Russell Maliphant
13 November 2007
St George’s Church, Bloomsbury Way, LONDON, WC1

 

London Ballet Circle members warmly welcomed Russell Maliphant who had trained at the Royal Ballet School and graduated into Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet before leaving to pursue a career in independent dance, working with companies such as DV8 Physical Theatre, Michael Clark & Company and Laurie Booth Company. The Russell Maliphant Company was founded in 1996 and seeks to explore a diverse range of techniques including classical ballet, improvisation, Yoga, Capoeira and Tai Chi.

Russell had created approximately 30 works and had set works on renowned companies and artists including Lyon Opera Ballet, Ricochet Dance Company, The Bathseva Ensemble and Ballet de Lorraine.   

Russell and his Company had received numerous awards including a TimeOut Live Award for ‘Outstanding Collaboration’; a Peoples Choice Award from the Festival De La Nouvelle Dance in Montreal and a South Bank Award.

Tim Rooke began by asking Russell when he decided to focus on choreography.

RM: In 1989/90 I started to learn about improvisation.  Until then I had not been thinking of choreography at all.  But improvisation was about making choices; like painting on a canvas, but creating something on stage.  From then on I was interested in working choreographically.

TR:  Did you do any choreography in dance school?

RM:  No, nothing at all really.  I created one solo - which I thought was very bad.

Russell’s Company has toured extensively, both nationally and internationally and was the first western dance company to visit Uzbekistan. Tim asked Russell how that visit had come about.

RM: As a project-based company, the more you can perform, so much the better.  We work a lot with the British Council and it sends us to places it has a lot of interest in.  At the time it was working in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan so we did a tour around this area.  It was very interesting because usually we tour in France, Germany and Spain – all places which we know very well and where the culture there has become familiar to us.  Whereas going to places like Uzbekistan and Armenia are very different.  We had no idea how the audience would take the work.

TR:  How did they take your work?

RM: Very well actually.  The venue was a very large house with 2,500 seats.  The tickets were sold very cheaply and so people brought their families along – including kids of all ages.

One of the first dances I learnt was a Ukrainian dance.  I grew up in Cheltenham where there was a large community of Ukrainians.  The young boys in the Ukrainian Company were all growing up and leaving Cheltenham and the Company was left with no-one to pick up the dances.  The word got around that I was interested in dance so I performed with them for several years.

It’s great to see the vocabulary that gets used in those dances and I am interested in how those old styles fit with ballet and other vocabularies and mixing them together.

TR:  Tell us about your work with Sylvie Guillem.

RM:  My experience is that she is the easiest person to work with because she is hard working, disciplined and has a good eye.  If she sees something she is not sure about, she’ll question why we are doing it.  We have struggled at times - but then you always have those. 

She has a great facility for movement and she can apply it in many different ways.  She’s not interested in just one technique. 

Sylvie first came to see me when I was working at The Place where I was performing with The Ballet Boyz.  After that evening she came backstage and asked if I would do something for her and The Ballet Boyz.  I was quite taken aback and I thought it would be great.
 
I was quite nervous starting with Sylvie in the studio.  I had left the Royal Ballet the year she joined so we had never come into contact with each other prior to that evening at The Place. As she walked in on our first day in the studio together she asked how I was doing and I said I was OK but a bit nervous and she said “Me too”. 

TR:  When you enter the studio, do you have an idea of what you are going to do?  Is it all mapped in your head?

RM:  If I am starting on something new, generally I go in with some theme to work from.  For that piece I wanted to work with Aikido because I thought that this would work with her interpretation because it goes through the joints.  There are a lot of twisting movements in Aikido where you take an extremity and progress the movement: through the palm and the wrist; from the elbow to the shoulder; to the ribs and the spine then down through the legs.  Whether you have a language in Judo, classical ballet or contemporary dance, it can be applied to whatever body type you have.  That was one of the ideas I took into the studio.

I also wanted to work with her high - lifting her. 

I also had a piece of music I was using at the time because it had a lot of energy and drive. 

