goodness, there are so many. A recent one was that we were doing some research with a very established choreographer from France called Maud Le Pladec. We spent three days together. The beauty there was that because she's so experienced in her own methodology, she was able to leave that to the side and open herself to what was present and what was possible with this particular group of people and their individual experiences. So that was my most recent experience of when new territory is available.

It was also such a privilege to be part of those early pioneering years, traveling around as a group of very close friends around the world, meeting disabled and non-disabled people. There were some very special moments, and sometimes they were big public moments, like an unexpected response from an audience. Other times they were very quiet, a connection that might happen between two dancers in a special needs school in the outskirts of some city, a very private space, where something is happening that wasn't perceived to be possible, but then there it is. Unfolding.

So sometimes it's in the work in the studio, and sometimes it's in performance or in the professional realm as the whole. What I love about Candoco is that it spans from very, very beginners, people experiencing dance for the very first time, or people that never imagined it to be possible for them, to the super experienced, some of the most virtuosic dancers in the world. That's the privilege of Candoco’s history and experience and reach.

BWW: So how do you connect such a wide range of dancers? How, do you bring them in and then how do they work together?

CHARLOTTE:  They don't always directly connect. It's more like a sort of web. But because of our history and because of the international opportunities we've had, there is a network. Even in the UK, there's a very strong network of very established, inclusive dance companies. And we work hard to keep that connection and to support one another and to support all these fantastic dancers here who wants to learn more about this. How can we support each other to support that person's development? Then, we have a similar European network, and we meet in areas of research. We recommend artists to each other and these artists travel between these different companies for peer professional support.

For every performance that happens as a workshop, and for every professional activity, there's a community activity. We have teaching and learning programs. We have the performance and touring program. We have a research and artist development program.

BWW: So it’s a three-pronged approach of learning, research and development, and performance.

CHARLOTTE: Yes, exactly.

BWW: What barriers do you find still exist for disabled dancers? I'm sure they're myriad.

CHARLOTTE: There are a myriad, and it's a really important question. Our understanding of access is growing and expanding all the time; even though we have 32 years’ experience, we're still learning. With every new dancer, there’s new learning about the very unique and particular needs of that dancer, and the particular skills and artistry of that dancer. We're learning, of course, that access is way beyond ramps, and that many of the barriers are attitudinal and cultural. We try to be quite explicit about a social model of disability and we try to offer and advocate for best inclusive practice wherever we go. We then use our learning and experience to talk with wider teams, so when we're in residence somewhere, the learning ripples out from the studio.

Our goal is to remove all the barriers to getting into the studio and to focusing on the artwork. We do this by creating access opportunities for training and funding. It's exhausting enough to be a creator and to create art without having to deal with barriers before you're even in the studio itself, such as transport.

What we're also becoming more aware of culturally is the labour that goes on for many disabled colleagues and artists day to day, and how important it is for companies like Candoco that have the privileges and the profiles to work on removing those barriers when they're in the workplace. We can take responsibility for the conditions that we create. So a lot of our work is on what happens around the art to allow more equity in the workplace.

We are also recruiting for a new disabled co-artistic director at the moment. I'm aware that I'm sitting in the place of a being a non-disabled leader. I'm also aware that my disabled colleagues would be able to answer this question with much more direct and embodied experience than me. I'm learning from them about the multiple barriers that disabled artists face. If the barriers don't exist for us, often we don't see them in the first place. We don't realize that they exist. It is astounding and phenomenally frustrating to slowly come to understand just how many barriers there are in being present in spaces. Just being able to show up and be there.

BWW: And we live in a culture where, if you want to be thought of as “professional,” you need to keep showing up. Because a great deal of what we think of being a professional is consistency, and something about disability is that often it's not consistent.

CHARLOTTE: Yeah. I mean, certainly traditionally we think of professionalism as involving consistency. I think it's more, as you say, the ability to show up and to work with what's there in that moment, and to have the confidence and the support and the opportunity to keep doing that.

BWW: How did you connect with Fall for Dance North? This is going to be your Toronto debut.

CHARLOTTE: We've been in conversation with various centers in Toronto for a long time, but talking about barriers, with various barriers such as COVID, we haven't made it there yet. I met Ilter [Ibrahimof, FFDN’s artistic director] last November, when he came to see Candoco premiere new work at the Lillian Baylis. We had a very brief conversation. And then I was thrilled that he then invited us to share this shorter work.

The work we will be presenting was made earlier this year by a choreographer called Jamaal Burkmar, who is a young but very strong and clear choreographer who usually makes work for outdoor spaces. It was the interaction with the audience that I particularly enjoyed about his work. The piece you will see is often performed outside, but also can be performed inside. It’s a duet for two dancers who have worked for Candoco for a number of years.

BWW: The piece you’re presenting at FFDN, I THINK WE SHOULD START OVER, incorporates a number of different podcasts and audio recordings. What’s the idea behind using that type of audio?

CHARLOTTE: Jamaal always works really closely with music. He's got a very interrogative, almost nerdy, and specific relationship with sound and with music. That's where the seeds of his creativity are. Then, it's how they then relate to the individuals he's working with. So when he met the two dancers from Candoco, one of them is a jazz musician. She also had this ferocious appetite for the detail, the textures, tones, rhythms, of sound. Her disability means that sometimes she has to communicate in different ways on different days. It's not constant. It's evolving for her, and she's learning new ways to communicate. So a lot of their conversation was around communication.

Jamal enjoyed listening to a regular podcast between two guys, but what he was really enjoying was their relationship and their challenging of one another, their love of one another, the wrestling that was really about communication. How things are said, how they received. The pitfalls and challenges and joys of connection through communication. So they started exploring podcasts and then audio books of different descriptions of the universe and different perceptions. They then used those words as starting points for movement.

So the piece has a lot of musicality; it’s gestural and full-bodied, but from the words themselves. Not always from music, but from sounds and in tension and tone.

BWW: You mentioned that one of the things that draws you to this choreographer in particular is the way that he interacts with the audience. How does that manifest in this piece?

CHARLOTTE: The work I'd seen previously was for his company called Extended Play, where the audience was able to select from a jukebox a number of songs which would impact how the piece unfolded. So there was a sense of agency. This is slightly different in that there's not audience interaction in the same way. I think, though, that there's a still an inherent interactivity in how people access and understand language.

How we communicate with one another is a theme. It feels very human. On one level, it's a sort of philosophical piece, about the universe and how it came about. It’s also a very human piece, because it's about the relationship between the podcasters, but also the dancers that you see in front of you. It's both specific and abstract, very literal and gestural in moments. So it feels very immediate.

BWW: Does the piece also account for audience members with disabilities?

CHARLOTTE: Yes. People who want different ways in to the experience are welcome. There is an audio description version that you can access through a QR code. You can access the transcription of the sound score and of the text through the podcasts. There are a number of different ways in which audiences can meet the work.

BWW: It’s great that you’re thinking not only the needs of the people on stage but the needs of the people in the audience as well.

CHARLOTTE: Of course. It’s a constant learning from one another, isn't it? One day you're an artist, the next you're an audience member. It’s that route that we want to hold the potential for, and it's super important that we can come at things in our own way and that we provide multiple ways in, so that we can enjoy the work on our own terms.

Fall For Dance North runs from September 26-October 7, with performances of multiple programs. I THINK WE SHOULD START OVER will be performed as part of HEARTBEATS, Signature Program 1, on October 4-5. For more information, visit FFDN’s website.

Photos of Maiya Leeke and Caroline Lofthouse in I THINK WE SHOULD START OVER and of Charlotte Darbyshire by Camilla Greenwell

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