PETER, dance with Jonathan Burrows

Today we danced with Jonathan Burrows. To follow Jonathan’s artistic work go to burrowsfargion.com and for his academic work go to pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/persons/jonathan-burrows. To watch full length videos of Burrows and Fargion's work go to vimeo.com/burrowsfargion.

Jonathan Burrows danced for 13 years with the Royal Ballet in London, during which time he also began performing regularly with experimental choreographer Rosemary Butcher. He has since created an internationally acclaimed body of performance work including ‘The Stop Quartet’ (1996), ‘Weak Dance Strong Questions’ with Jan Ritsema (2001), and his long series of collaborations with composer Matteo Fargion including  ‘Both Sitting Duet’ (2002), ‘The Quiet Dance’ (2005), ‘Speaking Dance’ (2006), ‘Cheap Lecture’ (2009), ‘The Cow Piece’ (2009), ‘Body Not Fit For Purpose’ (2014), ‘Rewriting’ (2021) and 'The Unison Piece' (2025). Burrows is a founder visiting member of faculty at P.A.R.T.S Belgium and has for many years been a regular collaborator for Jonzi D’s Back To The Lab hip hop theatre mentoring project at Breakin’ Convention, Sadler’s Wells London. He is the author of 'A Choreographer's Handbook' (Routledge) and ‘Writing Dance’ (Varamo Press, 2022), and is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

References: stillpeter.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/peter-dance-with-jonathan-burrows-refferences-and-transcript.pdf

Transcript

PETER:
So, hello. Today we are here, we are dancing with Jonathan Burrows. It's such a pleasure. I think you're a huge influence on myself in my career, but I think equally you're just a huge influence on dance in general.

I have known of your work for a long time. As I was just saying, I've been working very much with your Choreographer's Handbook, almost as a textbook in class. I've seen your works numerous times, and I feel very privileged to be here, so thank you for having me.

And for anyone who maybe doesn't know who you are, or where you are at the moment: how do you introduce yourself today, for this moment?

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, I would normally say… First of all, thank you for coming down, and thank you for those kind words.

I would immediately want to clarify that the kinds of ideas that are shared in A Choreographer's Handbook, and in the teaching that I do, are all collective. They all have collective origin. I like contemporary dance because of its generosity. And whilst I do try to credit all these ideas that I'm using, that have come from another artist, at the same time I like the fluidity of sharing ideas that seems to be a very present part of contemporary dance practice.

Yeah, I would – I do – identify as a choreographer, but I should add to that that I'm in a phase at the moment where I'm caught between two feelings about choreography.

The first is that I still really like doing it. I get a huge amount of pleasure and focus and cognitive and imaginative exercise from my practice of choreographing. But at the same time, I'm slowly arriving at a position where I suspect that everybody who dances is already choreographing.

And I was talking to Chrysa Parkinson about this recently, just a couple of weeks ago, and she quite rightly cautioned me not to use that statement to accidentally erase the identity of the person who is a dancer – not to say, “Therefore you are also and automatically a choreographer,” because that would be to lose aspects of practice which belong to the dancer herself.

And so I've been thinking about that since Chrysa said it. But my reason for – I think when I say “everybody who dances is already choreographing,” I'm aware that the job description “choreographer” remains. I don't think that will go away. But my arrival at that concept has been through trying to examine what are the things that I feel are tangible and pleasurable when I choreograph, and then to try to observe whether that's true for other people, and where it's true and how it's true.

So I've been working for two years with the Serbian dramaturg and theorist Bojana Cvejić on that idea, and we've also invited a collaboration with the neuroscientist Guido Orgs who, interestingly enough, is himself a trained dancer, though he now researches as a neuroscientist at University College London. And he has a similar sense that dancing is choreographing – the way that he would put it, I think, is that the same parts of the body–mind are active in both activities.

PETER:
I mean, it's extremely interesting, of course, with Chrysa's work – with her advocacy of the dancer as author and what is their material – because arguably that's a similar argument to what you're making.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yes, but I agree with her that you have to be careful not to accidentally remove the importance of the role of the person who identifies as a dancer.

I think also my position has come about by realising more recently that, actually, all the work that I've done with the composer Matteo Fargion is co-authored. We may, at various times, take upon ourselves undiscussed roles, depending on what we're doing and how we're doing it, but nevertheless, the longer we've worked, the more we've felt able to accept a position of co-authorship.

And so I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm not very often in a situation where I could say, “I am the job description ‘choreographer’.” In fact, I've pretty much actively avoided it.

PETER:
Yeah.

Jonathan Burrows:
I've never felt very comfortable with that.

PETER:
So maybe I can ask – we're already speaking about what you're busy with, I get the sense – so maybe I can ask: what do you feel you are doing? Because you spoke about feeling as well, which is such a – I think in dance – such an interesting place, maybe, or wording or direction.

