25 years after Michael Nunn and William Trevitt’s critically acclaimed debut performance Pointless at the Roundhouse, pioneering dance company BalletBoyz will return to the stage with Still Pointless leads audiences on a retrospective journey through a quarter of a century of daring commissioning, producing, and performing dance across stage and screen. We interviewed one of the dancers, Kai, to share how they feel.
This show looks both backward and forward at once. When you are dancing a piece with history like Critical Mass, do you feel more like a custodian of legacy or a creator of something new?
Thinking about lineage and legacy, Critical Mass sits somewhere in the middle of those two things, and when I’m performing it, I have to consider being a both custodian and a creator at the same time. By definition, contemporary dance talks about the present, so performing something that was contemporary 25 years ago requires reinterpreting to make it able to say something about where we are now. Dancing a work like Critical Mass means honouring what has come before, aspiring to what may lie ahead, and that way create a container for both the past and the future. But when I perform the work live, it is solely about that present moment in time.
BalletBoyz is known for blending film and live performance. How does that shift the way you inhabit the stage? Do you feel you are dancing for an audience, a camera, or something in between?
The depends on the what the work is and how it is intended to be perceived, but for me as a dancer, although I have a degree of responsibility for the audience, ultimately my responsibility is about performing it for myself as an artist and for the integrity of the work. The added factor is that BalletBoyz sits in the margin between contemporary dance and classical technique to an extent, and classical dance has a different presentational project to any audience, whether it is live on stage or for the camera. As a dancer, I have to think about where I sit within that, and how I balance projecting out versus projecting in.
The programme spans a wide range of choreographers and styles. Which piece challenged you the most personally, and why?
We’re currently about halfway through the rehearsal period, and I have found Fiction particularly challenging. The character I perform in the work is separated from the rest of the group, which means I have struggled to find a consensus with everyone else about what the work considers and what it has to say. Fiction was created very specifically on and for the people who were in the studio at the time, so now I need to start working on making it my own. We’re still at the point in the rehearsal process where we’re replicating something that has come before, and we as a company of dancers need to now determine how we make this something new that we can give our own contribution to. It brings up questions about how we inhabit the history and legacy of each work, whilst also transforming it into something that is reinterpreted and forward-looking. But we have to learn the work first, because how can you change something that you don’t know? We need to be able to understand it first in order to translate it.
There is a signature irreverence to BalletBoyz, a refusal to take ballet too seriously. How does that philosophy show up in your rehearsal room day to day?
I’m not sure that the irreverence of BalletBoyz is a refusal to take ballet or dance too seriously. The definition of serious doesn’t mean cold or formal, warmth and joy and personality can also be synonymous with taking something seriously or being passionate about it. The misconception of what serious looks like warps the perception of what dance can mean and how it can be viewed – I think the irreverence is more about finding a different path to creating valuable art. We don’t need to suffer for what we do. How this manifests in the studio, which is full of hard-working, passionate, dedicated, and serious artists, for me is about the fact that I am allowed to be a person before I’m a dancer. This allowance to be myself adds layers to the work that is presented on stage. The philosophy also shows up in the studio through the realisation that creativity is, has to be, both play and hard work at the same time, and understanding that art is not found through limitation but through freedom.
You are performing work by choreographers such as Christopher Wheeldon and Maxine Doyle alongside a brand-new commission. How does it feel to move between established voices and emerging ones within the same evening?
For me, dance is dance, identity is identity, refinement is refinement, so the difference between an established voice and emerging voice isn’t necessarily materialised in us as dancers or in how we present work on stage.
If you could describe this 25-year journey not in steps but in a feeling, what does Still Pointless mean to you as a dancer right now?
I wouldn’t be doing what I do now if I thought that it was pointless, which is what the 25-year journey of BalletBoyz encapsulates. For some people dance may be pointless, and the importance of dance is being diminished all the time, which we’re being told through funding cuts and reduced performance opportunities and everything else that’s happening in the industry. But there’s a duality to dance: it can mean nothing but it can also mean everything, it’s something that is both completely imaginary and also the most real thing we can do. For us as dancers, it has always had value and it always will, and that gives us a reason for doing it, otherwise we wouldn’t put ourselves through any of this. So this is all we can do, all we can do is continue dancing. I don’t mean that in a hopeless way, I mean to say that this is the most hopeful thing I or any dancer can do in this environment – just to simply keep doing it.
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