Digital Programme: Change Tempo

Interviews with Lilian Steiner and María del Mar Suárez/La Chachi ahead of their performances at the Barbican.

Lilian, has choreography always been built into your practice as a dancer?

LS: To me, working as a dancer has always been linked to choreographic practice – I’m always making decisions about how, what, where, when and for what purpose. Being a dancer is not just being a performer executing a work, it’s about consciously crafting the thing that I’m doing and working out how to share that.

I’ve been very lucky to work as a dancer for many other choreographers and in collaborations with visual- and sound-based artists, who have all asked me to be an active contributor to the creative process. I’m always bringing my own choreographic mind to these situations.

I started making my own work in 2012 and most of those works have been for ‘stages’ – for performance or theatrical contexts of various kinds. However, I’ve always been interested in the dynamic between dance and other forms (sound, visual and writing practices), and about how my experience of dance and being a dancer could translate into materialities beyond the body. In recent years, alongside live performance projects, my work has also manifested as sculptural objects, with the help of 3D motion capture, film projects and writing.

You describe your approach as having a focus on the intelligence of the body. What do you mean by that?

LS: I’ve been dancing since I was three, but the older I get, the more I value the many layers of attention one must have, the cognition and decision-making about every detail and all of them in simultaneous combination – how you can be busy with the positioning and tone in the eyes and the kind of tension and shaping of the face, while playing a certain relation to musicality in your own body, while waiting for a cue, while noticing sensations in your body, while noticing how the audience is looking at you, etc.

I think about ‘the body’ in its entirety – the physical, of course, but also the emotional, the cognitive, the social and the spiritual. Often the cognitive part can feel slower than other aspects of the body in reactiveness, and I’m interested in how embodiment as a whole is so complex and clever in its ability to take in its environment, process it and comment on it.

When you choreograph, are you mindful of how the production elements, the stage space and the different spaces that you visit on tour are going to affect the body's interaction with the choreography? How do you prepare for that?

LS: In my work as a choreographer, I see all aspects of the environment as choreographic choices. This includes the visual aesthetics but also the sound and lighting. It matters to me what environment the audience immediately lands in, and through the choreography of each piece, I make choices about how to invite the audience to traverse a particular landscape.

In different venues the same work can feel different, which I like. The audience also plays such a big part in the feeling of the environment, and with them, I will experience things differently on a Friday night to a Tuesday night, for example. The energy bubbles differently on different days and in different spaces. All of those things affect the body, whether the work is improvised or not. Navigating the differences is always part of the work.

This double bill is presenting work that challenges traditional forms of dance. Can you explain how this relates to your work? 

LS: In making Siren Dance, I was particularly interested in a slipperiness of expectations. I did quite a lot of ballet and pointe work as a young person and I’ve always been drawn to the pointe shoe as an object. It really alludes to ethereality: it gives a quality of floating, ‘magically’ enabling a human to hover above the ground. It makes me feel superhuman. But I also see it as dagger-like – it pierces the ground in the way it makes contact, like a weapon. Also, it’s a very hard and tight shoe! It creates a unique type of pain for the person wearing it, which juxtaposes the light, airy quality it enables. These dichotomies of beauty and horror, or what is pleasant or severely unpleasant, lie in the same object. This is interesting to me and it felt right to utilise this elusive and deceptive power in Siren Dance.

In the first part of the work, I play with an expectation of classicism that gets subverted and turns into something a bit more aggressive or hostile, and then in the second part – without giving too much away – there’s a big turning point where this classical figure descends into a swampy underworld. The entirety of the body and its seductive language is transformed.

You created Siren Dance a few years ago. Has it evolved much since the original?

LS: The work in its full form premiered in March 2022, and since then I’ve had a few opportunities to perform it, always with big chunks of time between. Every time I come back to it there are new influences in my body from other people I have worked with or projects I’ve done which have laid the body up with new stuff. It’s both a blessing and a curse to figure out how to come back to this work: it really challenges me, which I’m happy about.

Could you describe the core theme of the piece?

LS: The work stemmed out of a personal life shift and an idea of seeing something, somebody or an opportunity as being shiny and wanting to move towards that thing. In Siren Dance, as in many circumstances in life, there’s a two-way seduction: this thing seduces us and we attempt to seduce it back to see our desire or curiosity fulfilled. In the Myth of the Sirens, the closer the ship gets to the song of the Sirens it becomes clear that the wondrous beauty is actually dragging them towards their doom, towards total disaster. The thing that was alluring can suddenly become a destructive force. 

There's also that very human aspect of wanting to follow desire and the unknown but needing to be ready for it to disappoint, for reality not to be as you perceived it. So we never really land where we thought we would, and we have to keep dealing with what the moment presents. The extremely beautiful situational scenario and the really chaotic one sit together simultaneously. These moments are full of aliveness. One last comment, and perhaps most essentially, Siren Dance is about allowing ourselves to park our expectations and to find pleasure in surprise.

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María, how did you discover this hybrid form of traditional Flamenco with contemporary dance and physical theatre?

María del Mar Suárez/La Chachi (MdMS): I have been a Flamenco dancer since I was four years old. I'm an actress and dancer, and graduated in both disciplines in my hometown of Malaga. I specialised in Flamenco with La Lupi, and trained in gestural theatre, new dramaturgy and contemporary dance. All of those different disciplines combine to form the world I now work in. Everything stems from my Flamenco roots, it is my way of expressing myself.

What is Taranto?

MdMS: Taranto is a formal study of a Flamenco style. It respects the structure and the internal dramaturgy of Flamenco, and it respects the codes of dialogue between the singer and the dance. But it transforms from seriousness to celebration and it collides with my artform, which is what we were talking about before. There are actions and departures from the traditional style that transform the vocal, the rustic and spatial. 

The title of your piece is Random Taranto: how much improvisation or choreography is there in the piece? And can you describe the sound aspects of the piece?

MdMS: In terms of the vocal sound, we have adopted traditional lyrics. These are the lyrics that I dance on the tablao (the traditional wooden Flamenco platform) and are from Taranto and Tango – the piece ends with Tango, which Lola learned. The premise of Random Taranto is physical games into which I intervene with random actions. Everything that can be done with the body can be done with the voice. We use that theory in the game. The beginning and the end are improvised using material that is prepared – it is fixed material but it falls in different ways. Everything else is choreographed and set.

As performers you work closely together. Can you describe the process of creating this piece?

MdMS: I created the piece – the music, the structure, the sound – and Lola, as a Flamenco performer, interprets from that. Lola makes it possible for me to do all of this because she has versatility and plasticity, and picks up everything I throw at her. She takes it and she can make it happen. She isn’t just a singer.

When we perform this piece, Lola and I feel a shared vibration with the audience in which little by little they enter into the codes of the relationship between the two characters. The gradual transformation into the party feels very Flamenco but at the same time contemporary. 

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