So what do you feel when you're choreographing? What is that, so to speak, in relation to this – I don't want to say “crisis” of identity – but this pondering around identity?

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, I think it's complicated to land upon what that sense of feeling is. But I would borrow the term “entanglement” in the way that the philosopher Alva Noë uses it in his most recent book The Entanglement.

In that book he has a chapter specifically on dance, which is an area that he's been working within, actually, for many years, with the choreographer William Forsythe, with Lisa Nelson, and so forth. And there Alva Noë uses the idea of entanglement to describe the ways in which dancing is always entangled with ideas, images, preconceptions about “the choreographic”; and the choreographic is always entangled with what we might describe as the intuitive or spontaneous aspects of dancing.

For me, the pleasure is exactly in that interplay between what my body understands physically in an intuitive sense and what my body understands somehow, or experiences cognitively, in terms of memory and anticipation – so the experience of time while dancing: what do I remember happened before, and what do I anticipate could happen next?

And so I don't know if I'm right, and I would be very hesitant to share this, but I'm going to risk it because maybe it provokes somebody to have a clearer impression. I have an idea that when I watch a dance performance – whatever the subject, emotional field, atmosphere, tone, cultural specificity might be – I'm always engaged in a playful awareness of my own sense of time.

PETER:
Yeah. As the – well, not the spectator, but…

Jonathan Burrows:
As a spectator. I mean, it's there obviously when I do it as well, but there's something deeply human about that.

And of course other art forms do it: film, music, and so forth – I mean, possibly even writing. But there's something about dance, because it also contains this very evident spatial awareness, that I think heightens the sense of triggering my own perception of myself in time.

Or, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold would put it – to very loosely paraphrase – my body “in and through the world, with the world, in time”.

PETER:
Yeah, because a lot of your work – that's unfair, but a lot of your work that I've seen – deals with time quite centrally, as a texture or as a place, maybe. You're very rarely using large spatial compositions. It's usually at a desk or on a chair.

And the rhythm and the timing, the repetition, the way that it moves my – or the audience's – attention through time, I guess, is somehow fascinating. Because I would sort of echo a sense of, when I'm watching dance, there's a quality of thinking, ironically…

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah.

PETER:
…that is sort of encouraged, or almost provides this space of drift in the mind.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, but in the body as well.

PETER:
Yes.

Jonathan Burrows:
It's a kind of embodied cognition. I don't know if that exists as a term within cognitive science, but…

Whether I would have done that had I not met a composer who is an artist that I just resonated with immediately – we started working together immediately – I don't know. But obviously I'm going to work with time if I work with a composer and we're both creating and performing together.

I mean, I can perfectly see that there are… I would never recommend the way we work to anybody else. It's not a methodology. It's just what we're able to do because of who we are, who we are in relation to each other, and the ways that we relate.

And working at a table is also partly just a financial consideration. We've rarely been able to afford studios for long periods of time. We work slowly, somehow, when we work, so we took to working at tables. It's extremely limiting and that is also frustrating.

But I'm now gradually getting to a point where I think there's something also interesting about the comparative work over the years, all within a tightly enclosed space of performance – but I would hope that imaginatively it's not tightly enclosed. In fact, the opposite might be true.

And I'm also getting much older, so it's much more comfortable for me to sit on a chair.

PETER:
You said “slow” there – when you work together, you’re slow. What do you mean by that, if I might prod you there?

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, I mean, the first duet that Matteo and I made – Both Sitting Duet, which was in 2002 – took us six months.

And over the years we've been getting slower, so that the piece that we premiered in May this year in Oslo, Zagreb and Stuttgart took us two years to make. I mean, that was partly because it was a difficult project – we ran into difficulties, which were brilliant difficulties. I mean, now I really like them, but if we hadn't managed to come out the other end of the difficulties, I would have been more depressed than I am.

PETER:
Yeah.

This – I just made a piece for babies, so people under the age of 18 months.

Jonathan Burrows:
Nice.

PETER:
One of the things that I found really interesting and captivating was the sort of slowness, or perhaps even the quality of being with them, regardless of knowing what they are getting, what they are dealing with, or what's truly their culture, so to speak.

It's a beautiful continuous work that one had to do. We toured for the whole spring, so we had something like 30 performances and they were three hours long, so the babies and guardians could come in and out and do it at their own pace.

But interestingly, they would stay for quite a long time. We would have some who would stay for an hour and a half, seemingly actively focused, and we did a very slow performance. We had to really resist moving towards children's “something to keep the attention constantly”, and instead go with something slow.

