Original Score: Collaboration. Iteration. Risk.

(Have a listen to this track by Cat Myers while you read or after.)

Heaven is other people.

We’re talking about collaboration. Collaborators, full collaborators, are what keep us going. The surprises they bring into the process. Their questions. Their doubts. Their convictions. With Totentanz, we are continuing our relationship to designers Anna Yates and Emma Jones. And we’re forging new relationships with composer Cat Myers and photographer Brian Hartley. One of the major experiments we’re testing with the #LoveDanceScotland commission is the scope of these collaborations. This series of blogs is a chance to organise our thoughts on each of these collaborations.

First up, Cat. The collaboration between music and dance is in some ways the most fizzing at the moment. That’s because we put music at the centre of our early residencies. But it’s also because it’s the first time Shotput is working with a composer. So there are no givens. Each moment feels very alive.

Dance and music share a certain ephemerality. If we build the wrong set, we’d have to hack it apart, toss it out back, and build something new. That would be terrible: fiscally, physically, environmentally. With movement and music, a different sort of revision is possible. We can make our movements more angular or more curvy, throw away an entire day (week, month) of careful choreography. Cat can scrap twenty musical themes, or change the tempo, or take the one thing that works and build out from there. This realisation is hard but always a liberating, and it’s one that feels like we learn again on each project. So our collaboration with Cat has allowed all of us to think iteratively.

The more we make work, the more we insist on iteration.

‘Why iteration?’ asks the wonderful writer George Saunders, and answers like this:

Let’s say I gave you an apartment in New York City, one that I’d had decorated. That would be nice of me. But it might feel a little impersonal (since I don’t know you). Say that I then allowed you to redecorate it, at my expense, in one day. The result would be much more like you than my initial attempt. But it would still be limited by the fact that I gave you only one day in which to do it. The result would reflect, we might say, only one of the many possible people that you are.

Now let’s say that, instead, I let you take out one item a day (today the couch, tomorrow the clock, the next day that ugly little throw rug) and replace it with an item of equal value, of your choice. And I let you do that for, say, the next two years. By the end of that two years, that apartment will have more “you” in it than either one of us could have imagined at the outset. It will have had the benefit of the opinions of literally hundreds of manifestations of you; you happy, you grouchy, you stern, you euphoric, you blurry, you precise, and so on. Your intuition will have been given thousands of chances to do its best work.

That’s how I see revision: a chance for the writer’s intuition to assert itself over and over.

If you are a maker of dance or theatre, and if you were touched by the above passage, we cannot recommend Saunders’ book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, enough. It’s a masterclass in writing. And what is making dance and theatre if not writing in space? But ‘the writer’ in our field isn’t singular, it’s communal. And so Saunders’ New York apartment becomes something more like a planetary system. So how does iteration work when you’re working collaboratively?

Well, we can talk about how we are doing it with Cat. There’s a million other ways, but this is ours.

Cat - and all of the collaborators - were involved in some very early discussions. These weren’t music-specific. Or specific to any element of the production. In these conversations, we directly address the questions that lie at the heart of the project. During these meetings, we are directors and dancers and designers and composers as well, but we are first and foremost curious humans.

Then, with Cat in particular we started sending tiny snippets of music and dance to each other. Back and forth and back and forth, like George Saunders’ revisions. Even if it’s sometimes very tempting to just say, ‘Could you just write a song and we’ll dance to it?’ or ‘Show me the dance, and I’ll make a track.’ - we avoid doing anything ‘whole’ like that, and instead try to stay really small and partial.

So at a certain point, we had a bunch of short Cat snippets on our laptops. And one came about and we said, ‘That!’ The infamous that! that! it’s totally that! we don’t know why, but it’s that.

And herein lies the first irony because, inevitably, one month later, we were all sat there in the studio with our heads in our hands while listening to this perfect track (which Cat had by then extended into a full song) for the 500th time. And realised that it wasn’t right. The dance we’d made to it had become saccharine and uninteresting. Other material had grown, and this material had just…flat lined. And Cat - in a beautifully articulate ‘kill your babies’ moment - said, ‘I’m just going to scrap this whole thing.’ And we began to protest, and she confirmed: ‘It has to go. All of it, except this.’ And she played about three bars of one instrument. And she was right. That was the heartbeat. And she went away for a few days, and by the end of the week, she’d sent us a new song that unlocked something much more interesting choreographically. Her music dislodged a fixed and uninteresting movement idea.

That track died. But we believe in ghosts. We believe the stuff that you cut - especially the good stuff but the bad as well - all that stuff haunts the performances. We believe an audience feels this haunting. And the presence of this ghost makes the performance more alive.

We’ve given an example of a musical iteration prompting something new and more buzzing in the movement. And the opposite is true as well, we think. One day, Cat sat in on a very early rehearsal. We almost always find our vocabulary through improvisation, so there we were improvising. Even without anybody else in the room, these moments of improvisation always feel really vulnerable, so to have someone who is really ‘with us’ and excited to be on the journey is crucial. Here’s Cat:

Watching Lucy and Jim dance brought the music to life and gave me so much inspiration on where to go and what to do next. At first, dipping my toes into the collaboration between music and dance seemed like a daunting process, but as soon as we were together in the room, everything just seemed to fall into place. Hearing their inspiration for each of the dances and watching the way they moved within them gave me so much direction. I instantly knew what mood, tempo and vibe they were leaning towards for each dance. Our worlds have collided in the most exciting way.

So we’ve been writing here like everything is perfect. And that’s a mis-portrait. The jaggier corners are maybe the most instructive. We know, for example, that it was imperfect that we (Lucy and Jim) made some choreography before Cat was on board, before we knew the piece would be funded, before, even, there was a #LoveDanceScotland commission for anybody, let alone us, and therefore before we could pay a composer. And we kept saying that we’d get rid of that choreography. But the problem is that we really like it. Because it came from instinct rather than intellect.

And yet, we’ve just looked over a video of our first ‘run through’. And that very choreography was looking a little pale around the edges. We suspect that it will be the next ghost.

One last thought. We think when it comes to collaboration, you’ve just got to try it. Collaboration is essentially a leap of faith. It’s a risk. So much performance-making at the moment is risk-averse. Well, that team doesn’t have much collective experience so maybe they need an old-school mentor. Or, audiences here don’t really like dance, so could you emphasise the narrative? Bullshit. Maybe that old-school mentor is perfect. Maybe a narrative would be cracking. But it’s not because it minimises risk. Risk is what makes an audience wake up. Because they are aware that they are witnessing something real.

(Now if you’ve not listented to Cat’s track, scroll up to the top and take a listen. It’s banging.)

You can read more about Totentanz here. The project is commissioned by Dance Base Scotland, Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre and Tramway as part of #LoveDanceScotland. Supported by the Scottish Government’s Performing Arts Venue Relief Fund through Creative Scotland.