Making Wallflower: Richard Gregory, Director
1. Country dancing (1969 – 1971) 2. The crowd outside St Peter’s Church in Belper (1981) 3. A woman on stage asking the audience for cigarettes in Alain Platel’s La Tristeza Complice (1997) 4. Someone behind me ripping the shirt off my back at the Clash at the King’s Hall, Derby (1978) 5. Hating Mårten Spångberg’s Epic and realising now […]
Making Wallflower: James Monaghan – Dancer (Part 2)
Wallflower is a Tango. It is a question of how much do I want to give you? Should I give you? Do you want? Can you take? How much can I take? Being careful to not make the ‘wrong’ steps To make ‘real’ steps To not make shy steps Being free Being honest Being guarded […]
Making Wallflower: James Monaghan – Dancer (Part 1)
I always say I’m not a dancer. I am told that this is NOT helpful. But for me: it is. For me the dances in Wallflower are not the most important Maybe I would go as far to say the memories the performers are sharing are not the most important. It’s the invisible dance, a […]
Making Wallflower: Renny O’Shea – Dramaturg
On Saturday Jo said that it’s not about the performers fulfilling the task of remembering every dance, but about the audience making their own remembering narrative. It’s me watching a 12 year old Sonia dancing to Sister Sledge and seeing her 50 year old body in front of me. It’s something of what Adrian Kear […]
Moments from the Wallflower archive
Wallflower challenges its performers to remember every dance they’ve ever danced… it’s an ever-expanding archive of memories, a portrait of the life of each performer, told through the dances they remember on-stage and in rehearsal. Since we began in summer 2015, we’ve archived over 1600 dances. Each time Wallflower is performed, one performer sits out […]
Making Wallflower: Rend, repair, repeat
James’ trousers are torn again. Someone in the costume department is repairing them for the third time, a third rend in a fabric already scarred with cotton thread and patches – torn always in the same place. The first time was Dublin Theatre Festival 2015, the second time was in Vitlycke, Sweden, right in the […]
Making Wallflower: Jane Mason – Choreographic advisor
Choreography of the everyday I remember the image of a man standing close to my then home in Brockley in SE London, during the late summer of 1996. He was stood on the edge of a curb, facing into the sloping leafy road, his body unusually still. Leaning forwards with one hand on the lamppost […]
Making Wallflower: Greg Akehurst – Production Manager and DJ
On Thursday I visited Norwich to look at enormous spaces for us to make and perform Quarantine’s Summer, Autumn, Winter. Spring – a sprawling quartet of work with 65 performers from all walks of life. I’ll figure out how to turn a massive space into a theatre and a cinema, a place where performance can happen. […]
Making Wallflower: Jo Fong – dancer
I’m interested in bodies and histories and layers beyond the first impression. I always say, and somehow it’s a bit of a cliché, but I know someone better if I’ve seen someone dance or even better, danced with them. Maybe it is to do with a language beyond the verbal and the visual, a shared […]
The shape of a life… Richard Gregory reflects on Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring.
Last week I spent a day in my flat with all of the windows open for the first time this year, making a through draught. Spring has sprung. And I’ve been reflecting on being part of making Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring. The norm for me after making the first version of a new piece is to harbour […]