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My sound and music

I think kathak has made me more interested in music. As part of the training you have to learn an instrument, and initially I learnt singing. I had one lesson and the teacher said “Sing the note Sa”, so I sang the note Sa, and he said
“Get out, you’ll never be a singer”, which was really quite horrific, especially as a child. So he sent me to the next room and said I’d be better off in tabla class. I really persevered at the percussive side, and now I love anything that’s percussive. In kathak you are both musician and dancer, and that has absolutely affected how I listen to music. Because of the training I had I’m much more interested not just in the melody but also in the craft of the performer, the musician. Are they really accomplished, are they really good at what they do, do they speak through what they do?

A lot of dancers respond very honestly to music, and so when the music’s speaking from the heart, from the musician, somehow the dance connects with it much more easily. I was also into Michael Jackson as a child, his physicality and his musicality, how he physicalises music, that I just find absolutely fantastic. He responds to the music, rather than dancing on the music, and there’s a big difference. That’s something I was very drawn to. So, kathak and Michael Jackson are two influences I had growing up.

In terms of who I’d like to choreograph to, I’d love to collaborate with Salif Keita, a beautiful singer from West Africa. He’s got a song called Folon, and it’s just beautiful. I like Bjork. I also love Massive Attack; I’d love to do stuff with them, especially their early stuff. Nitin Sawnhey and I have made a few collaborations together, and Nitin I love. I love his music because he’s scientific, he’s fascinated by science, but he’s also very spiritual. These two worlds are something I’m fascinated by, the spiritual has the narrative, and the science has the information. The spirituality is more about faith and trust, you don’t need it to be ‘in your face’, you just believe it. And then, in the middle, where you meet, is the human being. And so you make a choice, you either accept both or you choose one direction or the other. For me, Nitin really encompasses both. There’s something extremely spiritual about him as a performer, but he’s also extremely scientific, it’s amazing.

I did a collaboration with Steve Reich, but for me, contemporary music’s hard; I find it hard to listen to, to get into. I look at it more as an experiment, so that’s why I enjoy working with the London Sinfonietta, because for me it’s like a science lab. It’s like being in a laboratory, wearing a white coat, and thinking “Hmm, that’s interesting”, but I’m not emotionally moved. I don’t know why, I just don’t ‘get’ contemporary music; it’s just something not in me. If you put on Flamenco, if you put on Arabic music, or African music, I kind of feel where it’s coming from, the stories it’s speaking, but the disjoint-ness of contemporary music I don’t get. I don’t see the spirituality in contemporary music, I don’t feel it’s made from the heart, I feel it’s made from the brain. It’s intellectual; the brain creates the music rather than the instinct, the heart. There’s no such thing as a piece of music that you couldn’t choreograph or dance to, but there is music that I don’t want to choreograph to. To be entirely honest, when I did the piece with Steve Reich, it was music I couldn’t find a story in, and I was really struggling with that. He created the music specifically for the piece, we collaborated, and it was the first time he created music for the concept of dance. Eventually, my story became about searching for the story. In a way, I psychologically changed the whole thing because I was so frustrated that I couldn’t find a narrative in this music, that in the end I thought, “OK, your story is going to be about searching for the story”, and I never found the story. And so, even if the narrative is that I don’t know how to choreograph to this, then it becomes all about “I don’t know how to choreograph to this”. I always find a story. Because the second I put the music on, I’m responding to it, even it it’s negatively, I’m still responding to it, and that means that a dialogue is taking place. So long as I react to the music, it’s OK. It’s only problematic if I don’t react to it, then I have an issue.

When I’m tired and I need to focus, or when I can’t sleep, I listen to Indian vocal music. It’s so soothing, it creates an atmosphere. I don’t really listen to a lot of Western Classical music, although I like it. I put on stuff like Justin Timberlake, I’m kind of cheesy in that way, I like that stuff. There’s a hint of him being influenced by Michael [Jackson], with the dancing and stuff, it makes you want to groove. I like a lot of hip hop, but I tend to like just one or two songs from each person, a specific melody, or what they’re saying, I like it when it’s about themselves.

