Dance Techniques 2010

200 Interview
Gill Clarke Interviewed by Edith Boxberger
Movement and Learning can
Happen Everywhere
What types of training have you done, and what
influenced you? My teaching has been influenced
continuously by my own learning, my dancing and performing.
I never went to a three–year professional
training course. I studied ballet from five till I was eighteen,
just some evenings a week as a hobby, a passion.
I met contemporary dance partly through artists from
London Contemporary Dance Theatre whose training
was Graham–based. That technique was never very natural
to me, but the introduction to contemporary dance
was important. I then worked and studied with a choreographer
named Janet Smith who had trained with
Erik Hawkins. That technique was softer than Graham
and I enjoyed its flow and connectivity.
And then the journey was never a straight line. I had
always been interested in what I saw happening in
improvised performance, thinking there is some interesting
attention, some range of qualities here. In England in
the 1980s, New Dance also emerged; sometimes the movement
forms struck me as a bit general or undefined,
but the range of textures and the sensory awareness of
the work intrigued me.
I also did Cunningham open classes. I liked the challenge
of it in terms of coordination—how one can
have so many things going on at once—and the irregularity
of rhythms. I loved it as a learning challenge, less
as an aesthetic that sat inside or agreed with my body.
But I was curious, and I was learning from different
things. I never thought, ‘I want to find the one thing that
is right.’ I was just working and learning.
All the time, teaching has been alongside of and a part
of my learning; I haven’t had to make a conscious
decision what I will use in my teaching—just all the time
tasting, digesting, and then something different emerges.
Of course, in the planning of a class, one takes conscious
decisions about the material one makes, or the principle
one wants to work with. But there was never any
dividing point between working this way or working that
way; for me, it was a continuum.
By the late 1980s, things had begun to change a little.
Before that, the world that was improvisational and sensory
and the world of technique felt very far apart. As
an audience member, I could move from one to the other,
but it was quite hard to make a bridge between them
as a dancer. For example, I did a few classes at a Dartington
festival with Mary Fulkerson—later she was very
influential in the new education that was emerging in
Amsterdam and Arnhem. Improvisational work, releasing
work, and I was intrigued by that, but I could not make
sense of it in my body in just two classes. I thought,
‘The movement is simple, but yet I cannot let go of my
muscle–holding to achieve it.’
How did these different experiences develop
into what you are doing now? The great opportunities
to try and bridge these two ways of thinking came for
me when I started working with Siobhan Davies, a choreographer
from London Contemporary Dance Theatre
with a background in Graham and then in Cunningham.
She got a scholarship to travel for a year in America,
and she visited and worked with some of the release and
body awareness artists there. She came back wanting
to explore the sensing body as a choreographic resource.
I started working with her. We had a visit from an
Alexander teacher, and one of my fellow dancers was just
starting a Feldenkrais training, so I was able to learn
alongside him as his guinea pig.
Also as soon as my curiosity was stimulated by these
experiences, I was reading a lot. I was reading about
Alexander Technique, I was reading about Feldenkrais
Technique, I was reading The Thinking Body by
Mabel Todd, the writings of Ida Rolf. I was doing my
own ideokinesis practice, imagining movement directions
in the body, and I would go sometimes to New York
and do classes at Movement Research—a center for exploratory
dance. I was just really hungry and my experiences
would lead me to questions and then take me to
further reading.
I was introduced also to the work of Susan Klein and
Barbara Mahler through a wonderful dancer, Jeremy
Nelson, who danced for a long time with Stephen Petronio
and is an official teacher of the Klein Technique. He
was very thoughtful and clear in the technique, and also
applied it to his own dynamic dancing. Jeremy was
an inspiration to me, as were the Alexander and the
Feldenkrais techniques.
What were the things you learned and how did
they affect your teaching? I found an inspirational
Alexander teacher who had studied with Alexander
himself, who had extraordinary power and information
in her hands. The Alexander work really helped me
find a connected torso, head, neck, and back. And the
spine became, in a way, an organizing principle in