Lee Brummer’s special moments | 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.
In case you missed it, part one can be read here. In part two, Lee discusses projects in the early years of ilDance which really stood out and what we can expect from her work later this year.
It will come later (2018) by iCoDaCo in Hong Kong
Are there any particular memories from that opening night on 13 March, 10 years ago?
Yeah, a couple. There was the same feeling you get when you perform, butterflies in your stomach and these nerves but at the same time, you know you’ve done everything you can and whatever happens from here is actually not on you and that is a lot of trust to give to the dancers.
It is something we got better at over the years - understanding that the more you let go in the process, the more the work can belong to the performers, they are not on stage performing my work, they are performing something that we’ve all created together. With our first work SOD, we were not quite there. It was more like they were performing a choreography by Israel Aloni and Lee Brummer.
And I remember us both in the audience, moving with them and people looking at us. That was one memory and there was a standing ovation, which was extremely overwhelming, humbling and gratifying – it was all more than we could have imagined. When the lights go down and people stand up and clap because they enjoyed it so much or it moved them or did something to them enough to change their physicality. That was huge, quite overwhelming.
From there, it seems like everything started to, as you said, snowball. 2013 looked like a busy year but before that there was still one more production in 2012, which was TWEE which you toured in Sweden and Israel. What can you tell me about that?
So TWEE is a duet that Israel and I created together and performed together and it was actually something that we decided to create for one of our shared teachers and mentor called Rosaline Kassel. She lives in Israel and is a big part of our lives. It was her 70th birthday. There was a big surprise event in Israel for her 70th with many of her ex-students, hundreds of people coming from all over the world to share this day with her, there were performances, a feast and speeches.
We were asked to perform something and we knew it had to be us performing something that we made especially for her. Twee is two in Afrikaans, she is originally from South Africa, so that was our gift to her and it was really a huge pleasure to dive into. It was originally a 12-minute piece that we later prolonged but it was something that came out of us very quickly, it was very natural, everything from the selection of the music to how we moved with each other, it was like singing along to a song you know very well, it was something that happened very easily. It was a very special day.
You said that after a couple of years, you were able to catch up with yourselves as ilDance and begin to think ahead. How much did that change the work that you did and the targets that you had?
I think it changed the organisation around everything. We always managed to do the things we wanted to do because that is who we are, we are passionate and passion is what drives us – not funding, not support. We want to do something and we’ll find a way to do it but it helped to not have to find a way at the last minute or against all odds.
It allowed us to communicate and create a language around what we do and how we reach people because this is how we present ourselves. A project like ilYoung is something that we started early on, both of us were engaged in education and it actually started around a conversation about one student who I thought was phenomenal and thought that something more needed to happen that just wasn’t happening at educations in Sweden because of a lack of time... there is a lot to fit in (to an education) in three years.
It was a conversation about how come in places like Israel, young people are more ready to jump into the work field, how can we do that and support that and what do we need?
We brainstormed and spoke to what was then Kultur I Väst, who connected us to Region Halland, who offered us a residency, so a lot of things happened. We were at the right place at the right time and we knew how to take an opportunity but I think the more we got into this mechanism, we knew what we needed, what to ask for and who to collaborate with, so the possibilities grew with that and we could reach people that were perhaps beyond our circle at that time but it allowed us to understand more about the world that we are in.
Even when it comes to things we offer with COMPASS now, like advice on application writing and understanding what funding there is, we didn’t know this. It used to take me days to write certain applications which is really a work of a few hours and I would be beside myself because I didn’t have that knowledge, nobody taught us or showed us how to do it. These were things that took time in the beginning, we were researching and finding deadlines that had just gone by, but now we have a chart of what is happening and how we plan our year around it.
With the organisation comes clarity, it is still something that we can be better at but in the first few years, it was difficult to be in a creation process when you are busy with a lot of things around it. That still happens and is the reality of an independent company, there will always be more to do than just doing the work but I think we have better tools to deal with it now.
ilYoung was up and running in 2013, iCoDaCo in 2014 and you are in Australia for a certain amount of time in 2015, so the collaborations and global aspect is very clear to see. Are there any particular milestones or productions that are highlights for you over the last 10 years?
Everything is a milestone in a way because I think every production was everything at that moment. Even though I look back at some things and go ‘ugh, slight cringe’ because I’m not the person now that I was then but it was all part of the process and understanding of ourselves as artists, how we look at other people and of what we want to do.
