You first came to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe ten years ago with The Back of the Bus, which was a huge success – how does it feel to be bringing a new work with you to Scottish audiences this year, and what can we expect?

Yes we were quite swept away by how popular Back of the Bus was and now this is our fourth time at the fringe. Anatomy for Accountants is the bravest work I have ever made. I feel really proud to bring it to Summerhall but also a little nervous. Anatomy for Accountants is full of heart and I show everything. I show the body being beautiful, funny, vulnerable, functional, sensitive, pleasurable, powerful and soft. It’s a work of extreme contrast between the wild beauty of the body and its fallibility with the relentless drive of infinite economic growth. It’s strangely fun for a serious work. I think it’s fun because we all price time, our skills and even our identities every day but just going one step further and pricing your body and your life magnifies ludicrous ‘selling yourself’ really is. Ha it’s pretty meta selling a show about selling yourself.      

The new show – Anatomy for Accountants – is described as ‘A high-risk, high-return dance show about how much our physical bodies are worth in a society ruled by cold hard numbers.’ Tell us about how this combination of themes, the body and economics, came about?

Firstly I looooove the body and secondly I read a book called ‘6 Capitals’ by Jane Gleeson White . The book explored using accounting to solve the world’s problems and ultimately rejected the idea. Systems were found for putting a price on everything – financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social, relationship, and natural capital. It made me think more about how complex the worth of the body is. It holds our genes, our ancestry, our memories, our love, our heartbreak, our joy, our grief and our history. How do you price that??? Pricing art is pretty funny too. The same art can be worth nothing or a lot in the blink of an eye. I wanted to explore the violence of value and what I see as the antidote – the full complexity of the body. Anatomy for Accountants came from a period in my life of radical honesty and non-avoidance so it contrasts my own personal stories with our system of accounting for things – money and cold hard numbers! I think people are easily seduced by numbers. They seem so solid and accurate but there’s often so much spin, especially with prices.   

Dance-theatre is a particularly emotive, immersive form of performance. What excites you the most about sharing ideas and telling stories in this format?

The audience get to have big feelings. Sometimes something in the air changes and the whole space is charged, people lean forward, draw in  their breath and suspend. I love this state of being. It sounds so obvious but I think it’s because everyone has a body. The ultimate is always to get the audience to feel the show in their own bodies. That’s why we have live music in our shows. Dance is also hilarious. I like that the body can move from the ridiculous to the sublime in an instant. It’s just so versatile. Combining spoken word and movement as a way to tell stories makes so much sense to me. There’s so much nuance in the tilt of a head or the curve of a hip and the verbal storytelling invites the audience into that nuance. 

Depreciation is a huge theme within Anatomy for Accountants. Tell us about this and how it shapes the show.

Ha well I am 42! That’s like 100 in dancer years. I love ageing. It gets such a bad wrap. It’s like we see no value in ageing and that’s like seeing no value in living.  There are so many things I love about ageing. I wouldn’t give up my smile wrinkles for anyone. I like my older, wiser heart with its scar tissue and my softer bits. In Anatomy for Accountants depreciation comes as a shock, something we didn’t account for. Depreciation is framed as negative but it’s where all the transformation happens. In Anatomy for Accountants depreciation takes us to dark places, to things we find hard to talk about. In New Zealand the average time it takes for people to make insurance claims for sexual assault is 15 years after the event. Some things take so long and we are older when they come to light. Somehow, even in a dark place we find the light. In the process we are changed. We become ourselves. The blanks are filled in with wrinkles and stories. Depreciation is where the body, heart and mind converge. Depreciation isn’t that bad…..unless you are looking at the cold hard numbers. The fact is that people don’t live forever. It’s ok to be finite….unless you live in a world where infinite growth is expected. I made Anatomy for Accountants when I was 39. That’s when I started thinking more about depreciation. There are so many myths about women over 35 and their value. They are myths. Depreciation is interesting. There’s some freedom in it.   

The show stars you as the lead, joined by musician and performer Tristan Carter as ‘Chief Financial Officer’. If you could describe your performance dynamic together in one word, what would it be?

One word is too hard. Sensitive, dynamic, frenetic, synchronised, playful, wild, free, specific.

Finally, how does Anatomy for Accountants handle these big issues? At the end of the show, what would you like audiences to have gained?

Embodiment. I want them to celebrate their own bodies. Everything about their own bodies. I want them to celebrate everything their bodies can do like taste and touch and smell and sing and cry and laugh and pee and wriggle and sing and dance. I want them to know they are alive and that all their senses and nerves and viscera exist. I want them to relish aging and feeling and existing. Embodiment. To dance is a rebellion. Dance is fleeting. There is no product, not really. There are just moments where people are in a room together and feel completely alive. That’s how I handle these big issues. I dance and I invite people to feel alive.