Corinne Bailey Rae and Sharon Watson on Seeds, Dreams and Constellations

Featuring a cast of 33 dancers drawn from three Leeds-based companies, Watson Dance Project, Verve and Mobius Dance, choreographed by Watson, with live music for choir and musicians composed by Bailey Rae, it’s a contemporary dance piece that explores the ‘infinite potential of the human spirit’.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post via video shortly before preview night, Watson, the widely renowned former artistic director of Phoenix Dance Theatre, reports that rehearsals have been going well “considering the timescale is challenging, and there’s a lot of bodies and ideas – it’s just putting all of that together – but you wouldn’t do it unless it was driving you and taxing you in a creative way, so it’s exciting in that sense”.

“For me it’s been interesting to see how a work of this scale goes together,” says Bailey Rae. “Sharon is unique in how she arranges these dancers, it seems to be in your head but also you’re moulding, you’re seeing them move and then you’re realigning them into your dream to what they’re doing, it seems to me. That’s fascinating to see and that’s really inspired me with how I work with the choir. I’ve written lots of original pieces and the choir are a mixture of people who are from the Leeds Conservatoire and also people who are emerging young artists from Leeds.

“Some of them have come through a connection with Christella Litras. She has organised two meaningful conglomerations of young people with the last seven years – one of them is Caution Collective, the other is Jam Around The Table – I went to see them at Seven Arts a few weeks ago. These are young people who are writing their own songs and making their own music that might not have played in a choir before. And then we’re also working with students from the Conservatoire who are doing musical theatre.”

The Grammy Award winning singer, 44, says she even found herself trying to adopt Watson’s mindset while giving pointers to the choir. “It was great for me the other day,” she says. “I had an idea of how to spread out this one particular phrase but when I heard it it wasn’t quite right so I sort of Sharon-ed it. I was going ‘That doesn’t sound quite right to my ears, how can you do it?’ You forget sometimes that people are willing to try different things. I sometimes think if I’ve told them it once then it always has to be that way, but it’s really interesting to be able to mould. I think we tried it four different ways and then the fifth way I thought that worked with the strength of the choir.

“One really special thing,” she adds, “has been how the singers have been incorporated with the movement.”

“That’s been amazing,” agrees Watson. “I think the generosity in the room has been empowering, and I’ve reflected on that in the music and the way we are orchestrating in the broadest sense an environment that is encouraging for that. When we offered to the choir the opportunity to be physically engaged with dancers that are training to do this as their job, I was blown away by their commitment to it and actually just blown away by what they did. They took the opportunity and are moving in the space physically, which I think is a credit to them and their learning and willingness to take on board what it is that we’re asking them to do, to be part of a vision which is bigger than just one individual. I call it the homogenous unison, the way of thinking that will allow us to make this feel like it really is coming together as a constellation. And some are more confident than others, which I think is also interesting – the way they are playing to each other’s strengths and what they’re doing to bring the group together.”

Although the pair first began talking about collaborating during a Phoenix Dance Theatre tour back in 2012, it was not until 2021 when they first began workshopping ideas with a group of dancers in various venues around Leeds. Bailey rae says: “I worked with Steven Brown and Myke Wilson, who are the musicians on the project who I work with all the time, so I guess that was our first taste of seeing what it would be like, and to me the most exciting thing was the potential to respond to one another.

“Of course we could make a piece or we could see them dancing and that would inform what we wrote, but the idea that in the moment I could be seeing a dancer twirl across the stage or make a particular movement with their arm or even their face and we’d be able to have the music react to that, that the music could go from being ethereal to suddenly very playful or unsettled or aggressive, all of these different emotions are playing out in front of us.

“So that was really useful to have that time and then weave that into the piece. We really wanted to keep some of that authenticity. We’d have times in the research and development where I’d think, ‘Gosh, I wish the audience was just in there now, that went so perfectly it could never go like that again’. It was just accepting that’s what improvising is like, it’s ephemeral, it happens in the moment and then it’s gone. It’s what I love most about live music, and of course dance is always live.

“We thought we want to keep that and we have been able to keep an element of that, so you will see there’s a moment where I haven’t planned what I’m going to sing, Steven hasn’t planned what he’s going to play, Myke hasn’t planned what he’s going to do on the drums and the dancers haven’t planned how they’re going to move, and we’re responding to one another and it’s b eing weaved in real time, that one of the real exciting moments.”

