Dance! The Most Incredible Thing about Contemporary Dance

'I always remember the first time I saw some contemporary dance.

'I was about 12 or 13 and it was a truly visceral experience.'

Two very dominant forms - music and movement,

and somehow the combined effect greater than the sum of their parts.

AMBIENT MUSIC

Down the years, I've seen various other pieces of contemporary dance.

I've occasionally conducted music to movement,

but I've never had an opportunity to sit down and understand the form, get right inside it.

This is my chance to do just that.

AMBIENT DANCE MUSIC

Be still. Really still, Charles.

Do you ever do that at the bus stop?

On my way to work(!)

LIVELY BALLET MUSIC

Ballet dominated the dance world until the beginning of the 20th century

when revolutionary figures like Isadora Duncan,

Nijinsky, Martha Graham,

Kurt Jooss

and Pina Bausch challenged its supremacy.

But it wasn't until 1967 that the first School of Contemporary Dance opened in the UK.

This is The Place. It is the home of both the London Contemporary Dance Theatre

and the London Contemporary Dance School.

It's the only school of its kind in Europe and it's a very exciting place to work in.

Since then, contemporary dance has constantly evolved,

taking inspiration from other arts,

breaking out of traditional venues

and bringing marginal forms main stage.

So anything goes now.

Or does it?

This year's Place Prize for Dance winners, Lost Dog, had critics up in arms,

claiming their entry was more theatre than dance.

Where were the steps?

People who saw it were surprised by the fact that they were dancers

or some thought they were actors or physical performers,

even though their skill is very obvious, but it's still this thing of like,

"Is that dance or is that theatre?"

But for us, it's not such an important distinction.

It's just this thing of we were interested in creating work that is physical,

but we enjoy the use of narrative.

LIVELY JAZZ MUSIC

It's not trying to do the same thing as everything else, so for people to want it

to do whatever they think dance should do is a bit frustrating.

If you can get beyond any sense of personal wounding,

it's quite exciting to create work that really does divide people.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Most live performance, particularly dance, is asking you to be involved with that creative act

which can be thrilling, but it can also be difficult for some people.

JAZZ PIANO MUSIC

So what are we talking about?

It's definitely not ballet.

Classical ballet, according to the dictionary definition,

is a precise form with highly formalised set steps and gestures

and, let's face it, the weight of history around it.

Ultimately, I guess, it's really about beauty and aesthetics, so how do we define contemporary dance?

I don't know.

I think us as artists, we're constantly making work to answer that question.

I think it's a journey. I don't think it's a destination.

But I think it is something which explores the stage and using movement.

At the moment, contemporary dance is simply an umbrella term

to cover dance in our time.

And I suppose the only clear definition

is that it's separating itself

from the classical ballet which is, if you like, a very clearly defined world,

but the walls between those two worlds are definitely tumbling down.

MELLOW JAZZ MUSIC

It's a passion, it's a freedom.

It's a love. It's a way of expressing sometimes what can't be said in words or...

..if it could be said in words, it would take an encyclopedia to say it.

It aims to heighten our perceptions

and our understanding of reality,

but it's about today, it's relevant to the world we live in.

TECHNO BEATS

Contemporary dance doesn't have rules. It's very exciting.

In the studio you feel like a rebel because it's not classical ballet

that you know exactly what type of movements you'll see,

what kind of music, you don't know. It's like going underground.

It's like trying to define music. It's many things at once.

It's a constantly evolving art form, re-inventing and re-defining itself.

The best way to understand it is to go and see as many things as you can

and then you begin to get a sense of what it can begin to encompass.

I'm at The Place, home to the Richard Alston Dance Company.

40 years ago, Richard was one of the first dancers to train here.

I was surprised because I thought his aesthetic would be much less balletic,

but what overjoyed me was this symbiotic relationship between the movement and the music.

I started with Merce Cunningham who was a very clear trainer and a wonderful teacher.

