Vocab Dance
Alesandra Seutin, Artistic Director of Vocab Dance, talks to Ithalia Forel about how her company’s unique dance vocabulary is evolving.
Your company Vocab Dance, was established in 2006. What is the company’s aim?
The aim of Vocab Dance is to bridge the gap between Contemporary dance and Afro inspired dances. I work on a contemporary base but, because my background is in Jazz, Street and African Dance, I fuse these forms with Contemporary dance in order to create new vocabulary. It then becomes my personal style of Contemporary dance, a fusion of many influences.
Who makes up Vocab Dance?
I am Vocab Dance in a way. I am the choreographer and the director. My dancers are elements of it as well, they are part of it, they inspire me as much as other things.
How many dancers are in your company at the moment?
I have six core female dancers, but I also have four part time male dancers who come in when they are needed.
So is it mainly a female company?
Well I work mainly with women, the boys are there but they come in for pieces when they are needed but the core group is female.
So that is an intentional choice?
Yes maybe, because I think women first of all are easier to work with in terms of reliability, and in terms of training I am more excited to work with women in order to make them stronger, because the boys I work with are already really strong. So my aim is to focus on the female dancers and work on their strength, keeping their femininity but to gain that strength that a man has when he is on stage.
Where are you based?
We are based in Hackney, in Carol Straker Dance Foundation. This is where I work and teach dance, so Carol allows me to use studio space for rehearsals.
What is your artistic ethos? What do you want to share via the creation of your pieces?
I share stories, real life stories, and personal stories. I share issues that we deal with in every day life, and that’s how I create my dances and the movement. As my movements come from every day life and I use my technique to make them dancey. I mean any movement that I create or make is about life and is about an experience and a feeling.
What are the main influences to your company’s style and work?
My background ,everyday life, people’s experiences, stories that I have been told and music. I use music that I might not use for a piece but I might use it for inspiration, I may use Hip-hop if I want something hard, or rock. Books, poetry, a lot of poetry because I write spoken word myself, which I have used in my pieces.
Who are your major influences, do you have any favourite poets?
Well I don’t have a favourite poet, there are different people and contemporaries that I quite like, Deborah Grey, and a guy called Shabaz, most of them are American. For example the Shabaz has a poem about black males in society, which I used for a male piece. In my work, I don’t just focus on black issues but being from a mixed heritage- I am a black woman from Belgium, living in the UK’s society - I am inspired by what is happening around me. I think living in London inspires me as well, as things are so different, taking something new in every day.
Going back to dance style influences, what specific techniques have you focused on?
In terms of contemporary I love Graham - the strength, the power, the emotion and the drama of it. That is my favourite technique. It’s odd but I think it has got something really genuine and honest about it. In terms of Jazz, I use Jazz for the dynamics - the turns. I have studied Matt Mattox and Lyrical Jazz, so it is more about the dynamics of Jazz that I would use in my contemporary pieces. The musicality of Hip-hop, and the fluidity and articulation of the back from African dance creates my style. Maybe one part of the body will be very clean but the other part will be very loose. For example the upper body may be very loose and natural and very articulated while the feet may be very balletic. There are sections in different pieces where the girls are doing footwork that is very technical and at the same time the upper body is very loose and the face is relaxed with an emphasis on performance, and vice versa.
So from all these different dance influences which do you think is the most prominent in your dance language?
Someone has asked me this question before. I think my heart, and my spirit is of a Hip-hop dancer with the training of a Contemporary dancer, and the body of an African dancer. So I can’t really choose. It depends on my inspiration at the time and the theme of the piece. All of these factors are contributory as all of those styles are in me. But I love Contemporary for the openness and the space that it allows me, creating movement that I can’t actually classify but at the same time you can recognise without really classifying or pinpointing. So that is why I call it ‘contemporary dance’ because it is something new, not because of the fact that it is a specific technique. ‘contemporary’ can be Hip-hop or African. Technically, what I make is ‘contemporary dance theatre’, because I mainly focus on theatrical work using ‘contemporary’ forms.
So tell us more about your personal artistic journey, how did you get to where you are today and are their any significant moments that you can remember that impacted upon this?
A lot of my journey so far has been within the context of my training. That’s where I met the people that connected me to where I am today. My training in Belgium helped me a lot, in terms of the grounding, foundation and the dedication. When I came here I thought people did not work hard enough. In Belgium the mentality in which we work is more hardcore than here, so it helped me in terms of dedication and pushing my ideas forward. But here the opportunity of going to college and University helped me get to where I am. At first I started at Laban but I stopped because I had a child, it was really difficult to be in a vocational institution with a child. So I stopped and then spent a year at City and Islington College, before going to Middlesex. A lot of the dancers that are in my company now I met in college when I danced with a Youth Company called Connecting Vibes, which is run by Beverley Glean who is also Artistic Director for Irie! Dance Theatre.