I wanted to work in such a way that was physically challenging to Sylvie and that’s quite difficult because things which are physically challenging to most people, Sylvie can do very easily.  If you say to someone “Get up on that person’s shoulders and then fall backwards and someone will catch you”, most people would have trouble just getting up on the other person’s shoulders and balancing there.  She would get up there very easily and stand there very easily and fall back with confidence. 

Another great thing about Sylvie is that she is a very quick learner.  She will work in a way so that you can maintain all that you have done in the studio that day.  If you have done a lot, she will come back the next day remembering the whole lot.  Whereas I have worked with a lot of dancers who come in the next day and half of the previous day’s work has been forgotten.  It slows down the process.  She writes things down; will look at a video and by any means necessary will keep moving on.  She is very conscientious. 

Video is very useful but finding things can be difficult.  In Choreology you can just flip to the right page to remind yourself, whereas looking for the same thing in a video can take time.

Tim then asked Russell about his work called ‘Shift’.

RM:  ‘Shift’ has got a beautiful piece of music, very classical and emotive.  I’ve worked with Michael Hulls on lighting on just about every piece I have done.  He is a fantastic lighting designer.  He studied dance and he thinks about lighting in movement terms.  The first piece I made I worked with a different lighting designer and then took the piece on the road and at some point the original lighting designer couldn’t come with us so Michael came in and we started to re-light with each performance.  We spent a lot of time on the road and this gave us an opportunity to discuss things and see other performances at festivals as well as have the opportunity to keep working on our piece.  So when we came to do ‘Shift”’ we had quite a short time to work in the studio – 10 days – and it was only to be performed twice.  It was made for a studio space in Birmingham, The Birmingham Dance Exchange, next to the Hippodrome.  It was not a large studio and there was no lighting rig so the lights had to be put on the floor.

TR:  I understand that you have just come back from New York. 

RM:  Yes, I came back yesterday.  We had a good reception there.  The work we are doing at the moment is in its very early days and the performances are part of the rehearsal process.

TR:  Why do you think England is producing so many great choreographers at the moment?

RM:  You hear of the different ways people work in France or Belgium and how people work within the confines of the system they have. 

It’s been a good time in England – the dance scene has been growing.

Tim asked Russell about his next big project.

RM:  I am working with Sylvie on something at the moment. It’s a piece involving Robert Lepage, a Theatre Director, and we have quite an extended period over which to work as its not on until Spring 2009 and we started in 2006. However, we only get 6 weeks to rehearse throughout that period. 

TR:  How do you choose the music for your pieces?

RM:  For most of the pieces I have made most of the time I’ve worked with a composer.  I like creating new things.  There have been just a handful of pieces made with existing music.  If I am working with a composer I usually go in with pieces of music which have things about them that I like. For example in ‘Push’, for the duet that I do with Sylvie, we were working in the studio to Purcell.  It was very beautiful music but I knew I did not want to set it in that period.  I wanted to have more musical range throughout the evening.  Part of the premise of that piece was working with Sylvie’s physicality and my physicality and I thought we were so different.  I work on contemporary pieces which are a lot about going into the ground and things which are drawn to the earth.  I always think of classical work as being drawn to the sky.  And I wanted to work with those two elements.  I thought that if I worked with a composer I would be interested in what might come out of that collaboration.

TR:  If you were commissioned to make a tutu ballet, would you do it?

RM:  No, because I feel like the time for me to try that has past by.  If I did it, I would want to do it as an exploration.  I would feel like I would want to know the dancers and engage them personally.  Going into a large company is a different kind of working experience and it’s not my strength. I don’t have the time, or the will, to explore that. 

In my Company we might work together for 6 months or 18 months and certainly over the time in rehearsal you begin to see peoples’ facilities and there are some people you question and wonder about, then you see that person in performance and you can find yourself thinking “Wow, I’ve never seen them move like that before.  That’s fantastic.”  And of course it can work the other way too.  Unfortunately a lot of people do their best work in the studio!

In reply to a question from a member on whether it was possible for dancers to improvise “on the fly”, Russell said that there were so many different varieties of improvisation. 