But my work is about movement and music together

and Merce's work specifically was not.

GENTLE PIANO MUSIC

Merce Cunningham and John Cage decided to separate the two

and make them independent.

Every audience puts them together.

Everyone always thinks that the dancers are moving to whatever sounds are going on

and his movement, although incredibly clear, was designed

to be put together by chance methods which is what he believed in,

which meant that any movement could follow any other movement.

RUSTLING SOUND

I'm more interested and have always been more attracted by a flowing language.

And therefore, classical ballet is the most sophisticated,

flowing language with small transitional steps

leading to big climax steps and so on.

I find the marriage of the two a really interesting world for me to explore.

I think of dance as sculpture, I think of dance as architecture.

It moves in space. I think of dance definitely as a form of music.

It's one of the things that gives me particular satisfaction

when an audience member says to me, "When I look at your dance, I hear more in the music."

What they don't say, but I also believe is true

is if I've made the dance properly, the music helps them see more in the dance.

UP-TEMPO MUSIC FROM "Overdrive"

I guess I fell in love is the truth.

I just fell in love with dancers and I've always been in love with dancers. I'm a bit of a groupie.

And it's never left me,

this love of human beings working so hard to move

and to make something that is, I find, incredibly uplifting.

DRAMATIC PIANO MUSIC

I fell in love with music, but I've always wondered how a dancer relates to it.

I've thought of an experiment. I've got a few people here who are going to help me.

If I played you a piece of music which hopefully you are not familiar with and haven't danced to before,

just to see what spontaneously it makes you do...

I'm playing a D Major Prelude by JS Bach on a very knackered piano

and what's amazing is you've got this 300-year-old piece of music

and it's inspiring contemporary, improvised dance.

The music had quite a rhythmical, lyrical flow which was this kind of movement,

then there were these accents and little things to highlight.

-It's also about making choices.

-Yeah.

You know, you could read that piece as quite sorrowful

or as I felt you read it...

kind of glad to be alive in a way.

Sometimes when you're improvising, you can go through 15 different stories

and that will make you move different to that piece of music. That's what I do personally.

Maybe the movement is quite joyful, but your intention behind it can be quite sorrowful.

It's like The Dying Swan. It's still moving a lot and beautiful, but it's a sad, mournful thing.

Sometimes without going outside the music, you can just stay still

or experience feeling the music and still be in it, and then start again.

Wow! Let's do that piece of music again. I want you to approach it completely differently.

MUSIC RESUMES: "Prelude in D Major" - JS Bach

Two basically different stories told in the space of five minutes - remarkable fluidity and ease

because who is to say a piece of music only has one message?

It has an infinite number and dance can really show that.

I thought perhaps in my prejudiced way in the past

that on occasion, dance was something which used music as a carpet on which to tread,

something to trample over. The reverse could not be more the case.

This is supposed to be Superboy and Girl...

'Mark Baldwin, the Artistic Director of Rambert Dance Company,

'has commissioned composer Stephen McNeff to adapt Ravel's music for L'Enfant Et Les Sortileges

'for his work Seven For A Secret, Never To Be Told. I've come here to see how he works with the music.'

What I'm looking for is all the mystery and gorgeousness in these little black things.

The idea that you work with a composer and you build something together is fantastic.

You're looking for something which is not predictable,

so you're looking for something which gives you what the composer's given you.

You're looking for bits that you can point out to the audience and you're looking for a relationship.

It may not be that you're holding hands. You could be hugging or you're looking at each other.

-It can speak volumes.

-Absolutely.

The music wants to go like this, so something inside you tells you to go like this,

but then he doesn't want that. He wants speed.

To me, it sounds like it's going like this.

Yeah. It's a long line, yeah.

GENTLE MUSIC PLAYS

Yes, I'm looking for some kind of visualisation, if you like, of what I hear, which is quite eccentric.

UP-TEMPO MUSIC

'The dancers are portraying children.