I feel as though, by allowing time, giving it a chance and staying with the children, their pace, their focus and those things, it's somehow very generous. There’s a sort of…

And it reminds me of some of the qualities in the way you speak, the way you articulate your thoughts and your work. There's this openness which I think is provided by the questions, often. I don't want to say you contradict yourself – but you pull into the fold ambiguity, which allows us to commit almost and stay there a little bit longer.

Because the guardians that were really problematic were the ones who didn't give it a chance. They would deem that it wasn't entertaining enough for their child and leave before they recognised, “No, actually, there's a tempo here, there's something here that the children could engage in.”

Jonathan Burrows:
I mean, I should say we don't perform slowly. We perform really quickly.

PETER:
No, it's true.

Jonathan Burrows:
It's just that the arrival at the performances is slow. And we do make versions of pieces, or pieces that nobody sees, because they don't arrive at the place of recognition, or something.

The questions thing is just: I do actually remain genuinely interested in watching people dance and choreograph. I mean, I've become skeptical sometimes about the cultural machine of contemporary dance, mainly to do with the claims it constantly – I think it's required to – make for itself, which seem out of proportion sometimes to the subtlety of the interaction that you can have as a participant or a spectator.

And the ambiguity, as you say – it's often not an experience that you can pin down or say exactly what happens. And, I mean, of course some people find that frustrating. They would prefer a strong narrative or whatever. I don't. I feel really happy in that slightly ambiguous space.

PETER:
But you do it very clever… cleverly – but you do it very cautiously. You do manage to keep us with you when we're watching. And maybe it is that sort of, “No, no, this doesn't capture where you're going,” and actually going for it. Maybe it is the fastness, like you say, but it really is super engaging, I find.

And it provides such a great access to exactly what I feel you're describing: of being with dance and staying in that ambiguity, that strangeness, that weird place.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, I mean, it's not about – I mean, good choreography is not about manipulating the audience. And neither is it about “challenging” the audience. I think that's a mistake.

It can produce extraordinary work – sorry, I speak too strongly, because I've seen… I've been challenged by dance performances. But I find myself more interested in the idea that choreography is about helping us all to stay together in the same room/space/time and follow through whatever that duration is.

I don’t like the idea of “choreographic tools”, because I think there are too many methodologies, and as soon as you've found a tool it often becomes redundant again: it was only the thing you needed to solve that moment, or whatever.

But at the same time, I think, strictly speaking, applying yourself to choreography – or even more so composition, musically – is about introducing things in a way and at a pacing that allows everybody, as best as possible, to follow and doesn't leave people behind.

And that takes time and experiment. You have to try a multitude of different ways, and every piece that you make seems to propose its own journey through that process of finding out how to hold together the threads of what's happening, whatever they are – whether they're emotional, rhythmic, concrete ideas or whatever.

With the piece that Matteo and I made this year – it's called The Unison Piece – it was only 30 minutes long. It had a very simple premise: we just decided we'd always done everything in counterpoint, and we should make a performance where we did everything absolutely in unison.

So I drew upon some research which Bojana Cvejić had very kindly shared with me over a period of time, and in which I'd been involved, about questions around why unison is complex socially and politically within contemporary dance. I mean, obviously because it is something that can be coercive. But at the same time, it's also at the heart of dancing: “I do it with you; I invite you to do it with me.”

So the piece with Matteo is an investigation into the joys and difficulties of doing something together. And I think it's resonating with people because we’re at the moment of a kind of intensifying of a neoliberal agenda and an individualistic agenda.

But the piece itself – the way that Matteo and I work is we tend to pass things to and fro, with very long periods of silence and no conversation. I passed him a text and then he passed it back in a brilliant looping form, and it was really great, but I felt there was something missing.

So I held onto this for, I think, two months and was trying to introduce more things without losing the pleasures of this very minimal looping structure. It got to the point where I was spending 12 hours a day sat at this table, doing it over and over again, and my 16-year-old daughter came down and she said:

“Please, will you stop? Please, will you stop doing this old men's cult performance?”

But I did eventually manage to get it to a place where I thought it was resonating more. And then, of course, Matteo and I made the mistake of getting overconfident – we overloaded it with too much and then it really wasn't working.

Then Matteo's daughter, Francesca (Francesca Fargion), who's worked with us for many years, sat with us and in 20 minutes she cut half of the text that I'd written. Literally half. And then we did it again, and what she'd done was: I was trying to give too much information, and she rendered it into a lyric.

Actually, the first performance of it was slightly an accident. We were in Oslo and the Norwegian choreographer Mette Edvardsen, who has a bookshop there – beautiful space – said, “Will you come and do a showing?” We said, “We're not finished yet.” And she said, “Oh, it doesn't matter. Just come.”

So we kind of pulled it together, and a hundred people turned up, and then we realised that it was finished. I think otherwise we would have struggled on for another year.

That’s just to give you an image of the kind of daily practice that goes into trying to arrive at something. And I think at any moment we might have thrown it away and given up.

