Another Dance Company's Dance & Text workshop reveals the processes used to create Epithet.
See our video clip for extracts of the dance piece Epithet and the processes used to create it.
Professional Dance Piece: Epithet
Another Dance Company’s captivating dance piece Epithet explores the power of fiction through movement that invokes the rhythm of speech, phonetics and the emotional journeys of protagonists.
The choreography explores how it feels to be the reader of fiction, and uses an analysis of the language and structure from particular texts to determine the movement.
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Created from the text of Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and J. D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’.
Epithet explores how and why so many of us choose to escape between the pages of a novel and immerse ourselves in a fictional world. How does an author draw us into their imagined world and why do we choose to become so involved in the lives of these fictional characters?
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The dancers embody the position of the reader as voyeur, judge and psychoanalyst of the situations in specific extracts from the two texts.
The dance piece does not narrate the stories through dance. Instead the movement aims to convey how it feels to be the reader of these texts. This insight into the power of fiction is achieved through a study of the language, phonetics, intonation and patterns of speech used by two authors to absorb and involve the reader, as well as the subject content.
The rhythm of movement is determined by the rhythm of characters’ speech and narration within particular extracts. The emotional journey of characters’ arguments and situations dictates the intensity of sections of movement. The reader’s involvement, compassion and despair at the lives of fictional characters are displayed through shifts in direction and movement style.
The piece is performed by three professional dancers and lasts for 30 minutes.
Another Dance Company performed Epithet at The Riley Theatre, Leeds; The Crucible Studio, Sheffield; Ferens Live Art Space, Hull; as well in secondary schools across Yorkshire June- December 2007.
