The Dancer's Cut
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
How do you create dance movement? What parts are played by the different dancers, and by the choreographer? How does movement become choreography? Is there a difference between a movement sequence and a dance phrase?
info_outline
Staging Schiele: Bonus Episode
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
In this bonus episode listen to the Q&A with Sanjoy Roy and Shobana Jeyasingh on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, after the London premiere of Staging Schiele on 4 November 2019. This accompanies Episode 5 of Surface Tension which charts the process of creation, rehearsal and touring of Staging Schiele.
info_outline
Staging Schiele
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
Episode 5 of Surface Tension charts the process of creation, rehearsal and touring of the company’s latest piece, Staging Schiele. Presenter Sanjoy Roy chats to Shobana, composer Orlando Gough, costume designers COTTWEILER, visual artist Ben Cullen Williams and dancers Dane Hurst, Estela Merlos and Catarina Carvalho about their respective collaborations on the piece.
info_outline
Science and Science Fiction
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
Episode 4 of Surface Tension investigates the impact of science and science fiction on Shobana Jeyasingh's work. Presenter Sanjoy Roy asks what are the connections between science and dance and sci-fi and Shobana’s choreography?
info_outline
Counterpoint, TooMortal & Outlander
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
Sanjoy Roy asks Shobana about the practical and artistic questions of making work for different spaces. We speak to Jenny Waldman who commissioned Counterpoint in 2010 to be performed in and amongst the fountains in the courtyard of Somerset House. Too Mortal was commissioned by Dance Umbrella and the Venice Biennale to be performed in churches. We talk to Betsy Gregory, former Artistic Director for Dance Umbrella. We move on to Outlander from 2016, made for a monastery in Venice.
info_outline
Faultline
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
Episode 2 of Surface Tension turns the spotlight on Faultline from 2007. Presenter Sanjoy Roy recollects his memories of the piece, the style, aesthetic and evocative atmosphere. The anxiety, the coolness and the swagger of what it meant to be young, British and Asian at that time. We talk to Londonstani author Gautam Malkani, composers Robin Rimbaud and Errollyn Wallen, plus filmmaker Pete Gomes who all collaborated on the piece.
info_outline
Configurations
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance's podcast
When Shobana Jeyasingh met Michael Nyman.
info_outline‘Watch a dance work as if it were a science fiction film’
Episode 4 of Surface Tension investigates the impact of science and science fiction on Shobana’s work. Presenter Sanjoy Roy asks what are the connections between science and dance and sci-fi and Shobana’s choreography?
Shobana talks about her interest in science fiction, and how she became re-acquainted with science as an adult (after not paying attention in school!). Bladerunner, The Matrix and Terminator are among Shobana’s favourite films and have all inspired her work in some way.
Shobana and Sanjoy look back at Phantasmaton (2002) and the influence of the book ‘The Location of Culture’ by Homi Bhabha and how it introduced the difference between the concepts of ‘fusion’ and ‘hybridity’. Dancers created their own versions of hybrids as part of the rehearsal process.
The moment of the dancer glancing in bharatanatyam was a key motif for Shobana and filmmaker Pete Gomes and they played with this figure to provide the background and set for Phantasmaton.
Conversation moves on to the ‘uncanny valley’ concept and robotics, which are central to Trespass (2015) where Shobana choreographed a duet with a robotic ‘entity’ and a human dancer.
We hear from Rauiri Glynn, Director of from the Interactive Architecture Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL about the collaboration with Shobana on Trespass and how this process diverged from the normal method of building a robot, allowing them to introduce a whole series of behaviours for a dancer to interact with.
In Flagrante (2014), was commissioned by Marina Wallace at Central St Martins for an exhibition on cell division - mitosis - with the aim of communicating how cells divided to the general public, with dance as the mediator for that process.
Marina talks about bringing together the scientific and choreographic worlds and using dance as an intermediary to explain what scientists do in the lab.
For this project, Shobana was partnered with Dr Kim Nasmyth, Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford, who joins us down the line from France and talks about how they communicated about the process of mitosis and how to present it in a dramatic and watchable way. The end result was the film In Flagrante.
Lastly, we move on to Contagion from 2018, which took the Spanish Flu virus as its source material, which killed more people than in the entire four years of the WWI.
Virologist and leading specialist in influenza Dr John Oxford talks about the flu and its global impact. He asked Shobana ‘How are you going to choreograph dance around the flu?’