Articulating The Unspoken

Sue Hawksley is both a choreographer and an academic. Apart from her work with Articulate Animal, the Edinburgh-based dance company, she is completing a PhD on the ability of the body to express philosophical ideas. In re-membering(s), she naturally brings together the disparate parts of her practice to discover new ways of moving that communicate directly with the audience.

At last year's Fringe Festival, she presented a solo that seemed to incorporate the fluidity of an eastern martial art and the precision of contemporary dance, her every gesture flowing into a narrative told by the body. Her work has a sympathy with Butoh’s attempts to make manifest the interior world through physicality, although her work is very different in appearance and form. For re-memebering(s), she has expanded Articulate Animal and teamed up with another ensemble, a group of musicians who share her interests in improvisation and experimental performance.

“This is very much a collaborative work,” she acknowledges. “Suzanne Parry, the composer, and I developed a framework of ideas with the dancers and musicians during a residency at Dance Base in February.” First of all, they developed parameters and ideas through improvisation. “In the performance we improvise within those parameters, working from what we can remember of material that has just been played or danced.”
The process here becomes the product, as the idea of remembering something is placed in sharp contrast to the usual practice within dance of memorising steps. “Memorising is a skill that is generally deeply ingrained into us during training,” she notes. Yet this can cause its own problems. When using memory to guide the dance, “it's surprisingly hard to keep attention on the unfolding moment.”

This distinction is crucial to re-membering(s), and the shift to a more attentive performance reflects Hawksley’s interest in alternative approaches to the art. Having become interested in therapies because of her own injuries as a dancer she "began practicing T'ai Chi, learning that working hard didn't need to mean wearing out.” This was deepened when she was with Ballet Rambert. “We worked with Trisha Brown. Her dancers exemplified the dynamic but non-destructive engagement with dance practice.”

Through her study, bodywork sessions and performances, there is a constant focus on the body's natural functions. Without stretching it beyond its limits or entering into a battle with its possibilities, her work treats the body gently and respectfully, allowing it to express itself clearly. “My abiding interest is the connections in the body, how people are organised for movement,” she confirms.

As for her latest work “re-membering(s) is definitely is informed by the research I've been doing into enactive approaches to embodied cognition, and phenomenology, but it is not a direct response about that.” It will be a beautiful mixture of the intelligent and the physical.