Hamlet

This professional production with Arc Dance Company, which toured nationally/internationally, was the first project undertaken for my AHRB Research Fellowship. The project enquired into the means available to a contemporary choreographer who seeks to make a major new piece, while working with a tradition of dramatic narrative that is so familiar to audiences. The production allowed me to focus in particular on the dramatic potential and input of a group of strong and idiosyncratic dancers, whose individual and group input was rendered performative when located in terms of the score I drew up in collaboration with the composer and designer. The simple design 'blocked' the space, offering specific parameters to movement. The project required that I analyse the pre-existing dramatic material in terms of action potential, and allowed me to explore ongoing issues raised in an earlier staging - Hamlet Antic - which had positioned the central character as spectator in a world of empty ritual. The new staging, with a change in designer and original music composition (Dearden) was devised in the rehearsal process itself, and was concerned with the choreographic relationship between movement and the means of dramatic characterisation specific to dance; it worked by establishing two narrative habitats, one highly stylised/theatrical, and the other which highlighted the work of the performers as performers. The first explored the choreographic and movement-specific means to trigger spectator-investment in the dramatic fiction as such, while the second framed and openly exploited virtuoso performance in individual dancers. The project asked how the dance performer deals with these modes in a single staging, and it looked at notions of parallelism, simultaneity and synchronicity. Material from the rehearsal process is available at three sites: www.john.robinson.dsl.pipex.com/hamlet-rehearsal/; e-pai 2003-4; kimbrandstrup.org.