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Short & Sweet Photo: Darren Evans

Daniel: Where are you at the moment?

Andrea: I'm in Edinburgh.

Daniel: Nice.

Andrea: Yes, and where are you now?

Daniel: We're in Brixton.

Andrea: Oh, good, it’s really nice to speak with you. Please tell us a little bit about who you are, for those who don't know you.

Daniel: We’re Thick and Tight, that is Eleanor Perry and Daniel Hay-Gordon. We create works of dance which combine mime and theatre, and lip syncing, drag, a lot of things together. We’ve been making work for about 10 years, and work for stage and little bit for screen.

Eleanor: Well, we trained together, that's where we first met. We've known each other for years, and we've worked together in different ways, but really, in the last five or so years, we've kind of become more officially a company and been working with more focus on this because we also are freelance, so we also work for other people as dancers and choreographers. Now, as well as working as a duet and making works that we perform, we've started to make work with other dancers and made a series of solos and group works and works with students.

Andrea: In Short and Sweet, the new show that you presented at Manipulate Festival in January, you collaborate with Corali Dance Company and quite a few amazing dancers such as Harry Alexander, Oxana Panchenko, Azara Meghie and with designs by Tim Spooner, Pam Tait, Claire Ashley and Darren Evans. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how you chose to work with them? Tell us a little bit about that collaboration.

Daniel: Yeah, there were four soloists we worked with, and a group that are also designers and makeup artists. One of the solos was a collaboration with Azara Meghie, and the work Finding Grace. She had come to us and said she would like us to make work with her about Finding Grace, but the other works we choreographed. When the dancers come into the studio, we say: “this is what you're going to do”.  We normally have a vision of what they're going to do before they come into the space. So, someone like Connor [Scott], who played Sid Vicious, we already knew and he came to us and we thought he would be an amazing Sid Vicious. We've worked with Corali Dance Company for quite a few years and the first piece we ever made was about Edith Sitwell. We thought the best way to celebrate 10 years of work together is by going back to that first piece.

Eleanor: I think that often we work with people we know, people we've worked with in different contexts, and then it's just about matching who we think they'd be good at playing so each piece is really unique to the performer. It's as much about them in a way as it is about the character they're playing. Instead of making something that's biographical about the dancer, they're being presented as themselves through embodying another person. You get this gap between who the performer is in real life and who the character is that they're portraying.

Andrea: I’m curious to know what your rehearsal process is like and whether you arrive with a set choreography when you meet your performers. Is there room for them to improvise? 

Eleanor: So, we're choreographing together to make the material and we do that by deciding what the limitations are; if we're going to work from photos, or from text, or how we're going to approach getting the research behind who the person is, into a kind of physical way. Once we feel comfortable enough with that, we come in pretty well prepared, but there are usually bits where there's more flexibility around what we make up on the spot with the dancer, whilst they're in the room. We're quite a small company, and we're always working on a really tight budget, we don't ever have much time, all of those solos, we had three or four days in the studio with a dancer to make.

Andrea: Wow.

Daniel: We have to be prepared, and we have to just go, this is what it is, to some degree. Another reason behind that is that quite a lot of dancers’ experience working for choreographers who get the dancer to make everything up and then the dancer isn't really credited with the choreography. I think there's also something that we both feel about taking responsibility as a choreographer to fulfil that role so that the dancer understands very clearly that their role is to interpret the material. But of course we would never get somebody to do something they didn't want to do or didn't feel comfortable doing. Working with Azara was different because it was a collaboration with her. We were trying to work out how she wanted to work and we spent a bit more time on that. It was a slightly different process. The concept was hers; a lot of the sound choice was hers; she wrote all the text.

Andrea: So, you come into rehearsal with a restriction? Is that the word you used?

Daniel: When we choreograph, we use the word limitation. We find a good way to choreograph is to set lots of rules so we don't just make anything. I think when the dancer comes in, they know what's asked of them and then within that, we use lots of imagery, we really talk it through, we play around with movement. It's not that we come in and go, “you're going to have to do that”, you know, things change, some steps don't work on certain bodies, or there might be something brilliant that comes out of us or within the process, but we do come in and have a series of steps that they learn, and the music's all there and there's a vision. We know what we want and we’re trying to get as close as possible to that.

