December 2009
The Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris has helped create a ‘Scottish Riverdance’ a Dance Base in Edinburgh
Morag Deyes remembers when she met Mark Morris. What they said is bit of a blur. They had a few drinks and she vaguely remembers him liking her chandelier-sized earrings. What she does recall, though, is that something clicked. “We just got on,” she says, shrugging. “There’s something slightly under the surface about having conversations with creative people; you can be talking about the weather, or the wallpaper, but there’s an underlying understanding. It’s almost like flirting; there’s all sorts of other signals going on.”
Realising they each seemed to “get” what the other one wanted in dance, Deyes, the artistic director of Dance Base in Edinburgh, invited Mark Morris, the Brooklyn-based choreographer who wowed crowds at the Edinburgh International Festival six years in a row, to be the company’s artistic patron. He said yes. That was almost 10 years ago, and the pair have been friends since.
He, a gay, virtuoso dancer turned choreographer, with as much of a reputation for his envelope-pushing modern dance as his sense of humour; she, a fun-loving champion of Scottish dance, who blows a raspberry at anything too stuffy or earnest. Both have created hubs for world-class dance. Deyes runs the glass-walled shell of Dance Base on the Grassmarket, and Morris has his state-of-the-art New York studios. They use their centres to make dance something that can be enjoyed, if not by everybody, then at least by anybody.
So when Deyes began dreaming up a Scottish Hogmanay dance show to end all Hogmanay dance shows, she knew who to call. She wanted Morris to create a work for Off Kilter, a c
olourful, irreverent mash-up of hip-hop, ballet, Highland and Indian dance. The show needed to reflect the energy and diversity of Scotland’s dance scene.
“So Mark asks me if I know Beethoven’s Scottish folk songs. I’d never even heard of them,” she laughs. “Seemingly, Beethoven set quite a few of Robert Burns’s poems to music. I had to be told that by someone sitting in Brooklyn.”
Morris had wanted an excuse to use the songs since hearing them “maybe 30 years ago”. “I’ve actually always wanted to choreograph them. When Morag called, I thought of them immediately,” he says. “The Burns song we’re doing at the end is very gorgeous.” Called The Lovely Lass of Inverness, it’s a story of a girl whose family is massacred in a battle at Drumossie Moor.
Doesn’t that seem a bit maudlin for a new year’s celebration? “Oh, everyone cries around the holidays,” he replies. “There’s a drinking song in there too.”
Morris’s show will last about 15 minutes and is one of nine different sections in Off Kilter, which Deyes describes as a “brilliant night out, a bit like a dance talent show”.
The common thread is Scotland, but maybe not as we know it. In one section, called Innit Anat, the Highland dance choreographer Frank McConnell and hip-hop dance company Freshmess fuse their styles. “Their vocabularies are completely different,” explains Deyes. “But put the two together and you get this sort of house-party-meets-ceilidh.”
Scottish Ballet’s artistic director, Ashley Page, has been enlisted to create a piece around the offbeat, witty music of Ivor Cutler. And in an aerial dance segment, performed on silks suspended from the ceiling, a dancer will evoke the mythical darkness of the Highlands. “I like the dark underbelly and gothic weirdness of the Highlands,” says Deyes. “That kind of peat-bog sprite thing; the slight spookiness of Scotland.”
Scottish football gets a look-in with Gemmill’s Goal, a performance by male dancers, who rework Archie Gemmill’s moves for his World Cup goal against Holland in 1978.
“We’ve had these wonderful, overwhelming responses already,” says Deyes. “One of the biggest compliments was when [the artist and playwright] John Byrne got in touch. He said he’d love to be involved somehow.” Deyes is considering asking him to design the programme, or paint something for the show.
Deyes — who believes television shows such as Byrne’s Tutti Frutti help promote the notion that Scots are funny, not like their dour, Calvinist stereotype — wants Off Kilter to be full of humour.
Off Kilter will also include traditional Scottish country dancing — a version of Scots Wha Hae that will begin conservatively and slowly descend into a kitsch knees-up.
“We’ve had such a ball putting this piece together,” says Deyes. “It’s based on those ghastly ‘let’s modernise Scotland’ TV shows from the 1970s, like The One O’Clock Gang, The White Heather Club and Thingummyjig. They were gloriously camp and utterly desperate.”
It’s the Scots’ ability to poke fun at themselves that makes Deyes and Morris get on so well, the pair agree. “There’s a healthy cynicism that I like,” says Morris. “Everyone perpetuates their own stereotypes. I know all the jokes about those. So do Scots about themselves — I think that’s healthy.”
If the show is a success, Deyes would love to see it go on tour. She likes the idea of Off Kilter showcasing Scottish dance around the world, just as Riverdance did for Ireland, only “less showbizzy, and without Michael Flatley, please”.
“I’d like Off Kilter to be a dance ambassador for Scotland, and remind people of the truly inventive and sophisticated choreography we’ve got going on here. Riverdance didn’t have a laugh at itself. If we’re in a culture that can’t laugh at itself, we need to have a word.”
Off Kilter, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Dec 29 to Jan 2