Let's Hear it for the Boys

“I originally wanted to become a PE teacher,” admits Anthony Missen. “My opening into dance came as a result of a visiting contemporary dance teacher noticing that I had really enjoyed his one off class. My own stereotypes about men in dance didn't encourage me to shout that I absolutely loved what I’d discovered. It took me an entire year to take the matter further.”

In this introduction to dance lie some of the seeds that have blossomed into Rites, Company Chameleon’s offering at Dance Base. From the experiences of Missen and fellow member Kevin Turner, Rites examines those rituals which have shaped them as men, from coming of age through peer pressure to their long friendship.

Despite his initial reluctance, Missen eventually joined the Trafford Youth Dance Theatre. “I think what I found there changed me profoundly,” he recalls. “It offered an alternative sense of reality. It seemed that I was existing more with my whole being rather than just my mind or my body. It also made me aware of the relativity of time, offering the capacity to exist and not know whether something happened over the span of seconds or several hours.”

From this inspiration, Missen entered the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, along with Turner, whom he had met at Trafford, before going on to a career that included time with CassaniDance and Scottish Dance Theatre, often in partnership with Turner. After a period when they worked apart, they reunited in 2007 to create the company.

Rites has been directed by Beth Cassani, whose 13 was a highlight of 2007’s Fringe. Like 13, Rites is concerned with issues of masculinity, although it observes the subject from an older perspective. Where 13 was choreographed for Cassani’s two young sons, Rites emerges from Turner and Missen’s reflections on their past. “The first major collaborative work drew its source and inspiration from ourselves, our personal stories and histories, and those we have shared in our many years as friends.”

Missen himself found dance an important strand in his personal history: a liberating if challenging force. “Growing up on housing estates in Manchester was often violent and generally difficult, so dance offered me a place to exist with a safe form of non-judgmental human contact."

Missen believes that the past offers a clue to the nature of personal identity in the present. “It’s easy to look around and ask how you have become what you have done: from peer pressure to wear certain things and behave in the 'right way', the cyclical nature of behavioural traits from father to son, and the struggle to find one's self in the tangle of information and ideals that we are bombarded with."

However, Rites is concerned with the broader impact of masculine socialisation. “I look at the youths that I see where I grew up. Where do they get the information from that forms their idea of what it means to be a man? What internal psychological pressures manifest? What external forces move us?” The company also tackled a global perspective. “We undertook lengthy research to see what rituals and acts are prevalent events in becoming a man in different cultures.” Finally, “The work was brought back to being about to us. I think there are some universal ideas both in terms of place and time that are expressed within it."

The ambition of this topic is, perhaps paradoxically, ideal for expression through dance, especially in the way that Missen interprets the medium. Ballet has always illustrated relationships, especially between men and women in the pas de deux. Missen regards contemporary dance as offering even more possibilities of expression. “The thing I still love about the form is that it can incorporate so many different things: the most insignificant human gesture, the most virtuosic leap, a burp or a chunk of wood can be used to express something, often things that are cumbersome with words alone. The scope is infinite, where many other forms such as classical ballet, which I think is a vital part of ongoing training, are limited by their standardization: each movement has a name, and cannot really convey ideas and stories in an un-pantomimic way."

In line with this, Company Chameleon have an eclectic set of inspirations, from DV8 through to one of the pioneers of contact improvisation, Steve Paxton. Between them, Missen and Turner have worked with Austrian mavericks Cie Willie Dorner, Rubberbandance from Canada and Leeds' Phoenix. The initial research for Rites took place at The Northern School of Contemporary Dance, emphasising the school’s importance both for their training and subsequent development.

Ultimately, Rites engages with a subject that has implications beyond the world of dance, and places movement at the disposal of an important debate. The crisis of masculinity, sometimes a fashionable headline for newspaper columnists, is questioned, through personal and social filters, yet given the mythological depth and meaning that dance supplies. Missen is clear in his intentions for Rites. “Although elements of the work are abstracted, there are narratives that run through. I hope the audience can consider their own life journey, who and what they have become, and what they will pass on,” he concludes.