The Wayside

Laila Diallo is currently an associate artist at The Royal Opera House, and her CV includes time as a choreographer and assistant director on both opera and dance. After eight years as a member of Random Dance, a company famous for its use of innovative technology, she struck out on a new choreographic journey in 2005 and developed a series of solos and duets that won her a Rayne fellowship. The Wayside, her contribution to the Dance Base programme, emerged from her thoughts on departure, and combines dramatic lighting, melancholic music and Diallo’s own sinuous style to evoke loneliness and recovery.
“I had some thoughts around the ideas of leaving and being left, loosing and letting go. These were the starting point.” From here, she gradually developed the piece. “I improvised a lot, talked with the various collaborators on this piece, tried to define states of being, develop a physicality that conveyed both a sense of fragility and one of resilience.”
Collaborators on The Wayside include Phil King, who created the soundtrack that accompanies the dance. While Diallo's movement has an uncommon musicality, and is often more intimate with the soundtrack than many contemporary dances, she does not necessarily allow the music to lead the art. “I don't have a set rule with this. It very much depends on the project,” she says. “Sometimes both grow simultaneously, feeding from each other, sometimes one is developed in response to the other.”
Yet for The Wayside, “there was a bit of both: a song I fell in love with and a soundscape which I invited Phil King to develop as I was creating the piece.” This tight connection between the music and movement in the developmental stages is eloquently reflected in the final performance. And, again setting herself apart from many contemporary dancers, she is concerned with expressing ideas as much as breaking formal boundaries.

“Performance certainly is an attempt at sharing, communicating something of value to me, opening a door or a window on a personal world,” explains Daillo. Certainly, The Wayside is evocative, and her precise technique belies an indifference to the shyness marked her early ballet and jazz classes. Daillo suggests that she “stumbled across dance. As a kid I hated PE, really wasn't much good at anything physical and would certainly never have guessed I would make a career out of moving!”
Fortunately, Diallo has found her own rhythm, as her choreography is  personal and gentle, a distant cry from the more furious and video-enhanced style of Random and perfectly suited to The Wayside’s attempt to communicate ambivalence and change.