It begins in darkness by Seke Chimutengwende is on Thursday 27th October 2022 at the Bluecoat in Liverpool.
Recommended reading:
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Rats in the Walls - H P Lovecraft
All episodes and full transcripts: listeningwith.substack.com
Marie-Anne McQuay 0:05
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode, dance artist and choreographer Seke Chimutengwende discusses storytelling, nonverbal communication, haunting and horror.
Seke Chimutungwende 0:33
I'm Seke, I'm a choreographer, a performer, and teacher, and I live in London. I guess in terms of work, that's the main thing, the main role that I have is choreographer. I perform in other people's choreographies and performances as well. I've been involved in in dance and performance for about nearly 20 years. I don't think I really started thinking of it as a profession until I was about 18. That's when I started doing formal dance classes. And when I was 22, I went to London Contemporary Dance School and did a three year training there. After graduating, and up until now, I've studied various improvisation practices a lot. And I've performed a lot of improvisation. But yeah, I'd say a lot of my training is rooted in various improvisation practices, as well as more traditional contemporary dance / modern dance techniques.
Seke Chimutungwende 1:37
I've always worked a lot with text and language and voice work. A lot of the work that I've been involved in has sort of crossed over from dance into theatre. And I would say, that's been a big part of my practice. Growing up, I was definitely very into storytelling and mythology, fantasy, science fiction, and the sort of fantastical. And the other thing that I was really interested in as a child and growing up was history. At one point I wanted to be a history teacher. I was always reading history including world history. So both of those things have always been there. I would say I wasn't particularly interested in ghosts or horror, that's sort of something that's come much more recently, but definitely the general fantastical realm has always been an interest, as well as kind of real history. I'm not sure what I mean by that - history is history, the subject.
Seke Chimutungwende 2:43
I made a piece a few years ago called Black Holes with another choreographer. Alexandrina Hemsley. As we were researching that piece, we were very interested in Afrofuturism, and black science fiction. I've always been interested in sci fi, and I discovered the term Afrofuturism, I didn't know when it was, about seven or eight years ago. And I was really interested in that. Part of that research led me into looking at horror and black horror as a genre. Films like Get Out and books like Beloved by Toni Morrison. I was kind of intrigued by this relationship between horror and blackness. There was something very interesting about that, for me. Something that particularly resonated for me was the idea of haunting, and histories that people don't want to look at so much or acknowledge, or if they do look at them they're sort of disturbing and troubling. For me, there's a function of 'ghost' to that fear of something that might be there, as well.
Seke Chimutungwende 3:59
It's interesting, the idea of exorcism. I think, in a way, bringing something out into the open that can then help us move forward - that's definitely part of it, for me. Another part of it is more... it more just feels like a kind of inevitable sort of point of research or point of focus. It's something that I feel like I just can't really ignore. When I look at it in that way, it's not so much that I'm wanting to achieve anything through it. It's more that I just feel like "Well, as somebody who makes dance pieces, what's the thing that's present that I can't ignore?" It's something that's sort of inevitably in the space and it's, in a way, more of a formal question of "well, what happens if you make a dance piece and instead of pushing that subject to the side, let it really be in space?" What then happens? So it's sort of a kind of experimental question.
Seke Chimutungwende 5:08
There's something also really interesting about the idea of a ghost and horror more generally, and even the sort of idea of the Gothic that I think it has... I don't know if this is through post modernism, or late 20th century culture, but everything is sort of now ironic. And if people think of horror, you know, they often think of humour, and ghosts and vampires, and all of these entities are definitely jokes now, if they weren't originally. For me, there's something interesting about that in relation to dealing with subjects that are serious, like the legacies of slavery and colonialism. It feels like on one level, it's quite a neat metaphor to think of the ghost and the haunted house, and on the other hand it's quite jarring because these images are, you know, filled with humour and excess, and the ridiculous, and entertainment. I think there's something about that feeling. It comes up quite often in what I'm researching where I'm like, "oh, this is actually inappropriate", or we're laughing about something that's incredibly serious and terrible. And I feel like those points are really useful in terms of, it's almost like it kind of wakes me up to the reality of it.
Seke Chimutungwende 6:37
I guess with looking at something like that there's a temptation for me, and it's easy to get into a kind of moralistic place where it's like, well, slavery and colonialism are things that, you know, were and are perpetrated by very bad people, and the fact that I can recognise that means I'm not a bad person. So I'm kind of separate from it, and therefore I'm okay. And I think somehow introducing an inappropriate image of a sort of stupid ghost or a kind of friendly haunted house, or whatever - it interrupts that almost worthy way into it. I find that that tension very useful.
Seke Chimutungwende 7:22
I wrote this text for the symposium a couple of years ago. I wrote the text because I couldn't be in a studio. I just started writing some stuff and I didn't really know what I was doing, but it kind of led me to this text, which is a kind of hallucination of the work that hadn't yet been made. That was interesting, because we're working with that text in the studio now as the a sort of blueprint for the actual piece. It has created a kind of bypassing effect, because I think it's sort of located the work in my point of view, but my point of view almost as a kind of character, a sort of unnamed character, who's witnessing something. That's a different kind of irony too, not comic irony, but distancing that has the effect of quieting some of the other types of emotion, I think. Including humour, that been a very unusual process for me. And I think also it's created this object, that's somehow... the effect of it has been that it's a channelling where it's like, now we have this object that was sort of channelled through me even though, obviously, I wrote it and put it together. The after effect is it feels like it's been channelled, and now it's this thing that we have that we're working with in the studio, that we're trying to figure out what it means.
