Published by:

August 2003
Publisher URL: http://www.dancing-times.co.uk/past-issues

Dance Umbrella: 25 years

Celebrating Dance Umbrella’s Silver Jubilee – an interview with festival founder Val Bourne


American dancer Douglas Dunn shuffles on his back around the stage of London’s Riverside Studios. Someone in the audience stands up and yells: My intelligence has never been so insulted! You stupid man, shouts another, you don’t know a good thing when you see it. A general ruckus ensues. Immediately after the performance, the representative of a major sponsor threatens to withdraw financial support from the programme, goading the theatre manager into accusing her of blind ignorance. Dunn, terrified, had ended his solo clinging to the back wall, quite possibly reflecting on the sole nugget of advance warning he’d been offered: the British are very reserved, so don’t expect much response.

Gestures in Red opened the first night of the first Dance Umbrella festival, in November 1978. The splash it created was an entirely suitable beginning for a festival that has been making waves ever since. From small beginnings, Dance Umbrella now ranks as a major event on the global stage. Never less than stimulating, it has grown into an international showcase, one of the largest contemporary dance festivals in the world. This year, Dance Umbrella celebrates its Silver Jubilee, having variously witnessed, tracked, nurtured, and not least made 25 years of dance history. And from the beginning, it has been steered by the vision of one woman: Val Bourne.

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‘I’ve had the best possible time,’ Bourne enthuses. Little did she know. She had conceived the first festival as a one-off event, the idea having emerged from an off-the-cuff suggestion at the Arts Council that London might benefit from a festival along the lines of New York’s Dance Umbrella, an organisation that both presented and managed contemporary dance companies. Bourne, then assistant dance officer at the Arts Council, and soon to become the first dance officer at Greater London Arts, judged the time ripe to present a professional showcase of contemporary dance in London.

At the time, contemporary dance in Britain was a relatively new phenomenon. In the immediate post-war years, it had been classical ballet that flourished, with a surge of interest and activity in the 1950s. In the 1960s, visits to the UK by American modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham stimulated a nascent contemporary dance culture. In 1966 Ballet Rambert changed its focus from classical to contemporary works, and London Contemporary Dance Theatre was founded the following year. Both companies were strongly influenced by the Graham style, and both were associated with their own training schools. In the early years, London Contemporary Dance School in particular fostered a climate of creative experiment, from which emerged a number of choreographers and companies. By the mid-1970s, these had grown sufficiently numerous to form an alternative movement to Rambert and LCDT, which had by then become the established, mainstream face of modern dance.

The ‘New Dance’ movement, as it became known, was represented in two London festivals in 1977 and 1978 organised by the Association of Dance and Mime Artists, and continued to develop in the festivals held at Dartington Hall in Devon from 1978 to 1987. Both these festivals were non-selective: they were sharings rather than showcases, more like performing arts laboratories than professional presentations. From the outset, Dance Umbrella had a different aim: to put contemporary dance on the professional stage, for a broader public. Nor was Umbrella ever aligned with any one dance style or movement: it happily embraced styles ranging from neo-classical through mainstream contemporary dance through to physical theatre and multimedia performance. In doing so, it has been instrumental in broadening the scope of contemporary dance, a field which has over the years become far more eclectic and diverse.

The scene has also been stimulated by overseas artists, and in this too, Umbrella has been pivotal. Though the festival was originally envisaged primarily as a platform for British artists, from the beginning it has always been international in scope. Initially, that came about almost by accident. At the time of the first festival, Jan Murray, then dance editor of Time Out magazine, had programmed four American soloists (Dunn, Remy Charlip, Brooke Myers and Sara Rudner) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Realising that Dance Umbrella would coincide with this season, Bourne and Murray decided to pool forces, presenting a three-week season that included the visiting soloists alongside British companies and performers such as Richard Alston, Rosemary Butcher, Fergus Early, Extemporary Dance Company and Janet Smith.

The 1978 festival was produced on a level well beyond its means. Bourne and Murray were unpaid, the only salaried member being co-ordinator Ruth Glick, on a contract of a mere eight weeks. Artists were put up with friends and colleagues, who also provided transport. It was, nevertheless, a critical hit, and successful enough financially for the team to moot a second outing. Audience attendance had reached about two-thirds of overall theatre capacity, and numbered nearly 7500. ‘At the time,’ Bourne remembers, ‘there was a feeling that, apart from an insider coterie, there wasn’t an audience for this kind of work. We showed that there was.’

It was a historic beginning. Bourne applied for and received more money for the second festival, for 1980. Umbrella was officially set up as a charity, with Bourne as director and Fiona Dick as administrator, a partnership of opposites that was to last for a decade, and was vital to the festival’s success. ‘People saw me as a headstrong person,’ remembers Bourne, ‘so I was lucky to have such a very prudent administrator who never ever allowed me to go beyond the pale.’ Dick was succeeded in 1990 by Mary Caws (‘equally cautious’) who remained with Umbrella for a further 7 years.