Because of my dance, I work with a lot of different cultures, people, dancers and collaborators, and the way to get to know them is to get to know what they eat and get to know the music they listen to. I’ve been listening to a lot of Arabic music recently, because my next piece is inspired by stories from the Arab world, the Muslim world. Before that, I made a piece called Bahok, with the National Ballet of China, so I was listening to a lot of Chinese music. It was kind of Chinese Opera, which was really strange! I like Tan Dun, who did the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and we’re planning to work together in the future.

I love Japanese music, I’m a big fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto. I’m working with a Japanese Taiko drummer at the moment, and she’s incredible. I want to see her perspective of what I’m doing. Rather than going to a musician and saying, “this is what I’m doing, this is what I want you to do, this is the story, you follow”, I show them what I’m doing and then I ask, “What do you see in it?” So she, coming from a different place, has a different opinion of what I’m doing. You’re always seeing from your own perspective, but what’s interesting is when you transfer that perspective, to try and see from someone else’s.

Henryk Goreck’s Symphony No.3 is just phenomenal. Phenomenal. It starts at the Earth. You can barely hear it, it’s so bass, so low. And it just… transcends. It comes out of the ground and then starts to go to vocals, which is the angels. There’s a journey, a kind of vertical road, (which is the name of the next piece I’m creating), and this journey is very spiritual for me. As an artist, there’s a sense of a journey towards perfection, but of never quite reaching it. The piece repeats itself, but it changes a tiny bit, layer by layer. I love the sense of transition, of mutation, of it evolving. This music really reflects that journey. I feel very attached to it because that’s what happened to me. I trained in Indian Classical dance for many years, and then I went to university and discovered contemporary dance, and my classical got contaminated. Contamination is used as a negative word, but then I realised, no, I’m evolving. Even if people hate it, I’m evolving. That’s why I relate to the music.

This article first appeared in INTO magazine, November 2009.

There was a lot of talk at Shift Happens earlier this month about innovation and making mistakes, with soundbites such as “we learn more from our mistakes than our successes” flying around. Attractive though the rhetoric sounds, I wonder if it stands up to scrutiny. For a start, it ignores the question of funding: how can you justify asking for (more) money if your previous project flopped?

Failure is an expensive luxury. If you lose the confidence of funders, audience or staff – or, worse yet, all three – the way forward is less clear. NT Live! can run in the hope of widening audiences and eventually breaking even, because the National Theatre receives millions of pounds from Arts Council England annually, has an ongoing sponsorship deal with Travelex, received additional support from Nesta, and can absorb the loss, even though each broadcast costs around £150,000. For most artists and arts organisations, though, no matter how fantastic an idea is, a financial failure makes it harder to convince anyone to fund your next project – whether that’s Ace, sponsors or philanthropists. However eager the audience may be to experience a risky, exciting, innovative project, it has to get off the ground first.

Even those with the most genuine and generous philanthropic leanings might find their patience and pockets tested by failure. And, in the current economic climate, it feels somewhat irresponsible to be encouraging people to make mistakes, however useful the lessons might be. The risks that pay off may be worthwhile, but the risks that don’t could end careers. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but it is a fact. The problem, in part, is the tick-box mentality associated with public funding, which requires you to know the outcomes of your project before you start.

Depressingly, this is borne out by a survey conducted by ArtsProfessional magazine and released last week, assessing the financial outlook for the sector. More than 500 people working across the arts and cultural sector responded, with around one in five self-identifying as the leader of an arts organisation. The survey revealed that 41% of respondents will be programming more “popular” work, and 37% will be reducing the amount of “challenging” work that they commission.

Risk in the arts is usually a good thing. Risky means creative, edgy or innovative. Can an artist who does not take risks be interesting? Maybe not, but this is at odds with the demands of public funders. Creative risk is good, but financial risk is bad. Let’s hope that risk-aversion is not contagious, and that those who are not planning to reduce the amount of challenging work they programme hold their nerve. Otherwise, audiences could have a dull few years ahead.

