On time, protest and being in Nottingham

Time Keeps The Drummer, photo by Benedict Johnson

This text was written as an editorial commission for Nottdance 25, where we presented our current project Time Keeps The Drummer in partnership with Fabric. It reflects on the relationship between children and time, between Fevered Sleep and Fabric, between Fevered Sleep and children and between dance and protest.

When I think of the work I think of circles: of moving in circles and the circles we move in. I think of the circle we make for a moment of gathering, before rehearsals start. I think of the circle where we practice the complex choreography of eye contact and touch and trust. The circle where we nurture the heightened perceptions that underpin all our work. I think of the circle that gathers up time into a spiral dance of bodies and play and space and music and light.

Back in the day (I’m talking like waaay back), perhaps we would have said, Here comes the chorus, ready with their judgements and their dances. Here come the ones who have gathered together to notice and speak. Here is a choreography, a circle dance, a tight roaring circle. He is the anger and the grief and the shame and the joy and the protest and the roar. We are the chorus, and we’re here with our protests and our dances. Come join our circle. That’s the invitation that Nottingham has always made to us: Come join our circle. And bring your protests as well as your dances.

The first time we came was back in 2014. (Back in the before-days, like waaaaay back, in that old world we used to work in). It was a critical stage of research and development for one of our most celebrated works: Men & Girls Dance, which we developed with support from the Jerwood Choreographic Research Project. Our host partner was the then Dance4, one of the organisations that merged to form FABRIC. Five professional dancers, twelve girls, newspaper, secrets, monsters, laughter, snatches of pop music (Beyoncé: If I Were A Boy), watchfulness and open-ness and all of them there in a line, a straightened circle, watching us watching them (I can see you looking at me. You can bring your judgements: I’ll meet them with my dances).

We turned up again in 2016, performing the show: different men, different girls, same joy, same monsters, same conversation, same fear, same trust, same need. Now it’s 2018. We’re back in a circle, gathered together in an after-hours shop, talking together about grief (don’t panic if I cry; let me be sad; there will be joy again), holding space for one another, a gathering of attention and attentive listening, a choreography of small gestures (reach, fold, clench, hold, gentle shift of weight, softened hands as witness, soft gaze as care). Now it’s 2019, back again, R&D-ing again, another group of children, encircling us again as we find the work with them and through them, again. Encircling us as our ideas are changed and shaped by them, again. At the end of the week, gathered in a circle, we ask our question: what makes you different from us? How are children different from adults? Their answer: we are iridescent; we are not finished.

(This story I’m telling is out of sync, I think; time is collapsing. But as Time Keeps The Drummer and the children who perform it have taught me, it’s good to escape the tyranny of the calendar and the clock. So I haven’t checked this chronology: what matters is the memory and the feeling, the looping back over all these journeys through all this time. The archive of accuracy is elsewhere). And so now it’s 2025 (this much at least I know for a fact, I think). Time has passed, and we’re looping back to Nottingham again, in this strange new world, in these spiralling moments of collapse and chaos and fear and war, gathering together in fury and with rage encircling rage encircling rage. Once again we’re gathering in Nottingham, making a circle again: us, adult artists and them, extraordinary children from this city of protest: gathering together, to rebel against time this time.

(way back, I mean like waaaaaaaaaay back, we…)

Time Keeps The Drummer in Nottingham, photo by sam Tariq