Roam

I am really excited to bring a piece back to Edinburgh. This is not over-commercialised work but in Edinburgh we manage to get a lot of people to see the show. I think they find it really exciting and refreshing to watch this kind of work that is impossible to categorize, not conforming to any genre box-ticking or restrictive pigeon holes. It is a style of its own.

Often people say they have never seen anything like it and that they didn’t know this kind of thing exists. For me, I am just happy for people to experience it and know that there is a lot more to virtuosic dance than plain showmanship.

For sure my life influences my work, I can’t really say I’m involved in sub-cultures as its just normal life for me, but yes I think the music scene in London, and now Berlin, is very exploratative and inspires aesthetics and art in many ways. I met Shackleton through friends in Berlin and Sion are part of a vibrant music scene in London.

I knew Shackleton was the right person to collaborate with for this piece: his snaking percussion, oozing basslines and Eastern melodies felt so right for ROAM. I wanted something that could be both landscape and earthy as well as urban. Sion have done an amazing job in this piece, the re-writing of “wayfaring Stranger” for the last section is a groundbreaking track/ song... It is something we are all really proud of.

I find it impossible to define my own style of movement, one day we, or someone will.... it has just grown and developed over the last 10 years. I can say my style has developed through exploring a relationship to music and aesthetics, and in addition, has sought to allow the body to transform through improvisation, to find a rich language with which we can create with. I loved working with Rick Holland who wrote poems for me for ROAM. He has a gift with language and the ability to transform my philosophies and thoughts into beautiful metaphor and meaning. All of this is like food to a choreographer and inspired tasks and explorations in the rehearsal studio.

I think people will be enchanted by the amazing performers - I am constantly. Their musicality is really beautiful, and amazing athleticism combined with grace and articulation make them some of the best dancers around, in my opinion. If I knew where we would get to in terms of movement quality when we started making this piece, I wouldn’t have believed it. I really feel the piece has a strong language of its own now but was all born inside the work. I think people won’t know how to describe what they saw or liked, as it is such a new vocabulary in the world of expression. The symbiotic relationship of sound movement and light creates its own world of performance with its own life and energy.

What's next is two new works, I Infinite, which is a solo that will go into art galleries and Cabin Fever, which will be a new piece collaborating with the amazing video art collective AntiVJ for presentation in theatres. We are also working on a big project with Shackleton called Refugees of the Septic Heart which maybe created in spring next year. In September I am off to dance in an opera in Japan, which will be nice.