Lorna Irvine speaks with Anna Porubcansky and Ewan Downie about the company, their work and who inspires them.
Company of Wolves are fast emerging as one of Scotland’s most exciting and inspiring companies. Using dance, music, multimedia and theatrical practice, they are ambitious and bold. Previous work such as Invisible Empire received great critical acclaim, bringing their work to a whole new audience. New show Seven Hungers is currently touring. I caught up with Anna Porubcansky and Ewan Downie from the company.
There seems to be an overlap in your work, wherein you engage both camps- the theatre audience and dance audience, who may not always go and see both- do you think it's fair to say that?
Ewan: That's true, but there's also a growing audience in Scotland specifically for experimental physical performance- for the work of practitioners like Al Seed, Oceanallover and Dudendance. Interest in this kind of performance, with elements from dance and theatre, is increasing, as are the number of people who make work in this area.
Anna: It's also worth saying that we also engage with people through music. Music is a key element in our work, and the structure of our performances is much closer to music than narrative – so we're also really interested to engage with audiences through that side of our work.
Ewan: Ultimately, we're interested in creating performances that are alive in the moment; performances that change, that offer the space for both performers and audiences to dream. And this can be through music, movement or text.
Much of your work involves improvisation. Who comes up with initial ideas?
Ewan: The initial ideas for a performance tend to come from an idea or theme that Anna and myself keep returning to, keep finding ourselves drawn to. Initially, and for a long time, we may have no idea how this idea can become a performance.
We then do research around the theme. This involves reading current research around the topic (we're particularly interested in current research into neurology and cognition, and into the history and pre-history of human development), while also looking at what might be the seeds of movement research and training for the work.
Anna: A large part of this is following our gut, following what may seem like random associations: songs that get stuck in our heads, pieces of text we keep getting drawn back to, books, images, art works, films, landscapes and environments. It's a little like diving into a body of water, keeping your skin alive and eyes open, and allowing all these sensations to fill your body. And not having a definite destination in mind.
Ewan and I bring all of that into the room at the beginning of each project. We put it all into the pot, and the members of the ensemble begin to add their own associations and ideas.
Ewan: We draw the net very wide indeed at the beginning and then during the rehearsal process begin to winnow out what we don't need from what will be the seeds of the performance. Collectively, with the members of the ensemble, we make a lot of material through improvisation and then we start to see how it might fit into a structure.
The performances themselves also have a lot of space for improvisation inside them. Each scene is improvised anew each night (within certain parameters, of course) so the performances change a lot from night to night.
Tell us (without giving away too much) about Seven Hungers, please.
Ewan: The project started out by a nagging interest in modern society's relationship with food – for instance, why is it that cooking programmes and cookery books are so incredibly popular, yet we are cooking less than ever before? We wanted to investigate our relationship to food, and how eating and hunger connect us intimately to the natural world.
As we got deeper into the subject, we noticed something strange: ask someone about a memorable meal and it's rare that they spend much time talking about the food. More often they'll tell you about the people they shared that food with. We began to look at how food and eating connect us, and at how more than food is shared when we eat together.
Anna: We began to investigate how the hunger that we feel can also be for closeness, for understanding, for comfort, and how sometimes, when we eat, we are trying to feed these other hungers rather than actually fuel our bodies.
Ewan: So, a piece about food and hunger became a piece about intimacy, and how the search for food for our bodies and food for our hearts are intimately entwined.
Who do you find interesting in the performing arts at the moment? Any recommendations?
Ewan: A lot of our inspiration comes from sources other than performance. At the moment, I'm reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, which is amazing. I'm also simultaneously doing research into mind control and motivation, which will be part of our next piece, A Brief History of Evil, which we're making next year. We also get a lot of inspiration from music; I'm currently listening a lot to Birdy Nam Nam's Manual For Successful Rioting.
Anna: I've been listening to a lot of heavy metal lately...in a desperate search for female metal singers (with little luck!). Women like Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) and Kate Bush I find really inspiring. Independent, strong women. Amsterdam-based Katie Duck and Alfredo Genovesi do some mean performance improvisation (dance and music) – we've done quite a lot of work with them in the past couple of years and that's been a huge inspiration for this piece.
Ewan: Closer to home, Al Seed has a new solo piece called Oog opening this month, which we're looking forward to seeing. Claire Cunningham is doing some really interesting work. We saw some good stuff at the Fringe this year too – Sirens by Ontreroend Goed, and Small War by Valentijn Dhaenens – both really powerful pieces of theatre.
Where/what is the most unusual space you have performed in?
Ewan: As a company, we haven't performed anywhere that unusual yet. What's new for us with this tour is bringing work into smaller, more rural venues, which has been really exciting. Next week we're at Rothesay Pavilion, which is an amazing old building on Bute, and at Three Villages Hall in Arrochar.
Anna: We made Seven Hungers to be tourable to venues with no technical support: the lights are internal to the show, and all our set and equipment is pretty self-contained. We're realising how flexible it is, so we're up for performing it pretty much anywhere in the future.
We're also trying to adapt the structure of the performance so we can actually meet the people coming to see the show. That way we can make the performance a shared journey and not just whack people over the head with something crazy and leave. So that's a work-in-progress too.
Who would be your ideal collaborators?
Anna: In the past, we've worked quite a bit with a great Portuguese company, Teatro do Frio. There are quite a few independent artists we've met along the way, totally committing to their own way of working that we'd love to get in a room together.
Ewan: Our work is made very differently to much of theatre and dance in the UK. The tradition we come from is based in the work of Polish innovators like Jerzy Grotowski, Gardzienice and Song of the Goat Theatre. This means that there are some fundamental differences in how we think about the creation and production of performances in relation to how things may usually be done in Scotland or the UK. So, collaboration takes a long time; it's something you have to work towards slowly and patiently.
Seven Hungers tours until October 25. For more information, about the company or the production, go to: www.companyofwolves.org.uk.
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