Round the Squares
Donald Hutera meets Rosemary Lee

Rosemary Lee has a long-standing reputation for creating high-quality performances in unconventional settings that often feature cross-generational casts. Staged at Greenwich Dance in the autumn of 2009, her uncommonly fine production Common Dance was one of the highlights of that year’s Dance Umbrella.

This Dance Umbrella 2011 commission, Square Dances – only a provisional title, but one that makes perfect sense – is the latest collaboration between her and Dance Umbrella. This ambitious new project will involve up to 200 professional and non-professional dancers of all ages. The participants, hand-picked by Lee via an open application process, will be split into four distinct groups (men, women, dance students and children). Over two days in October they’ll materialise in different public squares in the Bloomsbury area of central London. Each group will offer a repeated series of short, low-key but quietly spellbinding performances for anyone lucky enough to catch them in action.

Lee and I meet on a bitingly cold weekday morning in late January, our goal to walk the chosen locations and talk about the project as a whole. Betsy Gregory, Dance Umbrella’s artistic director, had originally invited her to devise ‘something small in Hyde Park’ that would be free to the public and occur outdoors during the day. Lee stayed true to everything but the proposed setting, which simply didn’t suit her sense of scale.

“I walked most of the squares of London,” she says of her subsequent research period. These on-foot jaunts lasted anywhere from 6 to 8 hours. What was Lee looking for? “Something that held me, or touched me. Wherever I went I’d ask myself, Can I see anything happening here?”

As is likely true of all of her work, lurking beneath Square Dances is a more personal intention. Lee was born into a family of environmentally aware Quakers in East Anglia. “Although I live in London,” she says, “for the past thirty years I’ve always thought I was just passing through. I suppose I’ve needed to find places that allow me to feel in some way that I belong here.”

A similar sense of belonging is something that this project with Dance Umbrella might well engender in participants and spectators alike. “It’s about bringing something brief and transitory into these very permanent squares,” Lee adds. “Without wanting to sound precious, it’s a reminder that in the general ordinariness of a London day one can experience something more poetic.”

Our trek starts in Brunswick Square, a small park very close to Russell Square tube station. “It’s very pastoral,” Lee remarks, “and so still.” Despite the frigid temperature a middle-aged woman and a friendly dog are playing throw-and-fetch with a large plastic ring. Nearby three park employees discuss their wages while sharing what our weather-reddened noses unmistakably recognise as a spliff. Chuckling to ourselves, Lee and I slowly gravitate toward the largest and most impressive of the park’s few trees. A wooden plaque stuck in the ground identifies it as The Brunswick Plane.

Come October, Lee says, ten to fifteen men will convene beneath this venerable tree’s gnarly branches and surrender themselves to gravity. “Simple and raw” is her description of how their movement will look. Although it won’t be difficult to learn, Lee claims, this earthy dance will require acute concentration.

We move on to Queen’s Square, a long, well-ordered space situated near three hospitals. Lee regards it as a place of poignancy, peace and proportion. Bordering the grassy areas and rosebeds are some thirty benches which will we be used by as many third year dance students recruited from the London Contemporary Dance School. “They’ll each have a different solo lasting about two minutes,” Lee explains. All of these solos will be repeated as each dancer shifts to four different benches in the square.

We next visit Woburn Square, the smallest of Bloomsbury’s squares with a statue of the mischievous, mythical Green Man at one end and a sweet little roofed pavilion at the other. Here Lee will work with fifteen children on character-tinged solos and group dances. The central oblong of grass will be their ‘stage.’ The pavilion, meanwhile, is where the musician Terry Mann (one of Lee’s chief collaborators on Common Dance) will be stationed playing a composition featuring bells.  This, Lee confides, is the only prepared piece of music to feature in Square Dances.

One of the main links between the activities happening in all four squares will be the sound of bells. “They’ll be part of the movement, if you like,” says Lee. “Apart from Terry, all of them will be played by the dancers.” Both she and Mann have a deep affinity for bells. “I love what they symbolise about marking time,” Lee continues. “They’ll be calling people to each event.”

Finally we head for the Gordon Square, the biggest space earmarked for the project. It’s an open space of subtle contrasts. Here a neat, upright line of trees is balanced by several leaning trees nearer the square’s centre. This parallels Lee’s idea of a loosely processional dance by a group of one hundred women of all ages. It is, she says, ideal for those “who’d like the opportunity to be expressive individually but also part of an ensemble.”

The over-all tone of Square Dances is, according to Lee, “celebratory but not jolly-jolly. It’s about people revealing a side of themselves, not just how their body moves.” As for the public, she says,  

“I’d like people to be more observant, and become as fascinated as I am both by the history of London and human endeavour. There are so many lives here, layer upon layer. We’re so brief compared to this city. We’re really just passing through.”

Recruitment has now begun for Square Dances and will last until the end of April.

© Donald Hutera, 2011