How did you come up with the idea of a film work
and what was the response of Echo Echo Dance
Theatre company to the idea?
When I first arrived and walked the city wall I was
struck by Derry’s extraordinary urban topography.
includes neighbouring areas and housing estates
whose inhabitants perhaps rarely mingle, as
if traumatic histories have inscribed unseen
boundaries, and very real walls, dividing them
into mutually exclusive urban areas. Looking out
over this vista, I felt very strongly that Without
should be a cinematic response rather than a
live participatory project, as originally envisaged.
I’d never made a participatory film project, and
Without engaged around four hundred people,
including big groups of schoolchildren, and
volunteers working behind the scenes, as well
those we see moving in front of camera. It was
never a live performance, but, during filming, many
people saw the live action we captured. Without
took about eighteen months to make and has been
installed in Echo Echo’s studio on Derry’s city wall
several times, in August 2019 it will be exhibited
again.
It has also been shown in Dublin and Cardiff.
Echo Echo has won many community projects,
and prides itself on being a local dance theatre
company, embedded in the heart of the city and
they invited me to help them create something
bigger. When I came up with the film idea, they
embraced a process very different to making live
performance, and formed unexpected partnerships
and relationships. Fascinatingly as dancers they
began to move without restriction through their
city, to get to know it geographically in a way
that perhaps challenged how they knew it as local
people, and hopefully opened possibilities for
future work.
Can you describe the work?
Without consists of an almost circular sevenscreen
video installation (running time, on loop:
22 minutes approx.), in a gallery space. Spectators
stand at a central point, from which they can view
complementary films of Derry sites, shot from
a point on its city wall. At the beginning of the
loop you see seven views of the city in long wide
shots. The cityscape and the people – groups
of fifty skateboarders, bicyclists, tri-cyclists, or
tandem riders – are like distant dots, gliding in lines
and groups through urban streets, playgrounds,
carparks, along the city wall.
As the camera zooms in, people appear in more
detail, dancing. The camera moves closer and
closer to moving bodies, and very slow zooms
produce close-ups of circles of people dancing in
spaces with complex histories, and cultures. Finally,
the faces of the people of Derry fill the screen, as
they walk slowly towards the lens. Over twenty
minutes or so, we move from very distant long
shots of the cityscape to close-ups of individual
people.
Could you tell us more about your relationship
with your future audiences?
As an artist I’m really interested in reaching an
audience that doesn’t always see art or wouldn’t
choose to go to a gallery or a theatre. If work is free
to view and shown in non-threatening situations –
outdoors or, in this case, in a dance studio where
lots of community classes happened – I can reach a
different audience and entice them back for more.
You can pop in when you’re doing your shopping
and you can come back another day with someone
else, at no cost. Derry does have an unemployment
problem and associated poverty, and it’s important
to encourage people excluded from artworks. My
commitment to showing work free, in unexpected
places, with unpredictable content, is just my way
of trying to welcome people in.
You worked with the city and its inhabitants as
the context and focus of the work, can you tell us
more about that process?
Comments by participants who saw the finished
films suggest that they were intrigued to see
their city through outside eyes, and also from the
perspective of a camera on the wall. Derry’s walls
are a tourist attraction and traditionally, historically,
they define a fortified Protestant city. People who
grew up in Bogside don’t walk on the walls, and so
the view of Bogside – including their own homes
– from those walls really engaged their curiosity.
The green place just at the base of the wall, where
we filmed people dancing, speaks to Derry’s social
history as a city of working-class slum housing,
now demolished. Catholic Nationalist people in
those houses weren’t allowed to vote, and you
know the roots of the Civil Rights Movement were
put down there. But Bogside is also designed for
surveillance, and when I looked at it, it was so stark
that I thought, ‘They can’t hide’. So, I was absolutely
trying to function as a surveillance camera that
zoomed in to find something peaceful rather than
to find trouble. It was almost like pursuing secret
harmony; zooming in to find secret acts of circle
dancing.
I think I managed to portray a city as a dancing
space – a moving space. I use ‘dancing’ carefully
because Without is really about movement
of people and figures through a city and I’d
never been able to do that before in film. I think
people were really intrigued to see a daytime
city transformed from everyday grittiness barely
registered as they pass by. I tried to slowly create
and reveal a magical, metaphorical landscape,
without changing anything but the speed of
images and events; dissolving figures in and out of
grass or tarmac, or by slowly zooming in. Slowing
dancers’ motion transmutes the city into something
dreamlike, without losing the texture of its actual
life, and that really moved and transported
audiences. I wasn’t sure I’d manage that, and it’s
due partly to the techniques of filming and editing,
and especially Graham Miller’s haunting score,
which enables a transformational journey from
everyday sound to an almost mythic soundscape.
Without seemed to produce a sense of seeing
their city through fresh eyes for some of the
general public who came to see it. One lovely piece
of feedback from a man in his sixties made me feel
that we had done the right thing. He said, ‘Thank
you. You’ve helped me see my city through new
eyes and see it at peace.’ Think of all the memories
he carried, as someone of my generation who’d
lived through the Troubles. During the research
and creative processes, I learned a lot about the
invisible city of tacit boundaries and no-go areas
that defined divided communities. One Echo Echo
dancer said she’d lived in the city all her life, and
had never set foot on one of the roads up which
I asked her to dance, with local children. The
dancing truly enabled people to move through
city spaces normally closed to them because of
patterns, habits, memories, and associations. To
have dancers move through the city as if there was
nothing to stop them emerged as an important
project aim. Gliding figures on wheels flowed
freely through the city, unhindered by embedded,
invisible, but very real and understandable barriers.