RM: One form is just to say “We’ll start and will finish in an hour and a half.” That can be interesting depending on how the performer moves and what they know about structuring something with dynamic flow or a juxtaposition with the music but the more people you get on stage, the more difficult it is so you start to have to put rules in place. Billy Forsythe works very much with improvisation but with specific rules and that keeps a theme much clearer and much more manageable. 

One of my first choreographic experiences was when I made a solo on myself that had been quite improvised, but structured.  I knew where I would start and how long it would last.  It had a set piece of music and a set lighting design and I knew the vocabulary I would use in each section.  A company called Ricochet Dance Company saw that piece and asked me if I would choreograph something for them.  I thought “I don’t really do that.  But I could teach them to do what I do – improvising”.  At the time, after I had left the Royal and I had worked with a company called Dance Advance for a little while, I thought “Either I’m unemployed, or I go to make this piece for Ricochet Dance Company.”  I thought it was much better to make the work so I made the piece and I did that by teaching them improvisation. 

We worked for five weeks.  I had set music and set lighting and I narrowed down the vocabulary.  There were good times and bad.  Usually the good times were in the rehearsal.  Then I would watch the performance at night and think “That doesn’t really work” and I thought “No, I can’t do that again.”  Although they enjoyed the process the Company knew, as I did, that the work was not the best.  However, they asked me if I would make another piece for them. 

I did make another piece but this one was completely set because, while I was watching the other piece, I realised that there were things that I wanted to see and other things which I didn’t want to see. 

Improvised performances depend on so many elements and if you have got someone like Winston Marsalis, that’s one great element you’ve got in there, or Peter Martins would be another element.  If you have got 30 people who can support some kind of rules then I can imagine that working but if you’ve got 30 individuals each doing their own thing it could be a disaster! 

Billy Forsythe has made a great study of how to use those improvisational rules to form work that is structured, precise and clear.  So there is a range of work between set and free. 
There is a remarkable CD Rom which he produced about 8-9 years ago which goes through his techniques – some of them are about drawing a line through space with different parts of the body, or marking out a chair through space, or drawing it with your nose or elbow or inverting a shape that you draw first in one plane and then in another, so I think a lot of those rules are to set up a movement vocabulary and that has changed over the years. 

I did classical ballet for 18 years and that is something that I am influenced by and sometimes I think about the dynamics of a glissade or the twists of épualement and can decide whether I want to use it or not.  It’s a classical language that I was doing for years.  But having said that, there are so many other things that have influenced me. 

One of the first jobs I got after I left Sadler’s Wells – after 6 months at Dance Advance – I went to DV8 Physical Theatre who did entirely different work. There were four men in this piece and every one was supposed to look like someone you would see in the street, market or in a pub.  Having just come out of the Royal Ballet I found that very difficult.  I had been working on technique which, for me, was pull-up and which had a line and it was so ingrained in my body.  So if I was pretending I was in a pub or club and, having had too many beers, was now dancing, I didn’t look very authentic. I had a strange predicament - I had this classical technique in my body that was not useful in that context of DV8.  And I thought that I’d like not to have it – for now.  That led me into other ways of working which were more about ways of letting go. 

There was a technique that was quite popular in the States called Release Technique.   People I had met had learned Release Technique and I tried to study it over here but couldn’t find anyone who practised it.  Instead I found a method of Yoga with John Sturge and Mary Stuart who had published books on the subject. It was a long process to let go of those things which had been ingrained in me since I was nine years old but I wanted to be able to pick up techniques but not have them imprisoned in my body. I wanted to be able to drop them.  It became an important thing to me.  I wanted to be able to go into classical language but at the same time wanted to be able to let it go.  And the same with every other technique I learned. 

The reverse of that had happened in my early days after the Royal Ballet School and when I got into the Company. 

When you are in the corps de ballet it can be fairly dull.  If you have got 100 Swan Lakes to perform and you are doing the Czardas and Mazurka, you put on a beard and put on a hat and the only thing that can be seen of you is are your eyes and you’ve got to do these steps that you could do when you were 10 years old.  Maybe you perform them with more panache now but you are not going to go and spend eight hours in the studio working all day just to do that.  So I thought I wanted something else to work on. 

