Study - EncoreEast / RMDC choreographic project

By Helen Laws, RMDC Research Project Manager

A year into Covid-19 pandemic on/off lockdown life and one of the considerable upsides has been the opportunity for these two companies to work and learn together.

With RMDC being afforded the time to focus on reaching a wider range of individuals, in a different way, through the development of online classes, and EncoreEast beginning their journey as a self-managed performing company, we came together to explore our mutual interest of the aesthetic performance potential of older dancers.

In normal circumstances this project might have consisted of weekly in-person sessions for a period leading to a performance, but with the uncertainty of Covid-19-related restrictions we had to think differently.

In the Autumn we will spend time together in the studio at DanceEast for a series of two-day intensives before a performance (live and live-streamed) on 3rd November. However, in preparation for that, we planned some ‘getting to know each other’ Zoom sessions where the dancers could begin to explore movement possibilities with Russell and his dancers’ somatic-based approach to teaching and creating dance.

At first it seemed unideal to be starting the project virtually on Zoom, but we were all becoming accustomed to the medium and decided it was worth doing, if just to keep moving and begin connecting, without any pressure to make yet.

This first stage of the project, with its focus on learning from and with each other, was also a time to plan how we could thread some robust research and evaluation through the project, that would work in the hybrid, uncertain, pandemic circumstances, in order to usefully share our learning between and beyond the two companies in the future. 

RMDC and EncoreEast share a curiosity in the way we work and move as dancers and companies. We set out our main research aims to guide how we reflect on the project both for our own learning and reporting purposes to contribute to the wider research fields. With a consistent overarching goal of becoming better dancers, the research has two main areas of focus:

• Exploring EncoreEast’s developing ‘Distributed Leadership’ model and how this is contributing to the operational, artistic and social growth of the Company and

• questioning the preconceived ideas of aging bodies dancing and examining the aesthetic performance outcomes following participation in this somatically informed, healthy, creative dance activity.

While we will be carrying out some quantitative research with the dancers, using dance science methods to attempt to objectively measure improvements in strength, range of motion and ease of movement, the really rich information will come from our ethnographic research with both dancers and researchers collecting and collating their observations throughout the process. We were interested from an aesthetic and pedagogical perspective how the teaching translates into changes experienced internally and seen externally in the body, and particularly how much was observable even through the 2D small-tiled windows of Zoom.

Already, following our five, 2-hour ‘getting to know each other’ workshops, which culminated in EncoreEast’s joyous open workshop for over-50s, we are gaining some fascinating insights which are feeding back into our collective learning journey.