'Having studied his friend's seven-year-old at play,

'how does Mark get his ideas across to the dancers?'

Talk me through your process. You listen to this music and you start to move to it,

-you start to find a language.

-I warm up to it.

-That's how it goes.

-Yeah.

-As we jump.

-So with me doing it, it would look something...

It would look something like that, which is quite different,

but that gives me an idea of what I could ask him to do.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

And also I know that I'm going to skip round the room, then jump over this way

and there's something over there, there's a grasshopper. It's that kind of mad, mental, physical thing.

You say it's different, but it's very close. You've drawn so much from that whole demeanour.

What Mark's done is he has really completely inhabited the story,

so when he does it, it's completely there. We're still trying to do the movements and make them look good.

And we try and usually make it bigger, so we get a chance to dance a bit.

So at what point does it become fixed or is it never fixed?

Throughout the season, you'd find, "Maybe I could do this here and that there," hoping that he won't see it.

-And sometimes...

-I do see it. I've noticed you've changed already. I'm not completely happy with it.

But sometimes our changes actually work. Sometimes.

But it's good to have a balance.

-They have to be soft in the chest and they have to push off the back leg.

-Yes.

-So it looks like it's going through space.

-Yeah.

It's those technical things I'm looking at and how he uses his core.

Also, it's the whole body because the music fills all of the stage

and so I need this to fill the whole stage.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

LAUGHTER

-It ends here.

-Yeah, yeah.

-It ends here.

-Very good, Dane.

-Wow, brilliant.

'In this sequence, dancer Eryck Brahmania has been asked to dance as though he's a flame.'

In terms of your characterisation, how much are you thinking "fire"?

You've got to think about it from the beginning to the end, otherwise the audience won't read it,

so this is still very new. We've had one session on this solo.

There's still material being processed and understanding all the steps,

but if you try to think the whole way through the essence of fire or flame, it's more like a playful flame.

It's always changing until probably... until we finally get on stage.

APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER

Can you do some blue flame for me?

If I do the material as a blue flame, I think it would be...

a lot calmer and a lot...

a bit more mysterious.

Yeah.

That speaks volumes because an interesting fire does that anyway.

If you chuck on a bit of the Sunday Times supplement, you get blues and greens,

-but then they're swept away and there's more orange. It's interesting.

-Yeah.

I think with this piece you have to find all those different elements,

those different textures and qualities,

so it's a little bit difficult. It's much easier doing it in one style.

-Who wants easy though?

-I know.

-Mark never wants easy.

-That was beautiful.

Really beautiful. I never thought of those kinds of suggestions.

The ability to interpret a colour or an idea without words is a real skill.

And for some people, dance, it's like it's hard-wired into them, it's an essential part of them,

a totally natural form of self-expression.

I played rugby and tennis at school, I played the piano, cello.

I was interested in art, music, sport,

but somehow dance seemed to...

I often think dance touches the things that other things can't

and maybe for me dance was a wonderful marriage of the physical

and the emotional and the musical and the spiritual. I don't know. It just meant more to me.

I saw a Bollywood film, one of those old classics,

made perhaps in the '60s or '50s. There was a dancer in there called Sandhya.

She did this extraordinary thing in this film.

She took a fish out of the water and she put it on the land

and the fish was obviously gasping for air to live.

She was dancing and imitating every movement of that fish.

It had such an impact on me.

I went to bed, I remember, dreaming about being a dancer.

I woke up the next day. I knew exactly that I wanted to be a dancer all my life.

It was so relevant to me, embodying some communication like that.

My grandfather was given a radiogram when he retired and when he died, it came to us.

Then music came to our house. We put these LPs on, these 78s.

I opened the window and we had a little garden.

I went on to the lawn and I danced to Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms.

Janet Smith and dancers of Scottish Dance Theatre hold regular events

where they show and discuss short extracts of their work.

There's a way in which we can watch.

