Caroline Bowditch’s Unlimited commission Leaving Limbo Landing is scheduled to go back into rehearsal soon ready for the first showing of the piece at East London Big Dance on the 7th July.
The PUSH ME team first met Caroline in May, rehearsing her dancers in East London. Caroline is not new to choreography but this is the first piece that has seen her sitting purposefully outside the work. With an obvious push to make her Unlimited commission her best work yet, she told me how the week had above all shown her the importance of trusting her guts.
‘Mid way through the process, someone asked me whether the emerging piece was what I had originally wanted to make. I suddenly realized that it wasn’t. There wasn’t enough of my story in the work and I needed to share more of this with the dancers so they could make sense of it. This was terrifying to realise but such a powerful moment too.’
It brought me back to our conversations at the time about the nature of choreography. In a recent article for the Creative Case Walks of Life, there’s a section on the late and great Merce Cunningham and the different ways and means that this extraordinary artist employed, particularly in his later life to ensure that he could relay what he wanted the dancers movements to look like. Not being on stage doesn’t mean less than, but there’s a real art to it and a degree of puppetry.
PUSH ME can’t wait to see the next rendition of the work with Caroline more firmly at the helm; to witness the leaving and the limbo and the landing; Caroline’s very own experience of emigration.