SOD was obviously very precious, as the first production, and not long after that we had a commission from Regionteater Väst to make a duet called ‘Once Upon A Happily Ever After’ and a residency at Regionteater Väst, so we were working on a double bill alongside ‘And Also, Time’, which was an ilDance work.
I think these processes were amazing. We were shattered, we were working throughout the day, I think we were teaching class in the morning, rehearsals all day, then had half an hour break and went in to rehearse And Also, Time until 9 or 10 o’clock, we were sharing a tiny apartment, getting on each other’s nerves. It was so hectic, it was so precious.
In both productions, we were really lucky to have amazing people. I don’t remember another production where we laughed as much as we did during Once Upon A Happily Ever After rehearsals, it was so much fun. Jessica Andrenacci and Michael Tang Markusson were the dancers from the company, they were magnificent, there was nothing they wouldn’t try. There was a lot of text in it, it was really fun and with And Also, Time we had a very special group of people and it was such a special time and a special bond created. We were with a calibre of artists we thought were beautiful, who wanted to work with us and seeing what we could create together was very special.
Trailer for And Also, Time (2013)
ilYoung is always special, it is this intense period of time with a young group of people going through life and creating a work at the same time, so the experience is so rich. It is so moving to see these young, passionate people and share with them what we know while also learning from them.
Every year is so different, even when there are people who return from previous years, it is just really, really special, so I don’t think I could pick one out from them.
When I made ‘An I for an I’, that was a very special process for me. I was working with six different artists, on and off, through the process and the final version ended up being a different constellation from what the original plan was. It was a full-length trio with Siri Elmqvist, Gavriel Spitzer and Eytan Sivak, three artists I admire and enjoy very much and are three very good friends of mine. It was very special for me to bring together these three people who do not have any connection to each other but all mean a lot to me.
The nature of the work, which we spoke a lot about during the process, was trauma. How trauma affects us, how we overcome trauma and the question I worked with in An I for an I was basically, if our body changes all the time, our cells change all the time and our mechanisms change all the time, what is actually left? What is the constant that is us?
We spoke about it a lot, worked around it a lot and the conclusion we came to was trauma. Because of that, perhaps there was something subconsciously that I knew that the people I work with, on this project, have to be people that are close to me because there is a certain amount of opening up that is going to happen in the process that they need to be comfortable with. So I think the whole process was really special, to work with these artists, to deal with these questions, to bring them together and see them on stage together, that was a highlight.
Making work in different countries, working with youth, working with professionals, teaching company classes, teaching open classes. Just the possibility of getting to know the world through art and dance and movement is something that is grand and I have been very lucky to have these opportunities.
Gavriel Spitzer, Siri Elmqvist and Eytan Sivak in ‘An I for an I’ (2016)
Related to what you were saying about An I for an I and the comfort that is needed to open up in the production, that seems very relevant to the piece you’re working on this year, ‘Something to do, someone to love, something to look forward to’, which is four years in the making since the first development. How much do you think those four years have informed and changed what is going to come in September and October as we celebrate 10 years of ilDance?
The work has changed! We now have a completely different cast, people have had babies, people have gotten married, moved countries, stopped dancing. Jennifer Wallén, who is the youngest member in the cast, gosh - how old would she have been when we had the first development? The world has changed and I think that is going to change the work for sure.
Initially, the work was based on this search for Utopia and what is this thing called happiness we’re desperately looking for and reading self-help books about, is it a tangible thing?
Since then, we’ve had Covid and we have all had this reflective process, during two years that nobody asked for, and acknowledging that maybe what makes us happy are the simple things like being around the people we care for, having our health intact. So the cast has changed, the world has changed and for me, my interests have shifted.
So while that is still the background of the work, I’m interested in what is this thing that gets us through stuff, through hardships and helps us come out the other end. It is not a work about Covid, but we have had this collective trauma - all of us. Life presents these things that people have to go through: Escape their countries, their homes, say goodbye to loved ones, go through medical procedures... all these hardships...
I’m interested in how we go through those things, again and again. This endless power we have - what is that for different people? Going back a little bit to the way that I worked in An I for an I, where I interviewed the dancers and worked with their personal stories, this time I am also going to interview the dancers and also people outside of the creative process to accumulate texts and stories which we will work with. It doesn’t feel right to make a work about where we were four years ago, so I am hoping it will be something that connects us to now.