In the same way as you can listen to music and hear pattern and form in music,

you can do exactly that in the form and pattern that dancers make.

The challenge is to draw attention to that

because you're just watching human beings doing pattern and form.

You are watching people and that is the first way that we look at each other.

GENTLE PIANO MUSIC

So I think that dance, unlike other forms,

tells its story through space and through time together.

Let's just have a look at a solo and a duet

that travel on different lines of space.

Sometimes like just the relationship of them in space and stuff

can show you the relationship that's going on in the piece or what somebody's trying to convey.

It's really nice to see the dancers watching each other and seeing each other and responding to each other,

which I thought was really clear.

Also the facial expression,

not just the movement, like the eye contact between the dancers and just the little quirky expressions.

The best thing which I felt about contemporary dancing is it gives you a freedom to think.

It does not have just one specific story that all the people around here would think, "OK, this is it."

No, each one will have a different view, a different perspective.

For Kenneth Tharp, dance can be an essential part of a person's development, yet it's often ignored.

I was lucky enough to discover my passion for dance at a young age and then never wanted to stop.

I don't know if you've read the latest book by Sir Ken Robinson, The Element.

They're a wonderful collection of stories and anecdotes about often very famous people

from Richard Branson to Sir Paul McCartney to the guy who invented The Simpsons

to the drummer from Fleetwood Mac and also a brilliant one about the choreographer Gillian Lynne.

What they all had in common was that at school, it's as though their innate talent

that later brought them to fame lay unrecognised. If anything, they were seen as problems.

Lea Anderson loved dancing ballet,

but when she didn't match the idealised shape of a ballerina, she abandoned dance in favour of art.

I went to art school and I was on a foundation year.

I kept kicking over everyone else's work

as I would suddenly jump or leap.

I would smash up so many people's sculptures. I jumped through a painting.

The principal said, "Every lunchtime you go to your dance classes, all day long you destroy everyone's art.

"Why aren't you doing dance?

"You could bring your art and the ways of thinking to dance and invent your own dance."

I thought, "Why didn't I think of that?"

I was taken by a friend's mum down to Pineapple

and ended up in a jazz class taught by Arlene Phillips. I was 13.

Step... On to a straight leg there. Pull it up.

'I spent years doing that in lots of dreadful legwarmers and enjoyed it tremendously.

'I got my Equity card at 17 and I adored working with Arlene.'

I felt that you could go further and deeper with the contemporary work,

so it really was extremely challenging and you could develop and grow doing it.

But also there's something more expressive in it than I'd found in the jazz.

What was so great when I was dancing with Lea Anderson

was to find someone whose work not only I enjoyed doing,

but I felt I could bring something to and add in and contribute.

I think a lot of dancers don't ever find that, so I felt really lucky.

I danced for eight years with Lea and it was just a joy.

At Trinity Laban Conservatoire Of Music And Dance,

they teach a way of understanding how movement is generated in the body

and how from this comes dance.

GENTLE, MELANCHOLIC MUSIC

What I teach here is called Choreological Studies.

And it's based on the principles and practice of somebody called Rudolf Laban

from which Trinity Laban gets its name.

It's about introducing students to the fact that dance is made from movement.

Movement is, if you like, the raw material of the art form,

but quite often in practice, people come to dance

through learning steps, styles or techniques

and not understanding necessarily the structure of movement itself.

Walk around the space.

'We look at human movement in all its structural complexity

'as a way of understanding how we can refine and create dance.'

And stop. I'd like you to walk and then be still.

'Using movement terms for movement and not subjective, personal ways of feeling about it.'

But if you arrest the movement, you create something other,

so I want you to travel therefore and then be still.

Really still, Charles.

Right, off you go.

Little by little, we visit each of these intrinsic structures of human movement

and understand how movement is structured before we make dance.

OK. Thank you. So we have what we call a two-action phrase.

You would understand as a musician that the duration and speed of those two actions

would create some kind of phrasing, OK?

You need to choose what that is, OK?

