Songs of a wayfarer and two footnotes to Ashton

These two commissioned pieces, produced over a single relatively short period of time, allowed a contrastive enquiry into the specifics of choreographic composition and signature. Making them led me to new insights into what others have identified, in my work, as 'narrative dance'. The two pieces, brought together through the reflection allowed by my Research Fellowship, allowed me to focus contrastively on a number of quite specific and recognisable compositional undertakings: first, both lacked pre-determined narrative components; 2. both drew on the creative input of expert dancers, but differently trained (Rambert and Royal Ballet); 3. both drew on classical music: Songs of a Wayfarer, for Rambert Dance Company, drew on the music of Mahler for its invention; Two Footnotes, made up of two short pieces, took Ashton's choreographic work as its starting-point with dancers Cojocaru, Kobborg, and Yanowsky, plus short arias by Gluck and Handel. The latter pieces were informed compositionally by Ashton's work, but both worked in terms of contemporary aesthetics, allowing a neat contrast between the 'Ashton-informed' and the Rambert piece. Both works explored quite specific factors: the virtuosic qualities of differently-trained dance performers and the highly particular sound scores are worked on through the highly economical ancient rhetorical device of hypo-typosis, which aims to anticipate and control narrative projection by spectators. The two productions explore motion and sound as the principal compositional factors, as I signal in conversation with S. Melrose, in "Theorising 'Kim Brandstrup at Work'",at www.kimbrandstrup.org, where we discuss a shift in my own grasp of my work, from dance product described as 'narrative', to expert process, centred in the compositional strategies of what she calls 'performative motion'.