24. Mai 2024 Lea-Maria Kneisel
About strange creatures and the urge of making sense out of everything
Choreographer Lee Méir is a Creative Crossroads artist of the European network project Life Long Burning in 2023 and 2024. As part of this program, she rehearsed with us for several weeks and is now celebrating the premiere of her new work crying creatures crying at Studio 14. Our editor Lea met her for a short chat about her new work.
Lea: We are really looking forward to the premiere of crying creatures crying! But let's go back to the beginning first: With what kind of ideas did you start your work on this piece?
Lee: At the beginning it was clear for me that I wanted to make a piece with no language. For a long time, language was very central to my work, specifically the relationship between language, meaning, and the body. At this point, a combination of things that happened in my private life and also within my artistic interests, opened up a desire to explore different things and somehow go away from language.
For example, in 2019 I went to Senegal for three months with the Pina Bausch Fellowship to study at L’Ecole des Sables. There I studied closely the relationship between dance and rhythm, and somehow I discovered this similarity to language, how rhythm gives a frame or a stability that language tends to give us too. Drawing from these understandings, in 2021, I started working on safe&sound, which was a group piece with six dancers (which at the time could not be shown live at HAU due to the pandemic, and had its live premiere in 2023 at Radialsystem).In this piece, we worked with rhythm through live sound and voice (there was no ‘played’ music in the piece, just the rhythms the performers created on stage), which we produced through extensive vocal work and engaging with materials, objects and costumes. Through this experience and my years of experience with costume design, I started getting very much into materials and costumes.
I got interested in costumes not only as kind of a visual element, but also as material that you can use in physical and emotional ways. Following this track, I developed a format called the costume workshop, which I’ve been teaching in different platforms. In the workshop, I bring a lot of costumes and materials and people just get dressed up, like kids playing costume. That is the entrance into improvising and researching with movement. Through this I got more and more into the idea of how costumes could change a person and their physicality. So basically, this was one of the main ideas that brought me to crying creatures crying. The idea of getting dressed up, of changing myself physically and seeing how that effects me. It’s the idea of shape shifting.
Lea: What kind of other ideas are there included in crying creatures crying?
Lee: I wanted to make a piece that would be very atmospheric and less logic, in the sense that you would be able to easily contextualize it. I wanted to make something that's more of an experience. We always try to make sense out of things, out of what we see, out of what we perceive. crying creatures crying is somehow the invitation, to postpone a bit this need of making sense out of everything.
Lea: Those are exciting approaches! How did you start your research into the topics?
Lee: Like most artistic processes, I started by writing an application. That's sometimes tricky because it gives a lot of importance to how we articulate things through language - again. It was quite a long way because it was only after a year or so that I got the funding, after 4 or 5 applications.
So within this year, the piece (the concept, the frame, the budget etc) kept shape-shifting because of the need to adapt the application to different fundings, and simultaneously I was teaching the costume workshop, and then I was invited to perform at tanznacht in September 2023, where I did a first ‘try-out’ of this core idea of crying creatures crying. After that i received the funding for the piece and started working on the stage piece.
"Anything can be an inspiration, anything can become something else."
Lea: And how is your rehearsal process like?
Lee: We start by going from the materials and their qualities and through them develop characters and creatures, like discovering the potential for the creature, the hidden creature within the material. Then we start getting more specific both about the creatures/characters and also about the materials, through questions like: How does this character move? How does it sound? What’s interesting about this material? Why this one and not another one? etc. Nearly all of the materials we use are second hand, meaning their original purpose had been a different one, also meaning they had a life before we met them. That’s my approach: Using things that are already there, to make up totally new stories. Anything can be an inspiration, anything can become something else. This is something that I hope will resonate through the piece.
Lea: You're talking about your team. With whom are you working with on this piece?
Lee: For me, the people I work with are very important. In this piece, I knew I will do something that is new to me, which is work both with a stage designer and with a musician. In the majority of my previous pieces I worked only with live sound and voice, and pretty minimal set designs, since I was very interested in how the whole theater apparatus can be expressed through the body alone. But for this piece I wanted to try something else. As for stage, I knew I needed someone who can think in stage sets, and has the technical knowledge, but mainly someone who has a very deep relationship to materials and craft. So thanks to Eli, my choreographic assistant, I met Loïc, who literally brought magic into the studio through how they engage with materials. Eventually, throughout the process, we realized that Loïc really needs to be on stage with me pretty much all the time, and in that sense the piece became more of a duet then a solo. Also Saskia, who is both my producer and my costume design partner, is someone who has a very deep relationship to materials and craft and has a background in fashion design. Saskia and I have been working closely together for two years now, and developed a way of making costumes together. As for music, I am working with Jana for the first time and this is very special for me, since as I mentioned before, I really don’t have much experience in working with a musician and sound designer. The question of the different roles music can have in a piece has been fascinating to me. Also as someone who usually produces the music only through my voice and body, it feels so good to be supported by external music.
With Eli, my choreographic assistant, I’ve been working for many years now, but usually she is on stage and I’m choreographing from outside. In this piece her role also kept shape-shifting: In the first stage of our rehearsals, since the piece is very visual and image based, I would need to see improvisations from outside in order to see what the image produces, so sometimes Eli would ‘be me’ and I would look. When the creatures became more and more clear, Eli stepped out and helped me understand and work on their physicality and ‘behaviour’. With Lidy, the dramaturge of the piece, I’ve also been working for many years now. For me her role is somehow to always have an overview, an external gaze on the piece which enables a distance and putting it in relation to things that are outside in the ‘real’ world. For me she is also the one who will ask me the difficult but very important questions, the ones that I might avoid or not have access to. She is also someone who always reminds me what a joy it is to work in this field, which is so important because we so often forget that. And also with Catalina, who is doing the lights I’m collaborating for the third time. She is someone who has a very immediate understanding of stage and lights. I always feel with her that I don’t need to explain my ideas very much, but she really tunes into the heart of the piece and finds a way to amplify that core through the lights.
For me the main thing about working in collaboration, is to create the conditions for everyone to tune into each other and to be able to create together the micro world of the piece. It is so special when this kind of tuning in happens, this strange common understanding of things that happens only through spending time and imaging things together.
Lea: One last final question: How would you describe the piece for an audience?
Lee: I think in this piece (as in all of my pieces somehow) there is something very important about playing, but taking the play very seriously. So somehow it connects for me to the way children play, which is serious because it’s their way of rehearsing and preparing for being in the world. In adults interpretation of ‘playing’, we often think about it as childish, but it’s not childish at all, it’s a very real play. But to answer your question more specifically- maybe I’d describe the piece as something between a kindergarten, a back stage of an opera house in a small provincial town with a very ambitious director, and a movie set in the 80's...but probably tomorrow I’d give you another answer…
crying creatures crying premieres on Friday, May 24 at 8.30 pm in Studio 14. Two further performances will follow on Saturday, May 24 at 8.30 pm and Sunday, May 25 at 5 pm. Tickets are available via our website.