Choreographer Yahna Fookes has made a career out of taking dancers off the stage. Presenting site-specific contemporary dance pieces, Yahna’s work dissolves the boundaries between performers and audiences to create experiences that are unexpected, unsettling and, Yahna hopes, liberating.
In 2016 the she’s bringing her latest creation, Intwo Pieces, to Sugar Mountain and joining forces with director and longtime creative partner Martha Zakarya, techno producer Daze, and emerging dancer Kelsey Smith. Together they’ll explore the retrieval of long term memory through movement. We caught up with Yahna to talk about the nature of collaboration, breaking away from dance tradition, and rolling around in tracksuit pants.
Hey Yahna, you’ve described InTwo Pieces as a “dance installation”. What does that look like?
It’s effectively like a film installation. There will be a bunch of different projections of a pre-recorded dance video and throughout the course of the day there’ll be points where the dancer in the film will come, in the flesh, and interact with her double image.
It seems like it would be challenging to translate dance to the festival setting.
A lot of the work I’ve done in the past has been about breaking down the traditional barriers of dance. If you go to the ballet there’s a body of dancers on the stage, and the audience sits and watches. I’m really interested in blurring those lines and exploring how a performance doesn’t need to be announced—maybe it’s an act of spontaneity, maybe the audience can interact with the movement and the dancers have to negotiate around the audience.
Have you always been interested in the intersection of dance and art?
I’ve always been really fascinated by it. In one of my really early works an artist called Sriwhana Spong commissioned a work for the Aukland Art Gallery from me. It was then i realised this whole other world existed, the art world, and I just wanted to be a part of it. Once you do a couple of those projects, it just snowballs from there—that’s all you do really. Even if you try and spread away from it, it sticks to you.
Let’s talk about collaboration, because there’s a lot off different artists involved in this project, and they work in quite different disciplines.
If you want to make something sustainable, I feel like you have to collaborate. There are so many amazing things happening out there, whether it be music or fashion or film—I really just want to be a part of it all, I get my inspiration from the people I work with. With InTwo Pieces Daze, who’s doing our music, is this epic techno producer. He’s on this amazing label from the UK called Lobster Theremin. He’s making something really cerebral and really beautiful but in a very modern way. My relationship with Kelsey, our dancer, is also quite new. Normally I work with dancers that I’ve known or worked with before, but it’s been good to have some fresh blood in the mix.
When collaboration is such a core part of your practise, how do you make sure you’re creating an exciting, sustainable environment?
First of all, you can’t just collaborate with anyone: there has to be a common thread of understanding. It’s all about really good connections—almost like an unspoken dialogue. Martha and I do very different things, I roll around on the floor in tracksuit pants for a living and Martha’s behind a camera, but we have an understanding of the moods and aesthetics the other likes. That being said, when you’re good mates with everyone involved, there can be too many cooks in the kitchen. If there’s someone fresh, like Kelsey, I think you’re more respectful of each other’s space.
What are you really looking forward to about showing the piece at Sugar Mountain?
I really just want everyone to engage with contemporary dance and see that movement is something that everyone should enjoy—it’s not about going and getting a glass of champagne and putting on your fine clothes—it’s about enjoying movement for movement’s sake.
Tickets for Sugar Mountain 2016 and the full line up are available here.