Dance doesn't happen to you. You make decisions about it.

It's not about putting shapes on the outside of you.

It's about generating from the inside out.

SLOW, MELANCHOLIC MUSIC

Strong breath, shifting...

Yeah, much better.

And then we come over the top and we're just going to start to allow everything to curve.

You've been quite audible with your expression of energy.

We work on the breaths, so that they're hearing and listening to their own breathing.

Sometimes they hear and see the breathing of others. We also sometimes make noises in class.

-And also breath is rhythm. It's your internal rhythmic map.

-Yeah.

And sometimes we work with that as our music in a way.

Rather than working to tempo, we sometimes work with breath rhythm,

that idea of feeling when the movement changes from the inside.

Shifting circle, release...

Come back. Not bad. Good. Nice work.

When you come back at the end from here...

I find it fascinating exploring Laban and understanding some of its principles.

It's about being so far inside your own body, physically, mechanically even, understanding the motivation

for a limb to move in a certain way.

Beyond that, it's all about breath, wonderful, intuitive breaths spread amongst a class of dancers.

It's like perfect, silent music.

THEY EXHALE

Change, change.

'So this is all about movement. How does movement then get turned into formalised dance?

'This is where choreography comes in. David Massingham danced with Adventures In Motion Pictures

'and he's now Artistic Director of DanceXchange Birmingham.'

Do I think a flock of birds is a piece of choreography if you film it? No.

It's beautifully kind of watchable and interesting, but it's not choreography. No one's designed it.

But I think that's what's fantastic about contemporary dance.

Over the years, through its creative roots, it's looked at life itself

and built an art form out of it.

That's why it keeps evolving and changing and becoming more popular.

It does reflect life beautifully.

For me, it's an art form that uses

the space between people

and gesture and shape to convey meaning without pinning it down with a word.

It's an incredibly complex and wonderful art form.

It enables me to make pieces of movement that simultaneously suggest various interpretations,

sometimes opposing interpretations, which can make for a very complex description of a relationship

or somebody's relationship with their environment can be very moving and transforming as a performance.

25 years ago, Lea Anderson set up The Cholmondeleys and then The Featherstonehaughs.

She's choreographed hundreds of shows with them and others.

I like to know what restrictions we'll have from the costume.

It's far more interesting to work with it in mind and the meaning of a costume.

Having dance pyjamas or a nice loose-fitting thing that enables you to do everything,

what does that say about movement and humans?!

The thing about costumes and people and life and humanity is about our clothing and what we look like

and how we choose to appear. For me, that's very important. The dressing of the human.

I also like to have a lighting design kind of worked out first.

Some bits might be in darkness, some in light. That's more interesting.

I'm getting a real sense that contemporary dance is all things to all people -

dancers, choreographers, audience. One of the things I'm learning is

that I need to let go of ANY preconceptions.

Mayuri Boonham choreographs contemporary dance drawn from the ancient Indian form Bharata Natyam.

It's my responsibility as a dance maker to give you the experience I want to take you on.

There shouldn't be any barrier in terms of, "All very interesting, but those gestures, I don't get it."

I'm really interested in breaking down that barrier.

RHYTHMIC CHANTING

I've still got this nagging doubt that maybe I just won't get it,

so I got some very useful advice from dance critic Donald Hutera.

Try and find something to connect with, whether that could be the music, a bit of text,

because a lot of people are talking in dance now, whether it's a costume

or set or a step. Sometimes it can be something as simple as the way a leg moves,

the way somebody does an arm movement. And something clicks.

I think this is key, fastening on something perhaps very small.

So much of contemporary dance is not about story. There's story in it, a narrative in the body,

there are different angles and aspects of storytelling.

Akram Khan says he is a storyteller, not a choreographer.

THEY BOTH SPEAK

It's amazing how much power it holds.

For me, some of the best work rises from a clarity of intention.