I had always been interested in Eastern philosophy and I thought I would learn Tai Chi.  I went to a private tutor and I practised it obsessively.  Every morning I would do it for at least 45 minutes. I did that for about two and a half years.

The posturing of Tai Chi tilts the pelvis so that the tailbone goes much further forward than it would in classical dance.  The entire torso is dropped and curved inwards whereas in classical dance it is lifted.  When I was doing classical ballet I found I was also working with the idea of Tai Chi and it was the wrong context for that idea.  After a while I twigged when I saw some pictures of myself!

When I started to work in a language that wasn’t classical, it gave me the possibility of moving between Tai Chi and classical and that can be very beautiful. 

When I was touring with Sadler’s Wells in Brazil I happened to see a display of Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art, which is performed in a fairly small circle to certain rhythms and it is fast and winding.  A lot of the kicks are circular, a lot of it is upside down on the hands, and everything is flowing around you.  Its patterns and flow are fantastic - like calligraphy.  It is circular motion in a circle.  It always reminded me of Nijinsky drawings where he would put a compass on his hip a draw a circle with a leg or put the compass on the shoulder and draw a circle with an arm.  You see a lot of those shapes in Capoeira.  That was something else I took up and studied quite obsessively.  But at a certain point I found it was overtaking my body.  If someone else moved in a particular way, I found myself responding in a certain way.  In Capoeira that’s good but for exploring a language that’s not what you want, so I stopped doing it.  I use it now sometimes when I am working with dancers in a company.  I will generally put a phrase together which will have elements of Capoeira or straight Capoeira practice phrases.    

Pretty much every piece I have made has got elements which have been influenced by it – particularly Torsion. 

In response to a question from a member, Russell talked about his work with the filmmaker Isaac Julien. 

RM:  I was asked by Sadler’s Wells if I wanted to work with Isaac Julien.  I have a composer that I work with, Andy Cowton, works with Isaac a lot.  I had heard stories about him so I was intrigued when Sadler’s Wells spoke about Isaac too.  I went to see some of his work which was on at the Victoria Miro Gallery in Islington and I enjoyed it a lot. 

At the time I wasn’t sure whether Michael Hulls, the lighting designer that I work with, was going to be able to work with me on a new project.  I thought that I didn’t really want to work with another lighting designer but I would be interested in working with someone in a different medium. 

When that time came around with Isaac, I thought I hadn’t really seen dance and film work together and I thought that this would be an interesting exploration.  Then through talking with Isaac I thought I would be interested in Isaac and I collaborating together. 

Then it became apparent that it wouldn’t be just be a collaboration but that there was an agenda for a show which was in three parts.  One part was to make one of his existing pieces into a dance work.  That was a piece called ‘True North’.  I had seen ‘True North’ and I thought it was a very beautiful film and a very beautiful meditation and had sensitivity throughout it but it didn’t really interest me artistically to work on someone else’s work.  However, it was a way of ‘shaking hands’ and finding out how this person thought and I thought this would be a valuable and interesting process before we did a collaboration. 

I agreed to that kind of idea for the evening and we had 11 weeks of creating time which I wanted to split with more time in favour of the collaborations - three weeks to ‘True North’ and eight weeks to the collaboration.  It was an interesting time, starting to work in something which had already been created and then starting to work on something that was not yet created.

I like movement and one thing that I don’t like about film and dance is that if I watch something on a stage on a screen there is no movement because my eyes go to the flat surface of the screen.  For the collaboration, this was a very important thing for me. So we worked with a gauze in front which gave the possibility of looking through when you lit certain spaces behind.  That was something I knew from classical works like Giselle and Swan Lake. 

One day we were looking at the images on the screen and we had chosen to work with a very large gauze – the size of the opening.  I was standing close in front of the projector and so cast a large shadow of my head in the middle of the screen and you could see through that part and see the dancers behind.  That was interesting for me because I was looking at these images and thinking that they were huge and how we could dance with them as they were so large and overpowering.  Then we found a way of dividing up the screen which gave the possibility of more movement and gave a better effect than simply putting dance in front of a film. 