Seke Chimutungwende 8:53
I think distance is an important element in the work for me. What I was saying earlier around this moralising approach, it's like I wanted to avoid making something that felt personal in the sense of, I guess, autobiographical. For me, there's a question around "whose history is this?" There's something about dislocating it slightly from me or from the performers, because I'm not performing in the stage piece. I think one of the questions around this history is around, well, "who were our ancestors, and what did they do and what didn't they do?" You know, when I say 'our' I mean 'everyone', not a particular group, that there's some sort of ambiguity there, I think, in terms of responsibility and guilt and burden. That's very, very complicated. Giving things a sense of distance allows a bit more space for that, rather than kind of closing it down too quickly.
Seke Chimutungwende 9:53
There's the idea of of things that are unseen spoken and things that can't be spoken, which are not the same. I guess that there are lots of things around histories, around colonial history and the history of slavery, which for me is one history, really. There's a lot that's just not spoken about, a lot of that history has been destroyed, even. You know, the records, it's not really taught very much in schools. Maybe it's beginning to be a little bit, although there's also quite a big backlash against that. It's something that people don't really want to talk about anyway, even if they're given the chance, they sort of don't want to get into it for many reasons. You know, one being that is just awful and terrible. And I guess in relation to that there's the unspeakable in the sense that there's a side to it that's impossible to really understand through language and express through words. Because it's so unimaginably terrible that it's something that people don't want to speak about. It's the kind of experience that you would sort of want to wipe from your memory. There's sort of a side to it where there's a kind of impossibility of speech and dialogue and intellectualising. I think they go together, even though they're not the same thing, the things that are unspoken and things that are unspeakable. What is there is the physical body and the physical body being a kind of moving thing. Something that I find interesting about movement as a material is that it's created by a physical thing, a physical organism that's very material and tangible. And yet the movement itself is ephemeral and fleeting. In some ways, it's uncatchable as well, unrecordable. That brings me back to the idea of ghostliness and spirit leaving the body.
Seke Chimutungwende 12:00
I think about memory a lot in terms of performance. Sometimes I perform work that's almost completely improvised, and sometimes I do performance that's completely choreographed. And often stuff that's in the middle of that. For me, you know, if I'm doing a purely improvised performance, I'm working a lot with memory, but I sort of haven't decided which memories beforehand. Then with a choreography, then the memories are things that have been decided upon. It's that we're going to work with these movements, or these states or whatever it is. And those are practised and rehearsed, and the memories are kind of made sharper. There's something about that kind of performance memory, where often anyway, you're not even aware that you're remembering when you know something really well. Whether that's movement, or whether it's text, or whether it's a piece of music on an instrument, it happens almost as if without you thinking. In a way, it almost feels like a kind of hidden memory. It's not like you're sort of struggling to recall something, or partially remembering something, which is how I think we sort of more consciously experience memory. I have that experience, particularly with music because I used to do piano a bit when I was a kid and I barely have played for about 20 years, but I can still sit down and play some pieces completely from memory. And I would struggle to sight read them if I didn't know them. It does feel a little bit like you're possessed by those memories.
Seke Chimutungwende 13:40
I like this idea of societal memory, and then there's societal forgetting. There are scripted memories, there are things that we're told to remember, and other things that we're effectively told to forget about. Even people who do know quite a lot about their family tree, there'll be areas of it that are quite unknown still. Other people who know almost nothing about their ancestry. Within that there's unattributed memories as well. It's like I don't know where this comes from. Societally, there's something where that functions as well on the bigger scale. If we really remember these things, then that will protect us from a vulnerability to what has gone before.
Seke Chimutungwende 14:35
I work in lots of different spaces all the time. I mean, there are definitely spaces that I return to regularly and that I've worked in over a long period of time, but I don't have my own studio or a studio that I can access regularly. It's always a negotiation and trying to find somewhere so I end up working in lots of different spaces, different kinds of spaces. I think more and more I'm realising that certain spaces are better for some things than others. There's definitely been moments where I'm just grateful for any space that I've had access to, or I've been prepared to use any space in any way. I'm now sort of more and more feeling "oh, well, this space isn't quite right". Something that I'm more aware of, working with more and more different people, is that certain spaces feel unwelcoming to certain people for different reasons. There's something interesting around the idea of taking a space or repurposing a space. Part of the research I was doing last year we were in a stately home, Newstead Abbey, which is near Nottingham. It was very interesting to be there, I was there with with five dancers. What happened was, it felt like we ended up mostly just rehearsing in this stately home. It felt like we were haunting the house, and we were using it almost like gatecrashers. There was definitely an element where we were interrogating the space and responding to it. And then there was also something which actually I found in some ways more interesting was a kind of disregard for the space and "we're going to do our thing here anyway". It's completely inappropriate, it sort of makes some of the performers feel quite uncomfortable. Not necessarily to be there as performers, but just its history is kind of uncomfortable. That was something really interesting for me, almost "we're going to have our parallel existence in this space". And that felt really like one of the richer things that came out of that research.
Marie-Anne McQuay 16:54
You've been listening with the Bluecoat. Produced by George Maund, Marie-Anne McQuay and Sam Mercer, with sounds by nil00. Thank you to Garfield Weston Foundation for supporting this series, and our core founders Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council and Culture Liverpool. Our public programmes rely on grants and donations, and you can support us at thebluecoat.org.uk/donate
