Dilly Dilly

Between the British and international artists who are visiting this year’s Fringe, the Orkney-based Tabula Rasa Dance Company is firmly rooted in Scotland. Claire Pencak set up the company in 1999, and it is one of only 12 theatre and dance companies supported by Made in Scotland. This partnership between the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, the Federation of Scottish Theatre and the Scottish Arts Council was established earlier this year. Its aim is to give exciting, talented Scottish theatre artists a chance to showcase their work to international promoters during the Fringe. Claire’s work Dilly Dilly will be the only children’s dance theatre on this year’s Dance Base programme. Dilly Dilly is a solo piece performed by Tara Hodgson, a graduate of Leeds’ prestigious Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and was first staged in spring of last year. Even so, the 45-minute piece has already changed since its first performance, with some of these alterations being generated by children’s reactions as they watched from the audience. Claire has made several pieces for children since 2002 (four for Tabula Rasa), and for her the choreographic process remains the same whether the work in question is aimed at young children or a more general audience (it is the audience which changes, not the process), although Claire emphasises that ‘a show for children is suitable for everybody’. This wide appeal is particularly evident in Claire’s work, as her decision to aim specific work at children is not necessarily made at the outset. Instead of always setting out with a determination to create a children’s piece, sometimes she begins with an idea and, after experimentation, decides it would work well for juniors. Claire trained at Laban, the esteemed London conservatoire. Unlike many choreographers who favour a more abstract approach, her choreography stems from her interest in a specific dancer and responds to the audience’s comments. Claire often dances in her own pieces and, even when working with another performer, she pays close attention to the specific qualities of that dancer: if she revived Dilly Dilly for a different dancer, she would make alterations to tailor it to their body and style. Claire’s way of working comes across as an organic process and this can even be seen in the way she uses music. ‘As much as possible I really like to commission new music’, she says, and in this case the commissioned musician is Quee MacArthur (bass player for Shooglenifty, a six-piece Edinburgh-based Celtic fusion band), from whom Claire promises a world-music feel. She likes to ‘work through an exchange of ideas’, and just as her dancers have input into her work, so might the musicians she works with, sometimes influencing the composition of the music. For Dilly Dilly, Claire and Tara worked together in the studio for a week before Quee arrived, and all three provided artistic fuel for both the music and the choreography. While this might sound like a serious business, Claire tries to ‘keep the sense of being playful throughout the entire process’, something which is particularly vital for a children’s piece. 'More and more,' she says, 'I like to work in the beginning very fast and very loose, and then work on that'. A demonstration of Claire and Tara’s playful open-mindedness comes when Claire tells me that for Dilly Dilly, during that first week in the studio, they began by experimenting with an A-Z of vegetables, using artichoke, broccoli or cucumber, and then 'played with that' to trigger movement and imagination. Claire encourages the audience, both children and adults alike, to utilise a similar mindset when watching the piece: ‘children have to really go in with their imagination. They kind of make the story’. In fact, Dilly Dilly doesn’t have a storyline: instead, children’s lively and fertile minds are provided with ‘images and atmosphere’. ‘It’s a very visual, fun show’, Claire says. There are digital projections, some of which were painted by children, and elements of clowning, as well as bits that are ‘quite silly’. It is, says Claire, ‘a little bit more like a journey’. Indeed ‘tabula rasa’ means ‘clean slate’ and theatre-lovers of all ages should come to this piece with just that; ready to enjoy the journey wherever it may take them. This is a welcome departure from the plethora of large-scale, over-long, TV-derived children’s theatre which fails to keep kids’ attention from wandering away from the stage to thoughts of ice-creams and toilet visits, all the while boring adults into a theatre bar-beckoning stupor. Enlivened by MacArthur’s composition, this is unique and colourful dance theatre, which promises to appeal to the imagination of audiences’ young and old.