It’s All About the care: Looking Back on Men & Girls Dance
In this essay Susanne Burns draws together some writing around Men & Girls Dance and reflects upon the different levels of participation in the project, how this resonates with audiences, performers and collaborators and the role of care in these relationships.
“The complex project was a clear success in terms of delivering impacts to audiences and participants, fostering discussion and testing new ways of working. The project explored a sensitive topic with exemplary care.”
— Complexity with Care: Evaluation of Fevered Sleep’s Men and Girls Dance, February 2017, Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
Time and time again in carrying out interviews and observing conversations throughout the course of this research the word care has resonated. It is worth reflecting back on Men and Girls Dance to shine a light on this fundamental value underpinning the work of Fevered Sleep.
In evaluating Men and Girls dance, MHM drew attention to care in the very title of the report concluding:
“Care around the topic is a key strength. It is clear that Fevered Sleep had really thought about the project theme, and taken a great deal of care to approach it with the necessary consideration and sensitivity. Partners and parents alike praised Fevered Sleep for this carefulness – it’s of vital importance, and should continue sitting at the core of the project to ensure future success. A project exploring this kind of potentially sensitive topic that was not handled with such care would have had a very different result.”
— Complexity with Care: Evaluation of Fevered Sleep’s Men and Girls Dance, February 2017, Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
In complex projects with such scope and intricacy like Men & Girls Dance there will be many challenges. It had so many different elements – the talking shop, the performance, the newspaper. It was remounted in many different locations including theatres and galleries as well as in the UK and Sweden. It had participants to keep in mind across the project and was dealing with a topic that itself requires a complex approach and results in complex reactions. Care was essential on so many different levels.
As Matarasso states in his piece on Men and Girls Dance:
“There are so many traps here that could have curdled my enthusiasm. Glibness, exploitation, grandstanding, incompetence: I’ve seen them all in participatory projects. Here, I saw care, method, courage, openness and a steady consciousness of the risks involved – especially for those outside the company.
The children are offered an intense experience unlike anything they will have known. They are likely to become very fond of the men they dance with and others in the team: their ideas have been valued and their performance feted. And then it’s over. Professional performers learn to cope with the aftermath of the intimacy of creation, but it is a lot to ask a ten year old. Fevered Sleep’s ‘aftercare’ is supportive though, keeping in touch with the occasional message or letter, while the local partner, like Dance 4 the Nottingham partner, offers long term contact and new opportunities to explore dance.
The decisive element was sensing that these artists were genuinely more interested in those they were working with than in their own ideas. That was evident in each dancer’s performance and in the project’s conception and execution. The different elements make a whole with beauty, political resonance and human integrity. That’s a rare trick to pull off.”
— https://arestlessart.com/case-studies/men-girls-dance-fevered-sleep/
When participation sits at the heart of your work, as it does with Fevered Sleep, care is critical.
“Fevered Sleep invite people to participate in their artistic journeys and in return David and Sam participate with their perspective. There is an equity, mutuality and reciprocity that is safe, coherent, that allows space for risk taking but which requires careful facilitation and consideration. They create opportunities for ‘careful participation’ – empathy, openness, the creation of a space of possibility. However, at the same time, there is a clear absolute aesthetic sensibility and preference at play so the work is by no means co-created.”
— Luke Pell, Artist
“People in art is what makes art. Fevered Sleep are totally committed to this and can’t create work without others. It affects what participation means to the company. There is no elitism or hierarchy – David and Sam respect the people they work with and challenge them. They care about people and the world around them. They democratise the process of working with people and don’t dumb things down. The robustness of their approach is a common thread through all the work and it doesn’t change. They are still Directors at the end of the day and make choices but they will always create the space for people to take ownership. They are not ego driven by what they want to make but are altruistic seeking to improve people’s existence. I think that is why the work matters to people. It feels important to others.”