In keeping with its original intentions, Dance Umbrella also set up an artists’ management service in 1980, with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation, in response to the clear lack of professional infrastructure for independent dance artists and companies at the time. The service ran until 1987, managing some 4 to 6 companies at any one time, and providing a regular information sheet for subscribers. Companies associated with this service included Janet Smith, Mantis, Laurie Booth, Rosemary Butcher, Shobana Jeyasingh (during her days as a soloist), Ingegerd Lonnroth, and Tara Rajkumar. A mark of its success is that many of its clients outgrew the level of service that Umbrella could provide, and went on to develop independently. The service also in a sense ‘invented’ Second Stride, a pioneering company that blazed a trail of critical success through the 1980s and early 1990s. Umbrella had already been managing the companies of Ian Spink and Siobhan Davies, both of whom expressed a wish to work with more dancers. Bourne suggested they simply join forces to form Second Stride (later Richard Alston joined them as a third choreographer). It was a unique company, with three outstanding and utterly different choreographers for a few years, following which it gained a distinctively theatrical voice under the sole directorship of Ian Spink.

After the closure of the management service, Umbrella became more involved in organising regional festivals. Umbrella had run Danceabout Northwest in Manchester for a few years in the early 1980s; but regional festivals became a stronger part of the programme from the end of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, three festivals were held in Leicester and two in Newcastle, while Woking has been  host to four festivals since 1995.

Dance Umbrella has been pivotal for the growth of a professional infrastructure and audience development, and for stimulating independent dance programming, both in its London base and regionally. But at its heart, where it belongs, is the artists’ work. Bourne’s tastes may steer Umbrella, but they are nothing if not eclectic. In the early years the festival revealed a preference for American work from the postmodern or post-Cunningham school – though without that we might never have seen some major works by Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Stephen Petronio, Mark Morris, and of course Cunningham himself. But the range of offerings on show has since broadened considerably: the late 1980s showed a strongly European (particularly French) influence, and the range of countries outside Europe has included Canada, Japan, South Africa, Israel, Australia and Brazil.

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While Bourne’s openness to artistic styles and trends has enabled Umbrella to reach a broad dance audience, her commitment to artists has won respect from dance practitioners (Richard Alston, Stephen Petronio and Merce Cunningham have all dedicated pieces to her). ‘Of course it’s exciting to pick out young talent,’ she says, ‘but you also have to keep faith with artists over time, even when they’re not going through a good time themselves. Because sometimes a choreographer doesn’t even hit their stride until after a decade.’

The list of companies associated with Umbrella over the years reads like a roll-call of the artists who have shaped, defined and invented British contemporary dance: Richard Alston, Rosemary Butcher, Siobhan Davies, Michael Clark, Lloyd Newson, Laurie Booth, Yolande Snaith, Lea Anderson, Matthew Bourne, Jonathan Burrows, Shobana Jeyasingh, Russell Maliphant, Matthew Hawkins, Akram Khan… Several of their works have been Dance Umbrella commissions, including White Man Sleeps and Wyoming (1988), the two works that launched Siobhan Davies Dance Company, Matthew Hawkins’ Fresh Dances for the Late Tchaikovsky (1993), DV8’s Enter Achilles (1995), Javier de Frutos’s The Hypochondriac Bird (1997), Michael Clark’s current/SEE (1998) and Charles Linehan’s Grand Junction (2002).

Every dancegoer remembers their own Umbrella highlights. What are Bourne’s? She has certainly enjoyed the site-specific events that Umbrella has commissioned, including two by New Yorker Stephan Koplowitz, Genesis Canyon (1996) in the Natural History Museum, and Babel Index (1998) in the British Library; also Yoshiko Chuma and Rosemary Lee’s event on Newcastle’s swing bridge, which coincided with the city’s firework display, and was witnessed by some 50,000 spectators. And, like many who were present at the time, Bourne fondly remembers the spellbinding impact  of Fase in 1982, by the then almost unknown Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Now internationally renowned, De Keersmaker has returned to Umbrella several times, and does so again this year. Another of Bourne’s landmarks was 1983, when she was able to present a major programme by Trisha Brown, including the acclaimed Set and Reset, which will also be presented this year.

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But perhaps the biggest risk that Bourne ever took was in 1997, with Mark Morris’s masterly L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato. Morris had been an early Umbrella visitor, but the growth of his company meant that Umbrella could no longer afford to present them. Then in 1995 Morris agreed to a Dance Umbrella tour of the UK (including an appearance at the first Woking festival), on condition that Bourne secured a season at London’s Coliseum – a far bigger and costlier event than Umbrella had ever undertaken. It was, says Bourne, a ‘Faustian pact’ that could have sunk Umbrella altogether. Its co-producers, English National Opera, were understandably nervous, not having programmed contemporary dance before and, like Bourne, far from certain that they could fill the huge theatre. In the event, the season was a huge popular and critical success – to Bourne’s undying relief. ‘It’s not exactly nice of me,’ she laughs, ‘but I used go to St Martin’s Lane and just look at the queues outside the box office.’

Dance Umbrella has hit low points of course. 1994 was a particularly precarious moment; funding sources had been cut drastically and the whole season came close to cancellation. Bourne, unsinkable, produced ‘a really large brochure in the hope that people wouldn’t notice too much’, and survived to fight another year. The road she has trod has often been rocky, but never uneventful; and Dance Umbrella has not merely survived, but thrived – and garnered a string of awards in the process. That is plenty of cause for celebration, and this year’s exceptional jubilee programme will do just that.