Interview: 'Memories Are Already Alive In Every Movement': Choreographer Amit Noy on Family, Trauma And Making His Sadler's Well Debut

It's fair to say general consensus is never work with your family, yet Amit Noy is doing the exact opposite in his piece A Big Big Room Full of Everybody's Hope. Marseille-based performer and dance maker Noy makes his Sadler’s Wells choreographic debut with the UK premiere of A Big Big Room Full of Everybody’s Hope in the Lilian Baylis Studio this October. For this production, Noy brings together three generations of his own family to explore the memory that is held between bodies and how we process trauma. 

A dancer, choreographer, and writer currently living and working in Marseille, Noy has danced for Michael Keegan-Dolan’s company Teaċ Daṁsa since 2019.

A Big Big Room Full of Everybody's Hope is Noy's first work as a maker, and looks at the “memory that is held between bodies and how we process trauma” - so I started our discussion by asking Noy how he thinks we can communicate memory through movement?

AN: In A Big Big Room Full of Everybody's Hope, we're looking at our bodies as containers for experience; like a bucket catching the rain leaking through a roof. Memories, then, are already alive in every movement. What you've lived determines how you move through the world, how you meet others and yourself.

MP: The work also discusses George Balanchine's Agon - can you explain why and how?

AN: I love Agon deeply and ambivalently. It's a thorny, electric work that manages to hold both the delights and problems of ballet. Agon is rich with deep choreographic craft and beautiful musicality. It is a product of ballet's rigid hierarchies and exclusionary violences; the privileging of the white, thin, athletic and youthful body above all others, but at the same time, it hijacks these dynamics from within.

I was interested in Agon as a model for how to be with 'a bad object': how to love and yet distrust the source, reinvent the material from a place of simultaneous homage and critique. Revisiting historical materials is a way of working what is already embedded into 'Agon', originally it was Balanchine's response to baroque court dances.

MP: How did you analyse/structure your own work in order to discover the themes you wanted to discuss?

AN: I believe the work tells you what it wants to be. I didn't dictate to any of my family members what their contributions would be, I simply told them I would love to work together, and then each of them arrived with their own interests, agendas, excitements, and boundaries. My work, then, was to understand how us, and our interests, can live together under one roof, how different materials and performers interact with each other, sometimes slipping in seamlessly and at other times, crashing together in exciting ways”

MP: Can you discuss the "personal and political practices of commemoration, reflecting on...the Holocaust" in relation to your grandmother?

AN: My collaboration with my grandmother in A Big Big Room... took a very simple shape. We sat on Zoom for hours, and I listened. I listened as she told me what she wanted to say, and eventually, I noticed that a lot of our conversations were around the inheritance of pain - the spectre of violence, and how it has marked her life. In the piece, she recounts two anecdotes which illustrate her ambivalent relationship to the question of memorialisation as a Holocaust survivor. She is questioning how grief and pain are taken up by the state, who use it for their own ends and agendas, and refuses a collective tendency among Jewish communities to take solace (perhaps too easily) in the role of the victim.

MP: Researching you I came across four questions you posed on your website that didn't have answers…perhaps now is the time?!

"How am I welcoming history?"

AN: In trying to meet the shitstorm that is the present, I look to the past for tools for survival.

MP: "How am I loving and being loved?"

AN: As much as I can, as often as I can.

MP: "How am I present to violence and repair?"

AN: I am trying, at the moment, to think and act more deeply about repair.

MP: "How can I be most alive?"

AN: By dancing.

MP: Thinking more broadly - what's the relevance of art/dance in the current political climate?

AN: The theatre is a space that can hold radical, complex, and terrifying questions that are perhaps not easily answered in debate, legislation, or an Instagram post. To sit with these questions together in the dark, and to allow our feelings to lead seems relevant.

MP: What do you hope people will take away from the work? Personally and overall.

AN: With a bit of luck the work might change people; open up a window to the possibility of transformation or repair. In the face of persistent and horrifying violence, we need more strategies of repair.

Amit Noy's A Big Big Room Full of Everybody's Hope is at the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells from 2 - 3 October