Resource Pack Contents Introduction 3 Background and training 4 – Initial Training 4 – A new beginning 5 – Early Work 6 – Russell Maliphant Company 7 Movement Language – Movement Influences 9 – Maliphant the performer 11 Creative Process 12 – Long Term Collaborations 13 – Lighting 13 – Costume 16 – Music 16 – Revisiting work 17 Interviews with Collaborators Michael Hulls – Lighting Designer 18 Dana Fouras – Collaborative Assistant / Dancer 20 Carys Staton – Company Dancer 23 References 26 2 Introduction Russell Maliphant has been described as a “genius” (The Guardian 2015) and his work as “dazzling physical poetry” (The Telegraph, 2015). This resource pack provides an insight into his choreographic practice exploring his background and training, performance career, early influences, movement language, and creative process. It also celebrates his long-standing and highly acclaimed collaboration with lighting designer Michael Hulls. The pack is comprised of an interview with Russell Maliphant and his collaborators, taken over the course of a year. It is divided into three clear sections and interwoven into each section are images and video clips to support this written content. It also contains an appendix with background information on Michael Hulls and further interviews taken with Maliphant’s Collaborative Assistant Dana Fouras and company dancer, Carys Staton. Provided within this pack are useful references linked to additional sources where information on Russell Maliphant’s work and creative process is also cited. We hope this pack will become a useful resource for dance artists, dance educators and their students and will be of interest to a wider audience who share the joy of watching Russell Maliphant’s beautiful work. Lucy Muggleton and Jane Woolley For up to date information, touring and education activities on Russell Maliphant Company: www.russellmaliphant.com 3 Background & Training Initial Training ‘A choreographer of persistent accomplishment and a performer of enduring fascination… mesmerising.’ (The Times) Sinnos Panayiotis Born on 18 November 1961 in Ottawa, Canada, Russell just a different arrangement of what I already knew. I think Maliphant spent his childhood in Cheltenham where he there was a part of me that would have preferred something studied ballet and a variety of other dance such as tap and else but I didn’t know how to go about finding that. I knew I modern at The Patricia Newman School of Dance. He went couldn’t find it with what I knew up to that time.” along with his sister when he was nine. (Maliphant, 2016) “When I first started there were no other boys studying This frustration ignited an interest in other forms of dance, there were only girls. I think determination and movement and he had become interested in Eastern discipline was something that I had from an early age.” philosophy. “My father was always interested in Eastern (Maliphant, 2016) philosophy and he read a lot. I probably had a bit of an interest in that from my childhood. I saw an advert in In 1977 at the age of 16 he began training at the Royal Holland Park for someone teaching tai chi and went along Ballet School. At the end of his second year he won a prize to private lessons to learn the form. I kept that training going for the most improved student and in his third year was the for many years alongside my ballet training.” (Maliphant, 2016) only one chosen from his year to learn the lead role for the school’s performance. Later in that final year he constricted A few years later whilst on tour in Brazil during the mid-80s a nerve in his shoulder and lost the use of his arm. It took he also discovered capoeira, a form of martial arts, and him nine months to make an 80% recovery and when he sought classes in London when he returned. Maliphant returned to repeat his third year he felt the loss of ease of didn’t always feel completely satiated though as a ballet shoulder range which was both restricting and frustrating. dancer. As he explains: “While everyone else would be warming up by doing the splits and stretching - I’d often In 1981 he was accepted into the Sadler’s Wells Royal be in a corner going through the tai chi form. I thought tai Ballet (SWRB, now Birmingham Royal Ballet). His ability chi was beautiful: the internal quality of it, the softness.” as a classical dancer was evident. He was chosen to (Maliphant 2016) perform significant Soloist roles such as the King of Spring in David Bintley’s Snow Queen, Benno in Sir Peter Wright’s Driven by his curiosity of the dance world outside of SWRB Swan Lake, Bluebird in Sleeping Beauty and Blackamoor he made the decision in 1987 to leave the company to in Petrushka. After five years of being with the company pursue a career in independent dance. “I heard myself he created his first short piece of choreography: “It was talking about Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet in a way that for an entirely unrelated personal development weekend. I was not always positive. I was aware enough to know that had to perform a two or three-minute solo which, I decided I didn’t want to be a person who is complaining about to choreograph myself and I struggled to put something their life when it had been so good and I’d had so many together. I remember feeling that the vocabulary I had put opportunities, so I knew that I had to do something to get together was rather clichéd. I’d seen it all before and it was out of that.” (Maliphant, 2016) 4 A new beginning ballets. I had a different relationship to the material and I was quite excited to think that my experience and my life There were five other people that were ready to leave and could now be a part of the work in a new, different way.” together they formed a company called Dance Advance. (Maliphant, 2016) The aim of the company was to break down barriers and bridge the gap between the classical and modern world Maliphant said the experience gave him a very different by using classical ballet in new ways. The company sought perspective on movement and inspired new ways of to promote new work by choreographers, composer and working for performance. The technique of classical ballet designers, working in collaboration. that he’d studied for so many years suddenly felt limiting on his body in this new context. He felt he struggled to do In the first season Sir Kenneth MacMillan created Sea things that other dancers in the company of four could do, of Troubles for the company. Maliphant was excited: like let his body fully relax and suddenly drop to the floor or “Mayerling had been made when I was at the Royal Ballet fall, spin and come back up easily like his co-dancer Nigel School. The partnering was mind-blowing with such Charnock who had a very different training. “Nigel was incredible flow, throws and turns. It was very different from fantastic in the things that he was doing. I thought – wow! I some of the other more conventional classical ballets, can’t do that even after so many years of training.” where there’s less movement through the spine but the (Maliphant, 2016) torso is more focused on being elegant and regal, along with the many connotations that implies.” (Maliphant 2016) It turned things around for Maliphant who felt there was more learning that he needed to do. Some of that included After the first tour including Sea of Troubles, Dance unlearning things which were ingrained in his body. He Advance invited Lloyd Newson to make a piece on the said he hadn’t ever thought about ‘dropping his body, or company. He came to watch them perform at the Queen letting go of holding patterns’ because he’d always been Elizabeth Hall and the following day they met with him. He going towards a particular goal and that goal was classical felt he couldn’t work on a company that already existed; ballet. “So it changed a perspective for me and it made me he needed to choose the people that he worked with want to look into other avenues of technique and movement individually. He talked to Maliphant and asked if he would styles.” (Maliphant, 2016) consider leaving the company and joining him for his next project, which was Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, In 1989 Maliphant performed with Michael Clark Company based on the fantasy life of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen. in the film Because we must, in which Clark thumbed his nose at the conventions of ‘serious’ dance. He then went on to perform in Clark’s Hetrospective at the Anthony d’Offay gallery. “It was notorious; there were three dancers as well as Michael himself and Stephen Petronio and we were all naked and shaved, totally hairless, and we had feather boas that sometimes covered our genitals. It was a big art event for the time” (Maliphant, 2016) After a period of ‘research and development’ with Clark in America, Maliphant returned to London and saw the work of Laurie Booth who was to become a major influence. He saw him perform a solo show at the ICA in 1989. “Laurie was working as an improviser but it didn’t look anything like improvisation to me, it was unlike anything Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Film still else I’d ever seen in dance. In terms of language it had a real dynamic scale to it. There were times when he was just “I didn’t know Lloyd’s work at the time so he showed kind of walking around and there were times when he was me a video of the piece My Sex, Our Dance.