Terpsichore and the architects: 'I have a deep sense of my body's architecture … the skeleton', said choreographer Trisha Brown in her prelude to the Royal Academy Forum which brought the worlds of dance and architecture together. In these pages Jeremy Melvin summarizes contributions, from a classicist, two architects, three choreographers and artist David Ward

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004 by Simon Goldhill

SOFT BODIES IN HARD PLACES

Jonathan Burrows

Here are some random and contradictory thoughts about space and about our dancing selves.

Why is it that when you watch a wonderful dancer you get the impression that they can go anywhere, that they can fly, whereas in fact they're stuck in this little box of a stage? It seems to me that we conspire between us, performer and audience, to create virtual freedom in space. So how does a choreographer create that freedom, how can they work with the space? Do they manipulate it, push it and pull it, or should they allow it to unfold and speak for itself?

For myself I find that if you push and pull the space it works well, and if you let it unfold itself, even allow yourself not to make any decisions about where you go, it still works well.

And I find that if you work with the architecture that surrounds you it will support you, and if you consciously rebel against the architecture that surrounds you it will go on exerting its influence anyway. The proportions of a rectangular stage can make all the difference between a performance working or not, being focused or not. But at the same time where a choreographer places something inside the rectangle of the stage can also utterly alter its impact.

How then to negotiate with the shape of the stage? In one performance recently my dancing partner and I had the difficulty that the space was narrow from side to side and we got pulled all the time into the middle. So we gave ourselves the thought that everywhere we went was middle and everywhere was as important as everywhere else, and somehow it worked, and somehow we stopped the force of the walls from pushing us inwards.

There is also this unusual phenomenon: when you perform in a room with white walls the audience are more inclined to relax and laugh; when you perform in a room with black walls they tend to sit in silence and hold their breath.

Why do people tend to think of front as a flat wall? What happens if you imagine front as being anywhere that feels like front, that doesn't yet feel like side? If you try this when you're dancing you feel liberated for a moment, you feel your body as curved and soft compared to the surrounding walls, you occupy space in an unbounded way.

Sometimes when I climb mountains I'm aware of the whole complex machine of my body and mind focusing on shifting, balancing and adjusting with each step, improvising my journey with unconscious brilliance and joy. And I wonder what the endless flat surfaces of buildings, roads and pavements do to us. Try one day walking through the city as though it's a mountain landscape. Soft bodies in hard places.

In the '60s and '70s there was a lot of dance coming out of New York that was fascinated with everyday movement, and everyday movement was given the name pedestrian movement. The image of the human being in the city landscape. And these fascinations among dance makers arose, I think, out of a desire to reflect the actual physical relationship we have with the architecture of cities. It was a desire also perhaps to anchor the dance in a real place away from the illusion of theatre, so that the performance could happen here and now, in this room, this building, street or rooftop, and not in an imagined other place.