Continuing our series of posts on various collaborators, this time our attention turns to Gail Sneddon – who has been working alongside Claire Cunningham for her piece Menage a Trois.

Gail’s website states that she ‘makes performative work that brings an immersive and sensorial experience to the audience through the orchestration and design of different strands of artistic practice, including video, sound and space’.

We wanted to know how that linked with Claire’s unique physicality and performance style, so we nipped along to ask her a few questions. Firstly, what inspired you to join forces with Claire for her commission?

I began working with Claire as her choreographic mentor, providing choreographic tools, etc and she seemed to be interested in my ‘total’ idea of choreography – ie  how choreography could be used to look at the performance space and all its elements as a whole, and to consider how these strands weave together- so not simply a term that was only applied to the movement of bodies. When she mentioned idea of building an imaginary boyfriend from crutches, I instantly had a million images and was captivated by the emotions that revolved around the idea.  Also the reasons for perhaps wanting to build this boyfriend: loneliness/isolation/fantasy/control- these are all universal in theme and we have all experienced these things at some point in our life. But as an artist who works with video/choreography and spacial design, to look at these through the lens of a fantasy world was very exciting.

How is this performance different from your other work?

This it the first time I’ve worked with a biographical story. We talked A LOT each session – it was like therapy! “Why do you think that way?” “Why is that like that?” We dissected Claire’s thoughts around the subject so thoroughly and each scene evolved from the exploration of these chats. I’ve never worked that privately with another artist before and it took a lot of trust on both our parts.

I also appreciated the trust shown by Claire to allow her collaborators to run with ideas/design. I found this very brave, especially as the work is so personal. I think its an asset how Claire lets people in to her story.

How are you finding working with National Theatre of Scotland?

For a video designer it’s a dream gig! My speciality is weaving movement, video and sound design, and this collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland – because of their technical resources and the experience of their technical staff, made it possible to make the production we had conceived in our minds. Also their support as producers- having adequate research time for a project of this size and complexity was essential and it was vital that the technical resources were in place/available to us from the beginning of the research.

What’s different about this project?

I’ve seen a lot of theatre/dance performance work that claims to use video but I feel that rarely is it truly integrated into the work – its often used as an afterthought. And I feel because we had the resources from the beginning with NTS, it truly is married with the movement and the story– I think that’s quite unique.

And finally, what’s the push inside for you here?

For me – a lot of the anxiety was about the integrity about the conversations, the sensitivity of the journey and making sure that translated through the piece as a whole. With such resources and scale its possible to go wild – and for me there was a concern that we kept the integrity of the story and personal issues and didn’t let the humanity become lost in the media and spectacle.