If the artist is really clear about what they want to do, that can produce the best kind of ambiguity

whereby I will have one feeling or thought about something, you'll have another

and we'll both be right because there is no wrong.

Back at the Scottish Dance Theatre, the dance has moved on.

I felt it was almost like a relationship between the two people

and it was as if they were trying to decide who wore the trousers, who had power.

It's like a relationship that's got a bit stuck and they're a burden on each other,

this shifting of weight is like, "Uh..."

And then at the end it seems like they split up and James is confused.

He was trying hard to convince her

and, I'm afraid, he didn't make it.

This has got me thinking. If I could dance, what would I have to say?

'Liz Rankin found dance in her 20s with DV8 amongst others.

'She now specialises in stage movement.'

I'm going to work with physicalising emotions, accessing a somatic memory

held in the muscles, a subconscious memory,

but which you can relate from specific moments

-in your own memory, that I'll access it from.

-Wow.

-Aaaaaah.

-Aaaaaah.

Now!

You feel the sun, you can hear the seagulls.

'In a way, you're reversing a lot of what I've learnt'

as I've become a sentient human being. We learn, don't we,

-not to listen to what our inner core is telling us...

-Yes.

-..because it's not appropriate.

-Yes, yes.

I very much come from a journey

where I was coming from a family that put mind over body.

Good.

We ignored, we forgot the body. There was no value in exploring it.

A journey has taken me back to my interest in the arts and the holistic wisdom in the body.

-All the way down. Take the feet over the head and hang there.

-Oh!

That's as far as it goes!

'Liz is going to open up the connection between my mind and body

-'to see if I can express an emotion in movement.'

-You're waking the back up. Roll back.

Roll. Try over the other knee. Right knee.

And back. And round! And up!

And down. Up and down!

Miaoooow!

OK.

We're opening the lungs, the heart,

the nervous system. Good.

BOTH: Miaoooooow!

We're just going to work with physicalising an essence of love

to see what that emotion does to the quality of movement.

I want you to think of a specific situation where, "Yes, I felt love." ..Great. So where are you?

I'm just welcoming my daughter into the world.

-You've got a new-born baby.

-Yes.

-Is she in your arms?

-She wasn't, but she could be.

-What else is in the room?

-Em, a fire.

-Is your wife there?

-No, just me and my daughter.

-Just you and your daughter. Great.

-Can you smell anything?

-That delicious smell of new-born baby.

-Yeah, yeah.

From this position, by physicalising a flow of movement,

just one movement inspiring the next,

see what it does to... That's it. Fantastic, fantastic.

One movement after the next.

Good. Good, good.

That's beautiful.

See, you're... That's it. Gorgeous, gorgeous.

Lovely.

Dance is an incredibly emotive form,

both for the protagonist and also the observer.

It's also a very pure form.

You can't come into dance, certainly as a participant,

with a load of radio interference in your head. You need to find clarity

and find a purity.

Your body has to become a bit like a...a perfect vessel.

Here is the perfect human.

'I'm trying to learn the body.'

I don't have a whole theory that is complete.

Maybe just before I die, I'll write it down!

One name that keeps cropping up is Hofesh Shechter, Israeli choreographer and dancer,

who won the 2004 Place Audience Prize.

Movement is not just about the shapes you see on stage.

These shapes are a translation of a feeling.

When someone watches them, it translates back into a feeling.

You can see them dancing sometimes and you think, "That can look like a ceremony in Africa,"

or a club on a Saturday night or like something you can see at a political rally.

Or something that you can see in, you know, a folk dance event.

And that sort of confusion, that similarity between a lot of things, makes it cool for me.

Growing up in Israel, the conflict there continues to inform Shechter's choreography and ideas.

I did feel that I am growing up in a country that is in a conflict, a country that is very Western

and free and everyone can say and do what they want, but at 18 you have to go to the army.

And I found this amazing.