This article first appeared on the Guardian theatre blog.

Right. I’m barricaded in my safe house (a secret location somewhere in Leamington Spa). I’ve blacked out all the windows. Taped shut the letterbox. Bought some heavy-duty earplugs. Insured myself. Assumed the Brace Position. And now I’m ready to surf the wave of public disapproval that has so far varied from accusations of grumpiness to the opinion that I should be shot. OK, here goes: I do not like Harry Potter. In fact, I’ll go further. Really stick my neck out. I actively dislike Harry Potter. Before you ask, yes, I have forced myself to read them all, just so that I can defend my point my view against the forceful tide of popular opinion. The books’ popularity continues to astound me, because they are so…average. I like to pretend to be a reasonably balanced and open-minded person so I’m not going to carelessly rip them to shreds. 

I’m going to meticulously rip them to shreds.

Firstly, they are unoriginal. This, I feel, is a fairly major flaw. There is an argument that there is no such thing as ‘new’ story and that all plots follow one of 7 basic plotlines. I concede that to write a totally original story is impossible; it would need the invention of a new language, culture, society, mindset. However, this argument simply highlights the importance of combining familiar elements in exciting, unexpected and intelligent ways -none of which Rowling does. Stories of boarding schools are hardly innovative, and neither is the idea of a school for young witches and wizards. Magic is always a tricky problem because it can provide a handy get-out clause for characters in sticky situations. Masking the spells with pseudo-Latin words does not hide the fact that there is, if you are super-clever enough to *shock* use the library, a spell for everything. This removes any tension that the books could have mustered and means climaxes fizzle out rather than exploding.

Furthermore, Rowling’s writing verges on the Enid Blyton-esque in places, (I say Harry, pass the sardines. Scrummy) and she deals in nothing but clichés and formulae. Her writing style is patronising (us Muggles are a bit slow) and her world is often poorly realised –why bother being consistent when inconsistencies can be explained away with magic? The ‘clues’ that she puts in the earlier books are just a way of allowing self-congratulatory fans to second-guess the forthcoming plotlines, which removes what little suspense she has managed to create. 

Rowling’s characterisation is unrealistic and two-dimensional; and her idea of how teenagers behave is outdated and, in places, ridiculous. The idea that our hero would not notice girls until his fourth year is frankly laughable. The entire social fabric of a school is based on who likes who and whether either party is going to do anything about it. I’m tempted to invite Rowling to Peckham and show her what mixed schools are actually like, but she might not survive the experience and I have nothing against her personally. Perhaps wizards are late developers. 

Harry as a character is so fantastically annoying, self-pitying and whiny that I’m surprised the stereotypical geek-with-a-heart and wimpy sidekick who save his hide don’t just leave him to the dragons/dementors/basilisks/dark wizards/pixies. Especially the pixies. 

Generally the “good” characters are all too smug and self-centered, except when they’re being noble and sacrificing themselves for their friends. They verge between the two extremes with no middle ground, thus rendering them impossible to empathise with. Dumbledore is annoyingly understanding and good and noble, buck up, man, or there’ll be anarchy at Hogwarts. Harry’s enemies on the other hand are so pantomime that the potential threats get trivialised in the unintentional comedy.  A friend argues that it is impossible not to be drawn into Harry’s world because Rowling has imagined it so vividly, but, as you may have gathered thus far, I found it possible. Easy even. I’m afraid that my view is that if Harry’s world is so prefectly formed in Rowling’s head I’d much rather it stayed there.  I have yet to be even slightly persuaded that the entire Harry Potter phenomenon is anything more than a mediocre children’s book, hyped beyond sensible proportions until no-one actually reads the books critically any more. Oh, and one more problem: Voldermort is not scary. 

Here Endeth the Rant. 

Next Week: Dan Brown Bashing.