What was Without’s relationship with the City of
Culture Festival? Could you say more about how
you see the work in that context and your doubts
at taking the commission at the onset?
I felt I was both working and not working for the
City of Culture. I was working to contribute to a
festival programme, but the work had to be for the
city itself, and its people, beyond the festival. It was
only after I’d finished that I realised Without also
documents a moment in time, especially for child
participants, some of whom are almost adults now.
When they get a chance to look back on it, they will
encounter their city – and their own lives – at that
moment in time and it may become a multi-layered
legacy, almost a historic document as well as a
work of art. The word ‘legacy’, is bandied about, so
maybe I should say it’s an artefact that is also an
archive, and I’m very pleased about that.
I’m pleased, not least because I arrived in
Derry with very significant doubts about my own
place there, as a person, and an artist. I am of
a generation that grew up seeing on BBC news
virtually every night the effect of the Troubles
on cities like Derry and Belfast. I was absolutely
puzzled and baffled, as a young person, by what
on earth the British army was doing there, and why
soldiers were pointing guns at young people who
were my age. I had felt confusion, bewilderment,
and shame really, at the role of the British army in
those Troubles and when I was asked to come to
Derry I asked myself,
A. Who am I to do this work? I don’t know that
history well enough; it’s very complex.
B. Shouldn’t it be somebody local?
C. Wouldn’t local people resist an English artist,
whose voice – especially on a tannoy shouting
instructions from the wall – would inevitably recall
dreadful times?
And then, to top it all, Thatcher died as I was
filming. I was very aware of how raw memories
were – of the hunger strikers, for instance – and,
with her death, they’d bubbled up to the surface
very fast. I feel very strongly that when you do
participatory work – when you move from place
to place as an artist – parachuting in is a danger,
even if you’re aware of it. I tried to arrange as many
meetings as possible, especially at the beginning,
with artists – not just Echo Echo, but other local
artists – to see their reaction to the commission. I
met all the people who might dance in the project,
gauging their feelings. I made it part of my practice
to walk the city, taking in feelings and talking to
everybody I met. I watched Paul Greengrass’s
Bloody Sunday(1) – an extraordinary film. Artistic
Director of Echo Echo, Steve Batts, really knows his
politics and history, so I quizzed him on the history,
the city, and the problematic role of an English/British artist
After making work in a variety of contexts and
media how would you describe yourself, and can
you say more about your approach to community
settings as an artist?
I tend to call myself a choreographer and a filmmaker.
I’m quite wary of terms and labels applied
by others, because they can be limiting and
even distort perceptions of what one actually
does. While it’s not quite accurate to call me a
community dance artist or choreographer, I do
work with communities and I create ... performing
communities for a brief creative endeavour,
initiating and sustaining a time of creative
endeavour – together. I create a community around
a project, but I don’t make work that is devised with
the community. In negotiating with a community,
I will not compromise the importance of the work
of interrogating things. If you have a vision, as in
the cinematic vision of Without which develops
from wide shots, wheeled vehicles, and concludes
with faces in close-up, what is required to realize
it emerges from following the logic of that vision.
In this case, Without negotiated an aesthetic
dangerously close to the historical surveillance of
the city from the very walls we’re talking about,
which yielded the insights we’ve mentioned. I
learned a lot from working on Without, gathering
as much contextual information as I could, and
then looking at the city, before deciding what my
response would be in discussion with Echo Echo. I
looked at the community in that sense, and I make
no bones that Without is explicitly authored by my
view of what I wanted to do. The final product is an
act of cooperation and collaboration and dedicated
community action. That, for me, is the gift of the
outsider, who not alone has to take responsibility
for the work, but claims certain privileges as she
struggles to realise the vision.
There’s a right to assert yourself as an artist,
and an equal responsibility to respond ethically
and sensitively to the people and the place,
history included. For instance, I was at great pains
to constantly say ‘Is it OK if I get the children
to dance in that little grassy bit out there near
those houses?’, or ‘Is it OK if we tiptoe round
this pub here?’; we tiptoed a lot. Tiptoeing was a
movement motif and I suspect occurred because I
subconsciously knew we were moving over murder
sites, and places where Civil Rights marchers had
waved the white handkerchief on Bloody Sunday
(1972). I wouldn’t always know the traumatic
significance of a location, and I’d have fifty children
moving through it. At times I was fighting back
tears when someone would just quietly tell me
after I’d done it. I was reminded of what WB Yeats
wrote, ‘Tread softly, because you tread on my
dreams’. That quote haunted me because I felt a
responsibility to respect the place, its people, and
what happened to them there, really keenly. I asked
myself constantly if I should be doing this, if it was
fair to the people, if I might be exploiting them.
Without is a vision of the city that I hope is a good
gift for that community – if that makes sense. The
intention that emerged from the process of doing
the work in Derry, with its people, was of finding
the light there and bringing it out.
Info
www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/rosemary-lee
References
(1) 2002; www.imdb.com/title/tt0280491