BWW Interviews: David Harradine, Artistic Director of FEVERED SLEEP

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. 

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.

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 17^th 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.