WHAT’S THE STORY?

A DANCE performance that lasts 12 hours is to be given its premiere in Scotland.

The performers on stage in Wallflower are trying to remember every dance they’ve ever done. Wallflower began as both a 90-minute show and a five hour version and this sparked the idea for the 12-hour marathon.

“I’m very excited about it,” said artistic director Richard Gregory. “I really enjoy the five-hour one and I always want more. It just gets richer the longer it lasts and becomes deeper and more complex. You go away feeling you have experienced something epic.”

He pointed out that the audience does not need to stay for the whole 12 hours but can come and go as they please.

“When we have done the five hour one, people relate to it and engage with it in very different ways,” he said. “Some people do come and go while others sit there for the entirety and don’t even go for a wee, which is amazing.

“There is something about the longer version that does something for the performers and the audience. You relax with it. The 90 minute is interesting, engaging and entertaining but because of its short timespan it demands an immediate response, whereas the longer version can be more fluid. It gives a complex portrait of other human beings and through that we can recognise ourselves.”

WHAT ARE ITS ORIGINS?

WALLFLOWER evolved from a desire by the Manchester-based Quarantine company to make a 90-minute touring show featuring two performers.

With a working title of Shit Happens, the starting notion was to explore incidents and events over which people have little or no control yet somehow shape their lives. While they were exploring ideas, Gregory returned to an exercise that he’d done with the two performers during an audition for a previous work. Then he had asked them to sit opposite each other at a table and try to describe every dance they’d ever danced.

This time, he asked them to stand up and to dance some of the dances.

“I quickly realised there was something interesting and engaging about people remembering dance,” he said. “It became clear that what it was becoming was both a way of looking at memory and how we remember who we are through our experiences, and also a very strong vehicle for creating live self-portraits in front of audiences.”

WHY THE NAME?

THE title Wallflower was chosen as the work needs someone to watch and not dance as much as it needs the dancers, according to Gregory. After the premiere at Noorderzon Festival in the Netherlands, Wallflower toured to Sweden, Canada, Ireland, Wales and throughout England.

This will be Wallflower’s first outing north of the Border and is being performed in Findhorn in collaboration with Dance North Scotland.

Nothing is rehearsed but there is a dance the dancers return to from time to time during the performance.

“It works a bit like a conversation because as one dancer remembers a dance that sparks something in another,” Gregory explained.

He added: “The kind of dances are as wide and varied as you would expect dance to be. There are a couple of professional dancers who have spent 25-30 years dancing for a living, while others are performers who would not necessarily describe themselves as dancers. Then there are some that would not think of themselves as dancers at all but who may go clubbing or dance around their kitchen.”

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

GREGORY said it was impossible to predict how the dance marathon would go but said that across the 12 hours there would be fragments of everything from ballet and contemporary dance to the kind of dances people might see in a nightclub. The music is played by a DJ who responds to the dancers.

“They sometimes stretch the definition of what dance means and use memories of physical experiences that might not immediately feel like dance but relate very strongly to dancing,” said Gregory. “We have found in the shorter versions that the performance seems to be able to touch, and be of interest to, an incredibly wide range of people – including those with little or no experience of dance or who don’t usually go to the theatre.

“It works for all kinds of people because we all, in whatever way, have some relationship with dancing.”

The performance takes place tonight in the Universal Hall, Findhorn