It has been an interesting experience and very different for many reasons as it involved different people and a different collaborator.  I am very fortunate to have worked with Michael Hulls for such a long time.  We are very close in that we often go to see a show and think the same thing about it.  He’s also someone I would go and have dinner with or hang out with and we have known each other for a very long time.  Starting a new collaboration with someone else that you don’t have that same kind of shared experience with is quite difficult.  Michael and I have made nearly 30 works together and have been collaborating since 1991-92.  As a result we can go deeper into the language and so with a new collaborator you have to find a new language. 

In reply to a comment from a member concerning the sense of perspective created in some Italian theatres...

RM:  Sylvie and I were performing in one theatre in Rome and someone wanted to show me another beautiful, old Italian theatre with the idea that we might like to perform there.  I was taken to that theatre and it was very small – and when I was on the stage it felt tiny and it was raked as well.  I thought I couldn’t do anything there.  However, when you went out front and saw people on that stage, it looked fantastic.  It was like a Tardis – what you saw from the inside was not the same as what you saw on the outside!

In reply to a question from a member on whether commissioned music ever turns out as Russell imagines …

RM:  I don’t know that commissioned music ever turns outs just as imagined.  At best, it is better than you imagined.  At worst, it is nowhere near it.  Usually it sits somewhere in between.  I was pleased with the music that Andy Cowton wrote for the duet in ‘Push’ because it seemed to straddle the world between classical and modern contemporary.  I hadn’t envisaged how he would do that.

I was making a solo for Sylvie that was going to premiere at Sadler’s Wells and I had been working with flamenco music in the studio and it went very well.  There was a lot of energy in the music, it was very dynamic and just felt great.  I wanted someone to write music for us just like that but they wanted to write it completely different.  They were writing and rewriting things and time was running out and it was getting closer and closer to the premiere yet we were finding that the new music didn’t work.  With three days to the first performance the music was still being changed. That turned out to be one of those occasions when we had to go back to the original music we had been using in the studio since the commissioned music lacked energy.  We did try to create another flamenco piece with another flamenco guitarist but the original piece was so well recorded – albeit in 1956 – that it was fantastic.  The energy that was captured in that recording was very important. 

When I was making ‘Broken Fall’ and I had two pieces of music by Barry Adamson and I loved them and thought that the energy in them was great.  One was classical and was only a minute long – a beautiful classical piano.  Working with it in the studio, I just put it on repeat, playing the same track over and over.  I made this piece that ended up being four and a half minutes long. 

Then the other piece of music was about four minutes long and it was very menacing, driving and intense.   

I went to the composer and said that I liked these two pieces and would be possible for him to extend them.  He said ‘yes’ for the short classical piece and said it would be interesting to him to expand that piece.  But for the other one, he said “No, I’m not interested in make that piece longer.”  He had been asked to do a similar thing for a movie called The Beach and Leonardo DiCaprio was in it and they had him talking through it and the soundtrack was his music.  Barry said that he had tried so many things to make it work but it was all horrible.  However, he said he could make something similar to the original piece.

Barry lives quite close to me and I would go past his house on the way to and from the studio.  I was using this driving piece of music there and thought it was great and wanted more of it.  But the piece that Barry eventually came up with was so completely different – it was not driving but it was kind of menacing, however, it lacked the energy of the original piece.  I was amazed and quite dumbfounded.  He came to the studio and we tried it out and there were many things about it that were quite interesting – although not what I had intended.  There were things about it that were different and some better than I had intended.   I like that about collaboration – at best the work can be better than the sum of the parts.  It’s not the totalitarian method of work which is limited by one’s own imagination.  Three heads are better than one – but that depends who they are of course!  

On behalf of the members, Tim Rooke extended to Russell grateful thanks for taking time in his very busy schedule to talk and offered the London Ballet Circle Members’ very best wishes for the future to Russell and his Company.

Report by Allison Potts