John Ashford
John Ashford on British dance
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By Lyndsey Winship
Posted: Mon Jun 8 2009 -
John Ashford is leaving his post as theatre director at The Place after 23 years, to take a job with European dance network Aerowaves. Why? Because British dance is boring, he tells Lyndsey Winship
‘British dance is timorous, and therefore often dull,’ says John Ashford – and as a man who has seen somewhere in the region of 10,000 performances, he might just be qualified to make that judgement. Too often he sees young artists ‘doing what they’ve been taught in school’ rather than ‘truly reflecting the world as seen by that artist’. Increasingly for Ashford, work coming from continental Europe is overshadowing homegrown artists in terms of invention, courage and authenticity.
So before he quits England for European dance network Aerowaves, Ashford has devised a ‘provocation’ to UK audiences and artists in the shape of his final season, ‘The Turning World’, showing what dance can be in the hands of real risk takers. Feature continuesAdvertisementSo why does British dance need such a shot in the arm? Where did it all go wrong? For Ashford, it comes down to three things: training, funding and a theatrical tradition too rich for its own good.
Back in the early ’70s, Ashford began his career as Time Out’s inaugural theatre editor, before moving on to work at the Royal Court and ICA, programming what was then called ‘experimental theatre and performance work’. As the work blossomed and grew, so the genre was increasingly splintered. ‘There was performance art, and then there was live art, and all these genres and subdivisions, all of which attracted their own audiences and venues and sources of funding,’ says Ashford. ‘That never happened in continental Europe, so a lot of people who’d trained in dance [in Europe] began making work in that area, and they called it dance.’
Those artists now don’t fit into our ‘dance’ scene; people like Berlin-based American Meg Stuart. ‘She’s pretty much derided in this country,’ says Ashford. ‘In a dance context everyone complains they don’t dance, and in a live art context everybody says, “they’re dancing”.’
Then there’s the funding issue; that’s the Arts Council’s fault. Firstly for abandoning peer review, secondly for inputting a ‘madcap’ funding agenda that values community outreach over artistry, and then for leaving the fate of young artists up to the Lottery-funded Grants for the Arts.
‘I don’t see why a game of chance should influence why or not promising young artists should get money to begin their careers,’ says Ashford.
‘I seriously believe the reason [British dance] is timorous is because it has been coerced into obeying that agenda in order to achieve any professional level of funding.’
Ashford can pinpoint at least one ‘boring’ regional company who continue to get funded just because they tick the right boxes. ‘A lot of it is to do with this community access and education agenda. So there is an awful lot of work that I find not adult, and rather dull, which is related to the fact that you only get a grant if you’ve got an education programme.’
And finally, there’s the question of how we train our dancers. ‘Fundamentally I would say that if we want to have a cutting edge – and I’m not sure that we have one in London – then we have to notice what Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is doing at PARTS [Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels, the hotbed of experimental dance]. We don’t have anything like that. What we do have is too much dance education, which is producing people who are not going to have a place in an overcrowded profession.’
So, London doesn’t have a cutting edge, artists are judged by their form-filling skills and not their work, and the man who has done the most to nurture new artists over the last 20 years is jumping ship to join the Euros. What does he suggest we do?
‘I think we have to be more mobile about our borders, between fine art and performance work and theatre, and put one in the context of the other and break that down a bit more.’
He adds: ‘Maintaining a flow of international work is important, as is keeping the dance borders open, so what we do here is refreshed by those who come from elsewhere.’ For starters, presumably, that means coming to see ‘The Turning World’.
‘The Turning World’ is at The Place until June 24.- Add your comment to this feature
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3 comments
As someone who has trained at PARTS, i can confirm that it was very difficult to start working back here in the UK. The type of work i was (and am) making does not easily fit into a fundable category, and people in the UK were a long way behind other countries to catch on to the exciting work coming out of the EU (and there is still a very limited platform for these works, even including Dance Umbrella). None of my colleagues from PARTS have ever had success in the UK comparable to the success they have had in other countries.
Despite the recent efforts of Dance Theatre Journal to document new and interesting work growing from the roots up in the UK, there is still a limited interest and audience for pioneering work. In the light of the article earlier this month about how difficult it is for female choreographers to be represented on any large UK stages, i feel that the UK is consistently lacking in recognition of its mid and late career choreographers and new dance movements (Angela Woodhouse included), and it seems that this article from John Ashford is consistent with that. I think we are loosing ourselves and our identity, because of a historical inability to look beyond our Island for so long.
Its time to find our identity.
Step one is to celebrate what we have going on.
i would say that one of the fantastic things about the UK is its cultural diversity in dancers and forms. I wonder who Ashford is referring to when he talks about a "boring" regional company who tick the right boxes. Which boxes? Diversity is one of the strong cultural strands that will inform pioneering contemporary UK dance; the cultural diversity over here is a strong factor in British identity, and one that we should build on in order to support pioneers.
Finally, i think its important to really celebrate Live Art in the UK, as a potential category for pioneering choreographers rather then considering it as a "ghettoising" box. Its another thing that we do really well here.
Step two is to facilitate connections and platforms between pioneers and recognise new movements and their works.
How do we start?
I find this article a bit disengenuous. John Ashford has occupied one of the most senior, highest paid and publically visible post in the dance sector for 23 years. Although The Place has done some innovative and exceptional things over the years, John has not been a powerful or vocal advocate for the points he has made above - or if he has been I haven't heard him. The Place houses one of the leading contemporary dance schools in the country, do you really believe that if he had made serious efforts he could not have influenced the methods and ethos of training? Or has he been just as timerous as those he is berating in order to keep the public funding he derides?
The problem in the dance industry in this country, as John seems to be pointing out, is that there is a reluctance to truly open up the definition of dance and for dance to re-invent itself. I would maintain however, that there are artists (I might consider myself as one of them) that are asking questions of the form. These artists may be looking for different contexts, which venues themselves either find difficult to support financially or do not have the vision to take much needed radical steps.
Issues around funding may be a red herring as a more fundamental shift in expectation towards meaningful radicalism needs to happen in the way that this is an accepted benchmark for visual art, for example.
When the Place Prize arrived we had high hopes (was this our Turner Prize?) but the decisions on winners (and losers) and the constraining rules of the Prize have enforced a conservatism rather than lifting the lid. The shame is that much of the high profile work, some the result of the Prize, cannot sustain its over marketed claims of offering new and exciting ideas and instead becomes reducible to commentary about dancers dancing and not about concepts and ideas.
In relation to training the issue of time allocated to choreographic practice is a real and worrying one but despite this, young graduates, for example those showcased at Siobhan Davies Studio recently, are attempting new perspectives for their ideas. The difficulty is that the culture around them appears alien to means that are not specific to proscenium arch, seat filling, number crunching, et al.
Actually what we need is an ambassador who will argue their case over the perhaps shallow, populist model. Without flexibility dance does become, as John says, ghettoised into live art or some other open ended definition. Visual art in this country celebrates the contentious and the chaotic, yet dance, often led by the producers and the commentators, re-enforces the status quo of the body beautiful while relishing the contentiousness and rigour of the work from abroad. When will we recognise this contradiction and the disservice we pay to our own dance artists?
Would a British equivilant of Jerome Bell be able to do here what he proposed for Paris Opera House? Such ideas are in us all over here - we just need the will and licence to get on with it.