It's kind of like an extract of the most intense moments of a dance piece that I have made

which is called Uprising. The piece is dealing with boys' energy and with boys' mentality

and with boys' behaviour, with the idea of playing and fighting,

and liking to play and liking to fight. How fun it is to be part of a war.

The music is the reason I do dance. That's, you know...

I love the feeling when music is played in a theatre. It just gives me...a thrill.

It can create atmosphere, it can create rules, it can create thoughts.

It can take you somewhere like that.

ALL: This is what we do.

Music feeds contemporary dance,

but if you want dance to reflect your own life experience,

you've got to find a music that does that as well.

From a very young age, coming from a Grenadian family, calypso was the dance style,

soca was really important. My brothers then did jazz dance.

One did a lot of reggae dance.

But for me, when I first saw hip hop dance,

that belonged to me. That made sense, it related to the environment

where I grew up, the concrete environment, which street dance comes from, made a lot of sense.

When Jonzi D went to study dance, hip hop was not an option available to him.

What I found at The Place, the London Contemporary Dance School,

was that the idea of contemporary dance

didn't quite add up to me.

A lot of these dance styles we were learning were from the '30s and '40s.

So when you say "contemporary", do you mean of today?

Because as far as I was concerned, I was already doing contemporary dance, the dance of today.

I was already popping.

Locking.

And breaking.

What I realised is that the title "contemporary dance"

is a noun. It's not a descriptive word.

And actually I wanted to use the dance of today to make dance theatre.

I looked at some of the ballet structures, at Petit Allegro and the fast footwork.

That's what we do in breaking. There's a fast footwork idea.

I looked at Grand Allegro - big movements, big jumps.

That's what I would say are power moves in breakdance, when you do windmills and stuff like that.

I looked at freezes in breaking and I thought of when dancers finish their set

and they'll end in a pose. So I took all of those elements.

Then I thought, "We're doing the same thing, actually."

There's no real difference other than the movement itself.

We can still tell the stories, we can still structure a narrative, still use staging and lighting,

but we can do it with this new dance form.

AUDIENCE CHEER

Jonzi D and Hofesh Shechter are part of Sadler's Wells' initiative

to bring dance talent in-house to create new work.

This move away from being simply a receiving house marks a return to its early producing days.

As their most recent full-length dance piece, The Most Incredible Thing, shows

with a score from the Pet Shop Boys, it's very much the vision of Artistic Director Alistair Spalding.

The golden age of Sadler's Wells was when things were created here.

I took over, really, when it was still a presenting house only.

That's OK, but it's very important that each theatre has a creative heart to it.

That's why I invited the associates in and started a philosophy of production as well as invitations.

That really has turned things round.

Ten, nine, eight,

seven, six, five...

I was determined in a way to democratise the art form.

You shall not covet your neighbour's husband or wife.

So to make Sadler's Wells a place where you could have hip hop, as well as ballet and contemporary dance,

people could really come and own that stage.

Anybody could come here and enjoy it.

And I think that really needs a very wide view of what dance can be.

You shall not blaspheme.

You have to come with a leap. It's new work, not a known thing like seeing Cinderella or something.

It's a question of trying to find out what it is that speaks to you and appeals to you.

I feel that because everyone's got a body and they're watching bodies moving,

there is work that will reach everybody if they find the right piece for them.

I am the Lord, your god.

RAPID DRUMMING

At the Scottish Dance Theatre show and tell, the music is now very abstract

and the dance much more complex.

Did anybody want to share any images they got along the way or any thoughts that they had?

-West Side Story.

-West Side Story?

Wonderful. Yeah, yeah, West Side Story.

Yeah. Very strong image. Two gangs. There's a moment of confrontation, it seems.

-Quite primal. Do you want to say more about that?

-It's just how it felt.

There was rivalry, there was... I took the gang image.

There was...aggression.

There's something quite tribal, almost sacrificial at the end.

-Sacrificial?

-Yeah. The girl toing and froing and being chucked about.

