Interview: Taking steps to bring the best of global dance performance to Birmingham

Paul Russ leads us through the newest THIS IS DANCE season

Birmingham is fast becoming the place to encounter innovative and varied dance, made visible in the annual THIS IS DANCE season, which is now entering its second year. Partnerships with a breadth of venues and artists enable the showcasing of exciting work that stretches from the international to the local. This autumn, Fabric, a dance development organisation based in the Midlands, is co-presenting four quite different productions as part of the season. We were delighted to chat with their Artistic Director and Chief Executive Paul Russ about what is coming up.

Hi Paul. Thanks very much for talking to us about Fabric and their work with THIS IS DANCE. This is the second year of the event. What’s been your involvement with it so far?

As CEO and Artistic Director of Fabric, our role has really been as the instigator and convenor of THIS IS DANCE – championing dance in Birmingham and bringing partners together around a shared ambition for the city.

We want audiences in Birmingham to be able to experience some of the very best dance being made across the world, while equally celebrating the extraordinary talent that exists here. Birmingham is a globally formed city, and dance is a brilliant way of expressing that – it exists in so many forms, traditions and communities, locally and internationally.

Fabric has been driving the collaboration behind THIS IS DANCE because we want dance to be visible, celebrated and programmed across every stage and space the city has to offer. No single organisation can achieve that alone. The strength of THIS IS DANCE is that it is a collective endeavour: a way of saying that dance belongs across Birmingham and that the city should be recognised nationally and internationally as a place to experience it.

So, who are the various organisations you work alongside in this ambitious and diverse project?

The partnership brings together venues, festivals, producing organisations and dance companies, all of whom make a different contribution to the cultural life of Birmingham.

That means presenting work across Birmingham Hippodrome, The Rep, Midlands Arts Centre and the Patrick Studio; collaborating with Fierce Festival to bring extraordinary international performance into the city and its many different spaces; and working alongside organisations such as Sampad and Birmingham Royal Ballet to shine a light on the work being created here – from new and experimental ideas to great classics.

What is exciting is that we aren’t trying to make all that work look or feel the same. Quite the opposite. THIS IS DANCE is about celebrating the breadth of what dance can be and the different audiences, artists and communities that connect with it.

Fabric is co-presenting several shows this year, the first of which is the multi-sensory Weathering by Faye Driscoll, in conjunction with Fierce Festival. What can we expect to see?

Weathering is quite unlike anything else. When I first saw it, it took my breath away.

It unfolds incredibly slowly, with ten performers creating this constantly shifting, living sculpture of bodies. You are very close to it as an audience, so you don’t simply watch the work – you become intensely aware of your own presence within the experience.

I found myself asking questions about humanity, about patience, about what holds our attention and even about the possible discomfort of watching people move and change at such a glacial pace. You’re also aware of everybody else witnessing it alongside you. And then somehow it builds and accumulates until you realise you’ve experienced something quite extraordinary.

I left on an absolute high. It stayed with me, and I immediately wanted other people to have the privilege of experiencing it too. That’s one of the great joys of what we do at Fabric: seeing something remarkable somewhere else in the world and thinking, “People in Birmingham should be able to experience this.”

Talk a little about Jo Bannon’s The Dirty Work, which intriguingly confronts ableism through a magic show.

At Fabric, and across the THIS IS DANCE partnership, we want to create space for artists to ask profound questions about how we live – and to disrupt some of the perceptions that can prevent us from understanding the experiences, ideas and identities of our neighbours and communities.

What I love about Jo’s practice is that the questioning never comes at the expense of the artistry. Her work is beautiful, caring and rigorous, but also playful and surprising. She has this ability to invite us beyond our immediate perceptions and, ultimately, beyond ourselves.

This will be an exquisite experience.

Italian choreographer Silvia Gribaudi is bringing Graces, an award-winning piece inspired by Canova’s famous statue, and also offering an additional public workshop. What can you tell us about her work?

Graces is a riot of joy. It’s incredible dancing, it’s very funny, and underneath all that pleasure is a really incisive look at bodies, beauty and representation.

Silvia takes inspiration from Canova’s The Three Graces and completely disrupts our expectations of what grace, beauty and virtuosity are supposed to look like. There’s a wonderful sense of humour running throughout the piece, but it never undermines the dancing – it actually becomes part of its generosity and its celebration of bodies.

I first saw it several years ago and cried with laughter. I immediately wanted to see it again and knew it was something I wanted us to bring to Birmingham. In fact, such is the popularity of the work that it has taken us several years to finally secure these performances, having originally had plans interrupted by the pandemic. So, I’m particularly delighted that Birmingham audiences will finally get to experience it.

And then it’s back to the ‘very much alive’ with Anatomy of Survival. This is a collaborative piece between a playwright and choreographer/psychotherapist isn’t it?

The performances in Anatomy of Survival are remarkable. It begins with something completely ordinary: a woman goes into a café, orders a coffee, isn’t understood – and loses it.

We all have frustrations. We’re all capable of judging a situation too quickly, misunderstanding somebody else’s behaviour or failing to acknowledge a perspective different from our own. Anatomy of Survival takes that recognisable human experience and asks us to look again – at ourselves as much as anybody else.

When I saw it, I found it a wonderfully poetic way of thinking about how we read other people and how absurd, hilarious and potentially harmful those readings can sometimes become, particularly in moments when we’re dysregulated.

It’s also a glorious collaboration between different kinds of storytellers. Vivienne Franzmann brings her extraordinary skill as a playwright and Frauke Requardt her perspective as both choreographer and psychotherapist. With two dancers, an actor, a drummer – and, yes, a bear – they create something funny, strange and deeply human.

It’s brilliant to see all this international and national work focussed in Birmingham. What impact are you finding THIS IS DANCE has for the city and also for artists local to the West Midlands?

We’re still in the early days of THIS IS DANCE, and I think it’s important that we allow the impact to build rather than make grand claims too quickly. But what is already clear is what becomes possible when a city creates space to share ideas and celebrates the collective effort involved in bringing great work to its stages.

We’re seeing audiences encounter artists and forms they might not otherwise have discovered. We’re piquing people’s curiosity to try something new. And we’re beginning to tell a bigger story – about dance, but also about Birmingham and what is possible here.

For artists in the West Midlands, that’s important too. A healthy ecology needs opportunities to make work, but it also needs opportunities to see work: to encounter different practices, aesthetics and ideas from elsewhere, to meet other artists and to understand your own practice as part of a much wider international conversation.

Ultimately, I want THIS IS DANCE to contribute to a city where artists want to make work, international artists want to bring work, and audiences know that Birmingham is somewhere they can regularly encounter extraordinary dance. That’s the ambition we’re building towards.

Thanks very much to Paul for telling us about this exciting season of dance that’s coming up soon.

THIS IS DANCE runs from Tuesday 13 October right through to Saturday 6 February. You can find out more about Fabric’s autumn co-productions in the schedule of events at the below link.