Lee Brummer on the early days | 10 Years of ilDance
As part of our series celebrating 10 years of ilDance, Co-Founder & Associate Director Lee Brummer speaks at length about the early days of ilDance and how it has evolved over the past 10 years in a two-part interview.
As we celebrate 10 years to the day since ilDance premiered its first production, SOD, on 13 March, here is part one.
Let’s start before the founding of ilDance and perhaps you can take us back to where you were, professionally and personally, leading up to it and what signalled to you that this was something you wanted to do?
Lee Brummer: I think I can take it to the period where I came to Sweden, which was initially to work with Israel on a work they were creating at Balletakademin Gothenburg with the graduating class.
For years, since Israel first came to Sweden, we had been speaking about doing something together. We were such good friends and so involved in each other’s lives, it didn’t make sense for the only thing we hadn’t crossed paths on was our work, which we were both really passionate about.
But I was dancing with a company in Israel and they were with Gothenburg’s Opera, so our schedules always clashed. Then I got injured – I wasn’t so well for a while and had to step away from the company, which looking back at it now was kind of a blessing in disguise, opening me up to other things.
“Israel called and said ‘Balletakademin asked and I said yes and you have three classes a day, then we’ll rehearse,’ and that was that.”
I had just finished up my BA degree in dance and teaching, which I did as something to have to fall back on one day, rather than something to pursue in the near future. Israel invited me to come over and assist in the project they were doing and spoke to Balletakademin about me teaching while I was there and when they asked, I was like no, because this was not something I was planning to do.
Then Israel called and said “Balletakademin asked and I said yes and you have three classes a day, then we’ll rehearse,” and that was that.
At that time, Israel believed more in me than I did in myself, they knew the context I came from and what I was going into, what I demand from myself and the experiences I had ensured that I had something to offer to students, which was my biggest fear.
Almost immediately, I fell in love with teaching, it was this new thing I became so passionate about after getting over the hurdle of fearing it - the contact with young artists and the possibility to share knowledge. Even though I was 23 at the time and teaching people of a similar age, I knew I had different experiences to offer and I was really lucky in my education and career until that point to have really inspiring teachers and artists to help me accumulate that knowledge, which I felt I had to pass on.
It's funny because within those few years, I was offered a lot of things and I think it’s the nature of coming from somewhere else and being a little exotic in your practice, but with everything I was offered, I said no to at first.
Lee Brummer | Photo credit: Marcus Tari
Everything felt really big for me and it took me time to build the confidence but I never doubted myself once I was doing it, it was only before I started. I think it is because I had so much respect for those who had taught me and it felt like big shoes to fill.
So teaching was the start of it and then the first time I choreographed was also at Balletakademin in Gothenburg, something the director of the school at the time, Hugo Tham, had been trying to persuade me to do for a while, which I was reluctant to do. It took me a while to realise that I was choreographing in my classes. Yes, there were technical things but there were a lot of mini-choreographies involved.
As soon as I recognised that, it led me to do a short piece with a group I had taught intensively over the three years – one of that group was Siri Elmqvist and since then we’ve been weaving in and out of each other’s careers.
It feels like a natural progression from that into you and Israel deciding to form this entity and get ilDance up and running, but was it as straightforward as that? Do you remember a point where it clicked and you both realised this is something you should persue?
LB: It was always clear that we were doing something, whether it was something in the studio or being involved in each other’s processes, we were always going to support each other and be these people that would bounce off each other.
So there wasn’t a moment where we pinned it down but maybe around 2010, when Israel took a sabbatical from the Opera and went to Israel for a year to do some other things, dancing, teaching and some things outside of dance, that was a year that I found myself on my own in Sweden and in a way it made me have to step on my own two feet a bit more.
It was a really big learning year for me. When you can be part of a duo and suddenly that other part is not there, you have to take more space, have more courage and be more brave. That allowed me to develop how I thought about my work I do, whether it’s in teaching, choreography or rehearsal directing, it kind of gave me the chance to think - right, I’m ready because now I’ve done it on my own and with that, I have more to offer the person I’m working with.
That was the year I made my first independent project with some friends, we performed it in Gothenburg and Stockholm under what was called ‘Lee Brummer Dance Company’. I worked with four artists and friends that I found very inspiring, they believed in me and I believed in them, so it was a very generous and beautiful process.
Just after that, Israel came back to Gothenburg. We had both gone through some different experiences and said let’s do something – and that is when we decided to create SOD, which was the first work under ilDance.
I think we weren’t expecting everything that came after that, or at least we weren’t planning it. I remember that in the first couple of years of ilDance, it was a snowball effect where everything was ahead of us and we were trying to catch up all the time. It wasn’t until two or three years in that we could start to plan ahead and get our head around what was happening.
With SOD, we were creating this work with seven dancers, which is quite big for an independent company at the time and I don’t know if we realised how much audacity we had to make it happen. It was quite a big thing, it was programmed at Atalante and although we understood what the venue meant, we dared to do things.
As a reaction to that, other things started to happen and I don’t think we were quite prepared for what was coming.
You both had done a lot separately and together but the whole process for SOD was the first as ilDance. Did elements such as the fact that you auditioned 40 people for the production make it feel like this was something bigger?
LB: Yes and no – in a way, of course, just having an audition with 40 people turning up, I don’t think we were ready to feel what we felt with that, but it was very humbling.
“Wow, there is 40 people out there interested in working with us.”
So I think there was a lot of excitement together with slight panic for me – I think I doubted myself, was I ready for this, can I offer these people what they would like to get from me in this process, is it enough?
As for me and Israel, I don’t think it was that different. We always had that healthy, interesting and exciting dialogue and I think it took us time to understand our roles as a choreographing duo because until then, we had been very involved in other’s processes but one of us had always been the sole choreographer.
So from supporting each other’s work, suddenly there was a role we had to share, so I think it took us time to understand how we could be ourselves to the fullest and also make space for somebody else’s voice, ideas and thoughts.
“There was the pressure of it being the first work as ilDance and it needed to be good – if it was a complete flop, it would have been difficult to come back from... the stakes suddenly got a little bit higher.”
In the first couple of productions, it took time to understand how it worked best, then jumping into the future with iCoDaCo was the extreme of that, how do you do that with five or seven people. And it’s interesting because you want to challenge the other person and at the same time give space to them and it was particularly challenging at the beginning because our practices as makers changed so much in the last 10 years. I’ll speak more for myself but perhaps a bit for Israel as well – we made work like people had made work on us, we were dancing bodies in space and we were tools for somebody else’s ideas to be formed.
Over time, we both moved away from that and we are much more interested and involved in the people that we are making work with in the room and I think that also creates a different position for us, because we are not two makers, if there are seven dancers, then there are nine makers.
And I think there was the pressure of it being the first work as ilDance and it needed to be good – if it was a complete flop, it would have been difficult to come back from, so I think there was a bit of added pressure in relation to a previous production where it was purely friends working with friends, the stakes suddenly got a little bit higher.