The work is presenting many challenges but it is also remarkable in its everyday experience. As a company, we believe that we are developing artistically by undertaking projects of this nature and that the groups we are working with are also given the same opportunities to develop that we give ourselves. We are not doing it for the group or doing for ourselves, but are instead holding the balance in an artistic exchange.
Dancing Inside has been made possible with funding from the Arts Council's Dance Included scheme. Motionhouse have a long history of work in custodial settings - work developed in partnership between Louise Richards and myself and together we have developed a set of tools that have enabled us to pursue this work further.
I feel that it is important that I point out that it was never our intention to work solely in custodial settings, or schools or special care centres or indeed any of the many and diverse social settings we have found ourselves in. We are and always have been artists working in dance theatre. What has been our central aim is to try and understand the core of what it is that we do and to find a way to express this and share it with whomever we encounter through teaching and performance.
It is ultimately, as with all things, essentially simple - the question to be asked at the beginning of a project is what is it about what we do that is relevant to this group of people? Once that question has been engaged with then a strategy can be devised for the exchange of this information.
The next question that has been very important to us is one of personal honesty in projects: why am I doing this? Financial remuneration is important and that importance needs to be acknowledged, however it is not the sole reason. Motionhouse is fortunate to have a large amount of work available; we do not have to undertake a prison project - we have a choice - so for us the work has specific artistic rewards.
We are very clear that we are not therapists, care workers or missionaries. We are artists. We acknowledge that our own experience of our work has taught us that it can be therapeutic, liberating, empowering and affirmative. It can offer these things but because it is art it can also be disturbing, painful, challenging and a bloody grind as well. A therapist uses a set of tools to help a person to recover. We do not know how to do this - we have not trained to do this. We know how to make art and we attempt to share this experience because we believe it to be a vital and fundamental element of the life force that sustains us all and helps nourish our humanity. When we share art we are being present to the moment together. In our work there is an exchange.
Over the next 18 months we are going to be leading a series of residencies at HMP Dovegate. The purpose of these residencies is to try to facilitate a group of men from Dovegate, who have had no previous experience of dance, in making their own performance work. The residencies cover intensive teaching by the company and performance in the prison of our current show - Volatile. The performance of our own work in this context is an extremely important element in our exchange process for this project.
In this work at Dovegate the company is engaging with the notion of site-specific work, the relationship between a work and its location. The 'site' of this work is the group of men that we are working with, and they will decide the location within the extremely limited spatial choices left open to them. It is hoped then to encourage them to make a dance to be performed at a place of their choosing within the establishment.
The project is specifically sited in Dovegate to develop and build on the existing relationship between Motionhouse and Roland Woodward, the Director of Therapy. Roland was previously Principle Psychologist at the therapeutic community in HMP Grendon, where we have delivered several residencies in the past and where we developed a relationship of trust and mutual respect. In the first Grendon residency, which was a week long, Louise and myself managed to take a group from their initial suspicion of us, and preconceptions about dance, to contact improvisation dancing by the end of the week. This is a short time to take a big journey.
Contact improvisation is a challenging and exposing dance form to deal with in prison but if it is addressed in the right way it can be a liberating one. It is 'as it says on the tin' contact, two partners dancing and supporting each other's weight through a dynamic use of touch. Using your bodies to support each other. Touch is a big issue in prisons as it usually means either sex or violence - now here was a situation in which much more body contact than normal was to be experienced. Also it was 'improvisation' which basically means making it up as you go along, without the security of a pre-rehearsed order. This can be very exposing and unnerving.
The liberating aspect of contact dancing is that in the early stages the focus of the work is very much about the relationship between the participants rather than the individual, which is the case for so many dance forms. Thus contact allows, albeit in a strange kind of way, less personal exposure to the act of dancing but it demands more exposure in the relationship with the partner.
In the second Grendon residency, this time four weeks long, Louise and I took a group from complete beginners to making their own short dances, which were then performed for the rest of the men on their wing. It is one thing to dance in front of a group with whom you have shared this as a common experience; it is completely different proposition to dance in front of a group who have had no experience of what you are about to do. Status and appearance are vital in prison: it can be the difference between respect and being preyed upon and victimized. We were amazed we managed to do this.
It is very strange experience to be with a sixteen stone armed robber who is now transfixed with fear at the prospect of 'going out there' to perform. The rest of the group rallying round to say "you can do it, think of all the work you have put in, we're all shit scared."
Roland was our contact at the prison but he also participated in the residencies. He went through those experiences and danced with the group and performed with the group. In terms of personal exposure, to allow yourself to be held upside down six feet off the floor by inmates while you are a therapist, one of the 'other side', is another level of trust again. He has been on an artistic journey with us. Roland believes in the intrinsic value of art for its own sake and is keen to establish it as a core activity in the culture of the therapeutic community at HMP Dovegate. The therapeutic community is part of a national service to provide residential therapy to volunteering prisoners and is a distinct part of HMP Dovegate.
Each time we undertake a project we wish to try and go further. The artistic goal is to develop and discover new things - in this way we learn and grow as artists. When the Dance Included scheme came along we identified it as an opportunity to develop on the work we had done at Grendon and the relationships we had made.
The Dovegate project we are now embarking upon will allow us to work more intensively, to take a step on to see if we can take a group even beyond the making of a dance, to considering the context of that dance and its relationship to its location. This is a question that I find is beyond many young professional dancers that I meet. What an exciting prospect, what might we discover on the way?
This investigation of the relationships between performance, site and location is the central thrust of the artistic research being currently undertaken by Motionhouse. The major touring works are endeavouring to engage with these questions as a matter of course. In this way we are sharing the heart of our work with the people we work with. Through this sharing we are testing, growing and learning together, both the members of Motionhouse and the residents of Dovegate.
Kevin Finnan is joint artistic director of Motionhouse Dance Theatre. Contact Motionhouse on 01926 887 052 or email info@motionhouse.co.uk