Eleanor: When we're thinking about the other collaborators that we work with, in design and in hair and makeup, we're always trying to think as early as we can about what the person is going to be wearing. That affects what the choreography is. Like whether there's a big reveal halfway through how we can work up towards that, for example, or if this person has a wig on how that wig might move.

Andrea: So, the costume informs your character quite a bit. You mentioned imagery, do you mean that you show images to the performers that they can get inspiration from?

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. We use images quite a lot.

Eleanor: We watch videos and love watching people because we work a lot with lip syncing. That's so much about really trying to inhabit the voice in your own body. You really have to observe that as well as listen to it. It depends on the piece to some degree, it's kind of a straight imitation. Sometimes it's much more of an impression of somebody, but yeah, there's lots of listening to how that person holds their body and the rhythm that they move with. We have to show the performer. They know what they're aiming for.

Andrea: I imagine there's a lot of text that you need to edit?

Eleanor: When we're researching things, we choose bits that we feel really give an idea of who the person is, that you can kind of understand and you can hear well enough as well. That's one thing. Making the sound is usually the way that we structure the work, we don't make work and then think, “Oh, I'll try this bit of music to it”. That usually comes at the beginning - we make the sound and then we work out what happens to the sound.

Daniel: We also think about the work within the context of the other works. So we try to make sure that we're not following the same audio story build up as the other pieces. For example, we've made a piece about Marlene Dietrich, and we could have done a sort of biopic of Marlene Dietrich but instead, it was a punk track and the dancer danced just to that track. Then we might pick another character and there will be lots of little recordings of them, like the Elaine Paige one. That's mainly only speech and singing. There's no other music with it. Within a programme we want to take them on a different symphonic suite of sounds that allows you to see things in different ways.

Eleanor: That helps give each piece its own identity. So that it is quite singular, hopefully.

Andrea: I’m a theatre maker and in theatre we always talk about the character’s journey. When you talk about story and character, do you think about their journey? Or is it more musical, more like the rhythm of the piece?

Daniel: I think we always work the music first, because we don't have a script. The music becomes the script, really and it becomes the theatre of it, and there’s language in it as well. We definitely think of the arc of how the piece runs and what needs to happen at a certain point, where you might need to bring back a scene and start again, or you might want something to just go in a loop. We think very theatrically about how it works. We were challenged to do that a few years ago, even just to put a prop on stage like a chair, and how suddenly that would lead us in a different way to traditional dance, which is people coming in and dancing without a narrative sometimes. Even having that chair strengthened our ability to perform as characters.

Eleanor: It very much depends on how long the work is that we're making, for example, a couple of years ago, we made a work about Derek Jarman and Marcel Proust. They're both writers, there's absolutely loads to know about their lives that we wanted to get, at least a bit of it across. So that piece felt like it had more of a narrative going into different locations. Whereas if we're doing a 10-minute piece about Andy Warhol, it doesn't need to be biographic, it's more just a portrait that exists, it doesn't have to have a story in that way. And then it's more about the energy of how it builds up and the audience engagement.

Daniel: I'd like, one day when we're older and have made lots of work, to sort of write something about what happens at a certain amount of minutes length piece and what has to be achieved and what you can't achieve. What you can do in a 5-minute piece, and what that looks like and what that feels like is so different to a 40-minute piece, but a 40-minute piece is really different to a 50-minute piece. Especially with dance, there's something about the energy of the work and how you keep it going through just movement. There must be an equation to it all, [both laugh] that we try to tap into and try and understand. Well, what we're both a bit obsessed with, is making entertaining work. What we'd never want is someone to feel bored when they're watching. The big driving force behind it is how do you keep an audience engaged and loving what they're watching. It doesn't always have to be funny, but it needs to draw them in, it needs to do something to them.

Andrea: When you work together do you observe each other? Or do you record the rehearsal, and then look at it and then decide, okay, this is not going to work?

Daniel: Yeah. We record ourselves, we create work separately and then show it to each other and then find ways to do it. It's a funny one, because sometimes we can suddenly have made a piece in two days. Like the Elaine Paige and John Cage we probably choreographed that in two days.

Andrea: Oh, really?

Daniel: Yeah. Once we have the script, we know oh well that would happen here and then that would happen and then that would happen. There are other things that we've done where we can spend a huge amount of time working on very, very short sections of our work. We get into a bit of a tizz about it, because ultimately what we're stuck with is that we don't know what's happening dramaturgically or we go, “oh, that’s a bit naff”. I think we both get it, we both have a good sense of what the other one likes, like we share a similar taste in music and the arts in general. I think we both know when it's not right. There's never that much discussion, we always normally know if something's not working. What can take time is if we're trying to push through a new barrier in terms of making things we haven't tried before.