Watson cites composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham’s experiments with improvisation. “You had a small number of rules at work so we didn’t lose our focus, it does have some small guidelines around it, but the element of freedom is absolutely with the context of the concept, and that for us is exciting because it will never be the same on any one night,” she says.

The piece questions our place in the cosmos and to what extent we can influence the future or reimagine the past. Watson says: “For me, the piece has got two parallel journeys going on. When Corinne and I got together we had a real strong sense that our history, our place in the city, our careers, our journeys have been influential in how we are thinking in that moment in time.

“There was a bit of research that we did on the journey, our cultural journey and the journey of our race, that was informing some of the thinking. And then Corinne provided us with this title, Seeds, Dreams and Constellations, it just opened up the future and I found that so liberating in a way that actually that’s what I want people to feel from the fact that our lineage in terms of history has given us one narrative, and now we’re actually building another, and within that new narrative there is a sense that everyone has started from a particular place.

“A thousand acorns produce a multitude of opportunities and inspiration, and the fact that we were able to dream… I think Leeds provided us with an opportunity to say the boundaries are not the walls of Leeds, it goes beyond that. As you see here, you have two international artists that are taking advantage of opportunities in that space.

“But also the idea of constellations, we need people, we love, we hate them, all of these things that bounce around in our world, and some of it we choose to ignore, some of it is inevitable that we’re going to come up against the tractions and the attractions. I think the fact that everyone has that in their power to do something with the ability to build your own constellations, to build your own dreams, and to really think what that feels like, who do you have in your space and what do you leave behind.

“There’s a lot of that for me within the journey that I’ve taken and I’m inspired by some of the conversations. Every time we get together there’s something new that Corinne brings to the table which I think is fascinating. There’s probably a part two and a part three that could come from this conversation. It’s a beautiful experience to have lived through.”

“I find with those ideas of staging, I love the idea of seeds as growth and potential and being a small carrier of knowledge,” says Bailey Rae. “I’m very interested in nature and natural science, and how that helps us to find our place as people. We’re part of this ecosystem too, so I love the potential of seeds, I love thinking of constellations and the organisation of stars, and I love thinking about the macro and the micro, how we see what happens at a molecular level and how that’s reflected in what we see in the universes.

“When you add in time to that as well, it’s so freeing to be around the kind of swirling thinking about potential and transformation and transcendence, which I think it’s what makes live worth living to a certain extent, isn’t it? The fact that you lift our of the minutiae and get outside of time, lifted up, totally connected experience, and I get to have that through music. Lots of people get it in other ways, they get it through sport, we all have it in our relationships and sex and all of those things. You have these moments where you’re outside of yourself and you’re part of everything. I think those moments stay in your body and in your heart.”

Bailey Rae talks of how in contemporary dance the interaction between the dancers can dissolve the illusion of prescribed gender roles. “I think in terms of gender it’s brilliant to be around a bunch of 20-year-olds because they have grown up on a different planet to the planet I grew up on, being in my forties,” she says. “It’s a different space for them. We’ve looked at costume design and many of the people who identify as male are wearing skirts, there’s movement in a skirt and skirts are ancient. I love RuPaul’s idea that we’re all born naked and everything else is drag. Especially when you’re costuming it, it’s really our responsibility to show that.

“I’ve always said that about Sharon’s pieces, that you see a 5ft woman supporting a heavy-set 6ft man just with one hand. You see these moments and it reflects back to you that of course this happens every day. How many of us as women and young women have been supporting men who are bigger and stronger than us at a particular moment, and then we’ve had the opposite with all these different roles. So when Sharon’s thinking about who physically lifts up who, who’s leaning on who, who’s spinning who, they can become political choices and that’s what I love when I see it.

“We’re so used to seeing in a classical form like ballet where it’s hierarchical, it’s gender, the man is lifting the woman. Without realising it, we’re showing our children this, we’re continuing this archaic conditioning, and that’s what I love about contemporary dance – it’s rule-breaking.