Most of the dancers that I met there are still dancing with me in Vocab. I attended Islington College whilst waiting for UCAS just to keep up with my dance training as I did not want to have a year gap and that is where I met my dancers. I believe everything happens for a reason. Laban was good in terms of technique but I did not really like the idea of the choreography, I felt like they wanted to strip away what I was in a way. Whereas Middlesex really allowed me to be free because I could create whatever I wanted, as long as I created something. This is where I started Vocab Dance, at Middlesex University, I was asked to create a piece for something, so I got together dancers that I had worked with previously and created something, then we found a name and it progressed from there.
So tell us about your most recent piece of choreography, how did the idea arise? And describe the piece.
Well the latest piece I am working on is called “Lasting” and it’s based on relationships between men and women. It’s a 10 dancer piece, five male, five female and it’s based around the idea that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. The way I came about it was through my own personal relationships and other people’s experiences. So I have been doing some research, I have a book called “A Bag of Love Poems” which I looked at different poems and found inspiration and also created a questionnaire made up of 10 different questions about love and asked men and women to answer the questions in one word, the one word had to define how they feel about love and/or the first thing that comes into their head when they think about love.
I then use these words to create movement, which is then developed and combined with looking at situations where men and women do not understand each other, their differences but how they manage to find the right balance in order to coexist, so that was the stimulus for the piece. It is all about relationships, including the ups and the downs and the constant clashing. When I talk to my friend’s guys and girls you always hear the same things whereever you are. So I just wanted to explore that further.
Can you share with us more about the process of developing the piece? Taking your ideas from words into movements, and how you then put that onto the bodies of your dancers?
Well I will start with myself as most of the choreography comes from myself, I use the dancers but I always know what I want before I go into the studio I will have an image and the movement. I already see the layout and I usually draw things, patterns, shapes which I work on in my living room. However I also want the input from the dancers and their own personality to be involved in the dance, I may use some of the words and I may ask them to think about what inspires them and what is their emotion when they see the word and to transfer this to movement with certain restrictions. For example the movement may have to go from the floor up to standing into a freeze with a turn. I may also give them a motif which they have to use every two counts within an eight count, then I will look at it and play around with the movement, then we may reverse it and defragment the movement to create different movement.
So how does that work with fusing all the different styles of movement?
It happens very naturally. Basically whatever comes out of my body will be the movement and that is how I work. In a piece called Kwenda-Kwenda, which is the most Afro-contemporary piece I have created. I used pedestrian imagery of cleaning the floor, or folding clothes and depending on how I do it determines what styles it will fuse, but audience members may identify it with street or African dance, it is just whatever comes out of my body. It is my own personal expression, as when I explain it to the dancers I tell them not to think of technique, just think about you when you are doing your movement, don’t let technique take over your personality. Do the move then we can use technique to make it or stretch it and make the movement more interesting.
Is there a recognisable, signature within your movement language that can be identified in all the pieces?
Yes I would say the dynamics can be recognised as quite fast and sharp but at the same time when I think about other pieces it is the undulation - use of the back and torso. Because I realise I use the back a lot in terms of how it moves and how it can articulate as sometimes I think ARGGGHHH I have so much pain in my back. The idea of the undulation of the body is a quality that is recognisable in my work.
So you mentioned earlier you are from a mixed heritage, what do you think that brings to your company?
It brings a lot, so much. My dad is Belgian and my mum is South African, so I mean I was brought up from both sides so it opened my mind to different cultures I mean I do not feel uncomfortable in any culture. I also listen to a variety of music, quite an eclectic mix of music I don’t limit myself to one style that would be expected of a Black woman to listen to so that also has an effect with what I do as I can go from classical to rock to house to Hip-hop to this and that. Also I speak different languages - that is why I called my company Vocab. The fact that I use different languages to express myself and that I use different vocabularies of dance to express movement, that I have come from different backgrounds and that I am multi cultural. I embrace anything, so I am attracted to many forms of dance, culture, language, music forms and ideas.
So would you categorise Vocab Dance as part of Black dance in Britain?
I would say yes, however I would not necessarily want to pigeon hole the company. I embrace anyone in my company, my dancers vary from white, mixed heritage and black, however most of my dancers are black or mixed race. I will always support black or mixed race dancers first, as I think we have fewer opportunities, and I think my work and the way I move reflects that. Usually when I audition if you can do the movement and you can feel where it comes from and the origins of it, anyone can dance for me but I usually find dancers with a similar background have a better understanding of it. That is why I usually use dancers from mixed backgrounds. Definitely Black dance as it is inspired by other Black dance.
What is next for Vocab Dance?
Keep climbing the rocky road of the performing arts, in the hope of being funded and being able to do it full-time in terms of employing my dancers, as a lot of my dancers, dance out of love and for a little money here and there. We are going to be performing in Resolution! in February 2009, I am really excited about this as it is something that I have had in mind since I went to University. So my aim for Vocab Dance is to grow and keep growing and to get more recognition, not just the people but the big heads in dance and the people in the industry in terms of funding. We are getting a lot of love from the people. That is good. It would be great to get love from the government.
What about your longer term vision?
I definitely want us to become a touring company. My aim is to dance on Sadler’s Wells stage one day, to expand and be recognised here and to have a Vocab Youth one day. To become a big company but one thing at a time hey!