It was easier to understand and be more open and just let it happen

and not try to figure it out and get all confused about what one person was doing,

just let it talk to you.

Also just in terms of having confidence, you know,

to really realise the level on which we can and do perceive movement.

That it's rich, that it's deep, that it's multilayered, everything that is in literature.

Finding dance that appeals to you should be possible

at the International Dance Festival. The driving force behind it is David Massingham

and his broad experience in dance ensures an eclectic programme.

My mother used to be a dancer and I started doing classes that were really disco classes

at the time. Then she started doing ballet classes by herself,

again when she was kind of hitting 50. Then I thought, "Why not add ballet to what I'm doing?"

I started going to ballet with her. She dropped out, but I carried on. I was looking at a range of styles,

thinking, "There's something in this for me."

One of the things we do a lot as part of the International Dance Festival

is commission work that fuses different styles.

I love pure ballet up against disco dancing or contemporary dance.

I think that makes it really exciting.

Down, roll it, and turn, turn...

One time, two times, three times, four times...

We've had some really major hits outdoors in free spaces.

It attracts a very different audience. People who don't go to theatres will go to the street.

# Let's do it, come on

# One, two... #

Contemporary dance is an amazing place for imagination to run free.

There are no rules, not really any impositions.

I've always been put off by the sheer skinniness of ballet,

the sense of body fascism, imposed body shape.

Contemporary dance offers a place for everyone. The Candoco Dance Company is celebrating 20 years

of including people with non-traditional dancing bodies.

We are basically a bunch of dancers who enjoy working and dancing together.

Our focus has always been dance and not disability.

In 1996, Candoco Dance Company were coming to Australia for the first time

so I went to do this 12-week course

called Moveable Dance, introducing us to the principles of contact.

And it was the first time that I really felt like I had landed in my skin

and I finally realised what this body actually could do, rather than what I was told it couldn't do.

Candoco inspired Caroline to become a choreographer and dancer

and she's now employed by the Scottish Dance Theatre as their Dance Agent for Change.

This is a tiny duet called The Long And The Short Of It, for very obvious reasons.

I am the short of it!

And Joan is the long of it, as the tallest dancer in the company.

MUSIC PLAYS

It was never an option until I was around a group of people who weren't scared to go,

"We'll try it. We'll take the risk and see what happens."

And to go through that thing with me of me being quite anxious. "I don't know if I can...!"

And just kind of doing that baby steps thing of, little by little, building my confidence

and their confidence and really getting to that... that launch place.

APPLAUSE

So when you watch that piece, I'm curious what you find yourself thinking about.

It's the infectious happiness that comes through. Two people together in harmony. Wonderful.

That expression you can twist somebody around your little finger. That's how I see it.

There's so many levels on which we can read work.

We're thinking about trying to make different lines, not circles now.

MUSIC PLAYS

As a Dance Agent for Change, it's Caroline's job to introduce new people to dance.

'Sometimes it takes one person to do that,

'to go, "You can do that if you really want to."

'And that's a lot of what I try to do with people I work with.

'It's kind of going, "Well, I can do it."

'I think that's what people see when they come to a performance that I'm in or whatever.

'All of a sudden, they kind of go, "Maybe that could be me."'

I'm less frightened of contemporary dance than I was at the start.

It did seem like this amazing high production value, glossy thing,

which was unobtainable to people like me. Now I feel...it's my friend.

I've always wanted to search for the otherness.

I've always enjoyed seeing general culture

and wanted to see if we can present it another way,

but still staying in contact with the raw human emotion and our desires.

It's a wonderful human activity and I also think dance is a wonderfully healing activity.

I feel it's a really exciting time for dance.

Half a million people come here a year now.

So it's just getting to reach different people in a different way and that's what is really exciting.

I'm now like an Exocet

on a mission to find the right contemporary dance projects to fuse with music I'm doing.

I'm already thinking of five or six different situations I've got

where dance, some element of movement, will lift them up.

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd - 2011

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