Naima Khan talks to Lea Anderson about The Featherstonehaugh's new touring show 'Edits'.
To call Lea Anderson remarkable is a bit of an understatement. She is the woman behind 25 years of stunning dance from two hugely successful dance companies. She founded the all-male Featherstonehaughs and, along with Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward, the all-female Cholmondeleys. Her credentials include choreographing over a hundred original dances for them, earning herself an MBE and being a compulsory study subject for GCSE dance students.
True enough, she's not so great at coming up with catchy or easy to spell names for her companies but The Featherstonehaughs (pronounced 'fanshaws') and their sister company The Cholmondeleys ('chumlees') have had some sweet titles for their shows. There was Yipeee!!! in 2006, Dancing On Your Grave in 2008, and now a new show for autumn/winter 2010, Edits.
When I manage to catch Lea between meetings with set and wardrobe designers she explains that Edits is born of her love of film. It's fair to say the most compelling art comes from artists with a passion for something other than their medium – it gives their art more substance. When the artist's passion is a whole other medium, there's no telling where it will go. “Edits,” Lea explains, “takes characters and looks at the way they are put together in films”.
Her inspiration comes from a host of international auteurs, particularly French and Italian directors of the 1970s like Federico Fellini. Fellini dealt with memory, fantasy and desire and managed to create profoundly fanciful and affective films with heavy use of a still camera and simple pans and it's this that Anderson finds so fascinating. As she says, “I'm interested in the way characters move in and out of frames and the way films are put together; where films can cut from scene to scene, we have to leap on and off the stage.”
An uphill task, this notion of slim narrative and focus on film presents new challenges to both choreographer and dancers. It requires the dancers to think of film in a new way and means that Anderson rarely demonstrates what she wants the piece to look like – there's no storyboard to work from, for example. “It's very experimental in its process,” Anderson says. She isn't expressing her vision, or her interpretation – in fact, she's tried to talk as little as possible to the Feathstonehaughs. Rather they've interpreted their own stimuli, as she explains: “I haven't shown them something to recreate, I've shown them films. And when the dancers watch the films, they come back to me with a long list of questions: the challenges of close-ups, or how to follow someone's foot on-stage as a camera would in a film.”
Having been sent some wardrobe images and with Lea being in the middle of design-related discussions, I'm curious about the aesthetics of the show and the effort that goes into such striking costumes. “Aesthetics are important,” is Lea's response, but with things still in processes she assures me that “the whole effort is collaborative. I don't like it when someone creates a dance and someone else tries to shine a light on it”.
“I'm interested in how clothes make people move and the ways we change when we're wearing certain clothes: a man moves differently in a suit than he does when he's wearing sweat clothes”. It poses further challenges that she welcomes: “if the movement has to be completely free and easy, we might as well perform in pyjamas”. But Lea prefers to see the subtle wardrobe restrictions presented to her dancers and the ways they adapt to them. With a nod to the everyday challenge, she says, “I like to see how people move in heels”. The distinctly different aspect of the Edits wardrobe is that Lea puts men in masculine dresses, but “it's not drag,” she insists. “Men wear dresses in many other cultures and it's not anything funny, it's what they wear.”
The company will tour the UK with their new show from September along with a previous hit The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketch Books of Egon Schiele inspired by the works of the Austrian expressionist visual artist. They'll be in London at The Village Underground and The Place from November.
Photo Creit: Matilda Temperley
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