“In the pop sphere as well, young people are breaking out of these binaries and I think that’s the shape of the world to come. Being a parent I think the same thing, if people misgender my children because they’re wearing one thing one day and one thing another I think it’s brilliant, I don’t correct them. Hopefully when they’re older there won’t be such a thing, everyone will just be themselves in flux.”

Both agree with the idea that the kind of questions posed in Seeds, Dreams and Constellations are something that cities like Leeds should be asking themselves at this juncture, and that culture has a part to play in addressing societal issues.

“I think that’s a massive question, not just for the city of Leeds,” says Watson. “Of course this year is City of Culture 2023, which is a massive journey that Leeds has decided to take, and have been supportive of this work that Corinne and I are delivering. It’s a conscious decision, it is a decision that a city chooses to make to engage with culture in a way that tells its citizens that they believe it’s important, and whatever culture means to you that we frame it in a way that allows to be inclusive with it, allows you to grow with it and allows you to challenge.

“You see us both here as females, as people of colour, and how we’re working on the broader spectrum, that it’s not exclusive to the two of us. It is absolutely a way in which we engage with the broader vision of what the future and the city of Leeds could look like. We are one small representation, a micro to the macro of what we hope that the world would be thinking in the future.

“So it is a responsibility, but also in art we do it incredibly well, we do it within culture that allows us to look at the broader spectrum, and I think when we look at political narratives and messages then there is a way of losing confidence around what you believe in. There is a way that the city itself because of its political agenda fits within a framework that doesn’t necessarily encourage others to be open about it, so you have to push at that, and that’s partly the struggle but I think that’s the beauty of what we present within the work when you sit and you watch it and you think actually what does it say of our city, what has it enabled us to do and what have we now enabled our citizens to believe in.

“That does extend beyond a policy round getting everyone to engage or wanting everyone to be part of a culture, when actually if you don’t really understand what that is you’re just superficially making suggestions around the value of culture. I think we live it, we breathe it and we offer it.”

“Coming out of the pandemic, I remember that famous advert that came out and was very quickly retracted by the Government,” says Bailey Rae. “It was a picture of a ballerina called Fatima and the advert said something like ‘Fatima, it’s time to re-train’. The idea was we’re in difficult times, everyone needs to put their shoulder to the grindstone and there’s no time or place for anything as frivolous as dance. Once that was criticised the Government retracted that within about two days, but I thought it was fascinating and I retweeted that and put it on my Instagram.

“I thought this is where we are, we have a government that doesn’t essentially believe in the value of culture, which is really remarkable because that’s actually one of the big earners in the UK – the British Fashion Council or what dance brings in or what art, what Tate Modern brings in, what the production of the Olympics brought in. There’s a huge disconnect between people that are supposedly representing us and what we actually feel, and I think this piece is saying, which a lot of cities are saying, culture is valuable, culture isn’t just for a rarefied few, it’s not just heavily sponsored opera for middle-class people who know about all the classical references because they went to private school; it’s produced by all of us.

“There are young people in this city who need to know that the feeling they have inside to dance, to make a film, to tell their story, that that feeling is valuable. Even with the choir, some of the young people don’t have the support of their parents in what they’re doing, their parents won’t be coming, but they have a belief that what they feel is right, they’re following their instincts and they’re going to be bringing joy to an audience, they’re going to be shoring up their own identity even if that doesn’t become their profession. In that they’re going to be saying yes to their gender identity, yes to their sexuality, yes to themselves as individuals, yes to their place in the world, yes to the fact they’re not just following what their parents want them to do.

“Culture is made by us, it’s a way of reflecting our diversity in terms of religion, ethnicity, socio-economic background. It’s so important for a harmonious life for the city, of a nation and of a planet for people to say ‘this is me and this is me and we’re different and this is how we interact and this is how we respect each other’s culture and this is how we understand each other’s culture’.

“I’ve been to so many things where I’ve thought I finally understand a particular aspect of Islam because I’ve seen this particular Sufi dance and it’s been explained to me that Allah means the oneness, it’s not just another word for God. That came in through culture, it wasn’t something I read in a book or learned at school. There are so many ways for us to understand each other by just watching each other do our thing.”

Seeds, Dreams and Constellations runs at Riley Theatre, Leeds from Thursday May 25 to Saturday May 27. https://leeds2023.co.uk/whats-on/seeds-dreams-constellations