‘WE THINK everyone should have the chance to dance,” says the co-artistic director of Candoco, the country’s leading contemporary dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers.
“But still in the contemporary dance world, apart from us, there are only a couple of other companies that have disabled dancers as part of their professional group.”
In Candoco, some of the team are people who trained in dance before having an accident that left them with a disability, while others were born with one.
The latter group generally found it difficult to gain admission to dance schools, most of which still are not geared up to providing equal training.
“We’ve always found there’s a big issue with training institutions taking on disabled dancers,” says Stine Nilsen, who has been with Candoco since 2000, becoming co-artistic director alongside Pedro Machado in 2008.
“They need to create a foundation course for disabled dancers specifically, because they haven’t had so much training and then they can go on to university and study there.”
Candoco runs its own training programme – in fact holding a workshop at Chester University earlier this week. The company has built such a strong reputation for pushing the boundaries of dance since its creation in 1991, that major choreographers are clambouring to work with it.
Among them are Nigel Charnock, founder member of the esteemed company DV8, and Hofesh Shechter, one of the hottest new names in contemporary dance. Their new works are being performed by Candoco at New Brighton’s Floral Pavilion tonight as part of Merseyside’s Leap 2010 festival.
“The overall impression you’d come away with is that the dancers look so different in the two works,” says the Norwegan-born choreographer. “The first (Shechter’s) really plays on all the strengths of the dancers, they’re articulate and fluid and can move a lot on the floor, and then the second piece looks like people are dressed up for an evening out, dancing to a drum and bass beat.
“It’s more playful than the first one.”
The soundtrack for each work is key to their expression, adds Nilsen.
“Hofesh Shechter’s piece is full of beautiful movement and has quite an underground feel,” she explains. “The music is a mixture of classical baroque mixed in with groovy techno rhythms. It has a low key, atmospheric and mesmersising feel.
“The second piece, by Nigel Charnock, is really different. It’s more like physical theatre so there’s more use of text and shouting and singing and the dancers dressing up and dressing down and engaging between themselves and the audience much more.”
Charnock’s work, entitled The Perfect Human is set to a montage of around 15 fragments of music.
“He wanted to change what’s happening on stage so that the audience doesn’t know what is going to happen next,” explains Nilsen.
“It’s a bit like a jukebox that flicks from one tune to the next.
“The music plays a great part in bringing out memories and emotions – Nigel said about the piece ‘I’ll kidnap you to come on a journey with me’.”
His title is also intended to provoke audience reaction, she adds.
“It’s ironic because the idea of a perfect human is a man made concept, it’s not something nature created.
“He wanted to give the audience a very specific way of looking at the piece, so in the back of their minds they’re thinking ‘is this what the perfect dancer looks like?’, ‘what is a perfect human?’. But he doesn’t give any answers.”
CANDOCO Dance Company is at the Floral Pavilion tonight. Tickets £15 (concs £13), 0151 666 0000. Further details on Leap 2010 at www.leap2010.co.uk