— Producer
“The process of working with performers is the same whether professional or not. Working with David and Sam is a deeply human process informed by aspiration, quality and equality. People are treated carefully. The work is precise and particular. Their work is characterized by meticulous attention to detail at every level and in every stage of a project.”
— Artist Collaborator
When people are at the heart respect and trust are crucial:
“The company know how they work – they are open and Sam and David are very particular about their method. They have a distinctive approach to making work. I trusted their care and expertise as we had never done anything like this before - restaging an existing piece. It wasn’t like a community piece being made with a group from scratch. They work in an impressive way.”
— Presenter
This approach means that work is made ‘with’ and not ‘on’ – there is genuine ownership.
“The link between the process and aesthetic is what makes it different. The work is ‘human’ – the language of love, touch, play and care is so central to the way that David and Sam work. They take meticulous care in the aesthetic – there is a ‘handledness’ to the craft – people have put this together. There is a complex understanding of light and perception in the work.”
— Luke Pell, Artist
“It is hugely important work and to see performers of that age on stage was powerful - they owned their material - it was made with them and not on them. The relationships between the men and the girls was special – two identities coming together.”
— Venue Manager
Working with people in this way though raises questions around the ‘duty of care’ the company has to the people with whom it works and these are not straightforward.
“Do we have a duty or responsibility to the people who are playing into our projects?”
— Company Member
As Matarasso has suggested above the ‘aftercare’ must be shared between the company and the venue partner. It also raises questions around the nature of the relationships that are build. The girls who took part in Men and Girls Dance were unlikely to visit This Grief Thing so what is the balance between a long term relationship and a one off encounter and does this matter?
“Is participation only meaningful when it is ongoing? For some people it may be about building a long term relationship but for others a one off engagement might be enough?”
— Company Member
“Is it about defining different levels of participation in how people engage with us? We have so many participants but they are all quite different and quite unique in their relationship to the project we are running.”
Company Member
Fevered Sleep make ideas-led work that is not conceptually siloed – instead it is deeply heartfelt and human. Because people come first, their work speaks to other perspectives and fields of knowledge. They make work that takes the form it needs to take unlike other artists who are prefaced by their artform. There is a fluidity and openness. Their work sits in the canon of contemporary devised performance but doesn’t fit neatly in a box.
It is perhaps worth speculating as to whether this means that the quality of participation is different – is it deeper, weightier, clearer or more uncompromising? Different forms of participation will have different impact and affect those participating differently – but whether it was seeing a performance, visiting a shop or reading a newspaper it is the care with which the experience is presented and supported that appears to characterise the work.
But perhaps most importantly, it is the value that is placed by the artists on that participation and contribution. They simply see the participants as completing the work. As David Harradine writes in an article in Animated:
“Men & Girls Dance is an attempt to imagine and embody a different way of being. It’s a public experiment in which dancers of totally different ages, sexes and levels of experience model a different way to be and be together in the world. The project takes a critical stance on many tenets of participatory practice, and reshapes them into art: touch is celebrated, intimacy is reclaimed; the body becomes a site of play and joy, not of danger and of risk.
All this of course is played out in front of an audience, those other participants in Fevered Sleep’s practice, who, more than in any other project we’ve made, complete this work. They complete it with the anxieties and fears they carry with them into the room. They complete it with the hopes and desires they bring: for their daughters, the girls who are taking part; and for the men, to be allowed to be free. These multiple layers of participation – from research, through creation, public performance and into the encounters with our audiences – drive Fevered Sleep, and nourish all our work.”
— David Harradine
Links to other materials
Harradine, D. (2017) Men and Girls Dance in Animated https://www.communitydance.org.uk/DB/animated-library/men-and-girls-dance
Matarasso, F. (2018) ‘Men & Girls Dance’ (Fevered Sleep) A case study of participatory art’: https://arestlessart.com/case-studies/men-girls-dance-fevered-sleep/
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre (2017) Complexity with Care: Evaluation of Fevered Sleep’s Men and Girls Dance