Eleanor: Yes, like the piece that we made with Coralie about Edith Sitwell, we made a whole soundtrack which was 15 minutes of other music, and we spent all day doing it and listening to it and it was, it was nice, but we just knew that it wasn't exciting. So, we scrapped it and started again, and it was quite exciting to do that and to both know that we've spent all day on something that we thought was okay to go. Yeah, lose it and do something else.

Daniel: It's exciting as well, it's liberating. To try stuff out and it's good to do it. It's so much better. Because we've both been in a lot of productions. We've worked a lot as dancers, and one of the most frustrating things, for me, is creating endless material for a choreographer and then go no, no, not that. [you spend] days, weeks, and you don't hold on to anything. A lot of choreographers do that. I think they also think that that's an exciting way to sort of keep the energy of the room going. For me, if you've got a dancer and you've got them for a little bit of time, as the choreographer you want to have done the hard work of going: “what is it?” before people come into the room, so you're not laying it on them to be the people who have to be creative, have to suffer, have to go through your melodrama. I hate that, I hate it. [Laughs].

Andrea: It's a bit different from theatre where the director doesn't always have the opportunity to try things out on their own and fail and then be like: “Okay, this doesn't work.” I guess because you two work together and you know each other very well you know what you like, and then you can sort of scrap things out. Are there no like hard feelings about it?

Daniel: No, well, we make the things separately, so if we've got a bit of music, Eleanor would take the first bit, and I’ll take the second bit, and what the other one has made, we try and be as respectful as possible about that. So, it might be about gilding it or adding another element to it, but I think we always check in. I wouldn't just sort of go “Oh, not that, you're not going to do that”. I wouldn't step on what she's done. I remember I did a sort of Moroccan art thing. It was a certain technique where everyone gets this big canvas and you all paint on the canvas and you decide where you're going to put it. It was a really nice kind of task. There was this woman who was doing it and she found it really liberating, just before it was timeout, she covered it all in grey and you could feel that some people thought “But I did that and now you've completely you've covered it up.” So anyway, that's a silly thing but you do need to be careful if you're working together, to respect other people. I think it’s also really important not to be arguing, especially if it’s in front of other people, I mean, it's fine, there can be something going on but [it’s important] not to be weird.

Andrea: That's another limitation not to be weird.

Daniel: Not to get competitive. That's when it gets weird, I think, when it becomes a struggle. I want to be seen as equal; I don't want it to be…

Eleanor: One up on each other.

Daniel: Well, then it stops being about the work.

Andrea: When you choose a character, how do you go about it?

Daniel: It feels like there are always people circulating, people that we're reading about. We watch YouTube videos about them and then things just kind of land really. I think there's certain elements to our work that definitely require more time and more confidence. If we're going to make political work, or write a piece about Priti Patel and Winston Churchill and conservatism, and we made a few little videos online, that can be a challenge, because then you're having to both understand what's going on right now, present day and agreeing on a political stance. So that seems to take more time than if you're going to do something about a character who's already existed, because then you've got all the information, you know, an autobiography. They're encapsulated already, but if you're trying to go, “Oh, we're gonna make a piece about the current situation in Ukraine”, in a little video, to get on that right now, and to do that in the next few weeks, that's a different beast, I think. But it's also an exciting one.

Andrea: I think the work that you make is political, but then if you talk about political science, how do you translate that onstage? How do you physicalize it?

Daniel: Well, I think we always like a bit of satire. You know, a basic version of politics is, I always think it's politicians. So many things can be political, you know, we make queer work, and whenever we put our work out there, we are making a statement, but in terms of, you know, making stuff up the current politics I think we always like a bit of satire, really. It's the best way to highlight what's going on, but also stick it to them a bit. I like that. And I think dance is a great way of doing that because dance can be very silly, and it can also be incredibly direct so it fits satire very well and also satirasation and mime. You can embody that through movement.  

Eleanor: It’s a way of subverting something without preaching or without giving the impression that you think you know everything. It’s a way to comment on something without being a know it all either.

Andrea is a Mexican-born, Edinburgh-based theatre director and freelance writer. She is the artistic director of Anahat Theatre.