PETER:
Yes, yeah.

Jonathan Burrows:
And it was quite a surprise when it resonated with people. But that's always the case, I think. The idea that you can ever “learn how to make a performance” is misguided. I find it's becoming, sometimes, more difficult.

PETER:
More difficult to make a performance?

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah. Well, I mean in general – socially, culturally, politically – because I think we're all feeling a bit knocked in contemporary dance at the moment.

There really is a feeling that the ways in which we've sustained ourselves with a sense of purpose and confidence are getting harder to navigate.

But I think also that the minute you start thinking you know what you're doing, you find out that you don't. But I mean, how good is that? There'd be no point doing it otherwise.

PETER:
Yeah, no, exactly.

I saw the video of it.

Jonathan Burrows:
Oh yeah, from Stuttgart.

PETER:
Yeah. You have it on your website, and in it you do also include a little bit of a nod to the worry of the unison, right?

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, we do.

PETER:
There's comments of marching and where it can be used in a negative way, and yet it exactly has that quality of a joy of being together, being with. I think you mention it, right? There's a sense of yes, we're trying to be together, but also we're failing – we're failing at that. But still the joy of trying is somehow spectacular.

We were talking about Swedish folk dance just before this, and in there there's a sense of repeating almost the same step over and over again, but there's such a joy in trying to get there – and it's so hard, actually.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah.

PETER:
It's not simple at all.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, I do experience it in… I was doing traditional English dance since I was a kid, but I now play traditional English music – well, actually, even more a form of traditional English music from where we are now, here in Sussex.

I think it was partly realising that that experience of doing things together in traditional art forms is a central part of dancing somehow. I think that informed the piece.

And it was interesting because there's movement in the performance in The Unison Piece as well. We'd never videoed it, and then, when we were rehearsing it before we performed it for the first time in Oslo, the only space we could find was in Dansens Hus, in the dressing room. There was a mirror where people would do their make-up.

We have two electric guitars, and they're lying on a flat surface next to each other. For the first time, in the mirror, I could see Matteo doing the movement. I was very touched by it, because I had said to him, “If you do this, you really have to do it every day until, when we do it together, you're not thinking and I'm not thinking – it just kind of dovetails somehow.”

I saw how much work he'd put in, and it was very touching – something like, “Yeah, we're doing this together.” It was a beautiful moment.

Because I'm standing next to him, I couldn't really see what he was doing, and I was all the time nervous about the movement we were doing. Then I looked at the mirror and I went, “Ah, that feels nice.”

PETER:
There is a sort of relinquishing, a sort of giving over to the dance.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it.

PETER:
There’s also something extremely ethical about these approaches – also what you started with, right? The “dancing is choreography”. This sense of being in the trouble of it, for want of a better word – the participatory nature of politics, maybe – that we are engaged continually in the difficulties of power and structure and hierarchy.

Because I think, in my MA, I was focusing on ethics. It was an artistic MA, but still, that was the curiosity. I was very fond of Simon Critchley, who does this “infinitely demanding” ethics, and then I'd look towards choreographed situations.

There's this sort of trope that if it's choreographed, it's more authoritarian; if it's unison, there's more domination involved. And then, of course, we're very well aware of – I forget who wrote it – but The Tyranny of Structurelessness, how domination can obviously be a part of improvised situations and informal structures and things.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yes, that's right.

PETER:
And so ethics invites itself in that way of almost holding the two types of freedom at the same time, while you are dancing and choreographing simultaneously.

Jonathan Burrows:
That's very interesting. I think, if you choose to enter a shared activity like that – especially if you're making the same material, whether that be singing, playing music, dancing – then it's vital that you and anybody else in that space feels able to stop or walk away at any moment.

That way everybody has agency over their own relationship to the decision to enter into that collective space, or space of collective doing.

PETER:
It's those openings that you kind of provide conceptually, often, in your performances – openings of, “You might be seeing this, this might be the truth, but it also could be something else.”

It's the same when you go to a dancing situation and there are openings of, “Oh, I could do it my way,” or “I could leave; I don't have to be trapped in that space,” so to speak.

I'd love to know – since when I came back to the UK after being away for so long, I started doing, now I'm not going to know the names and stuff, but Morris dancing in Cambridge. And I went to a workshop in the middle of England (Jigs Workshop 2025, Sutton Bonington), and there we arrived and the teachers, I suppose, were telling us how in these traditions it would normally be that you would dance one or two dances and that would be it. “But today we're going to do ten,” or something – and of different traditions as well, you know, two from this tradition, three from this tradition.

I couldn't help but wonder in that workshop, of course, what are we working with now? Are we working with the dancing, or are we trying to become a sort of virtuoso Morris dancer, in a way, out of having this big library of…?

Jonathan Burrows:
There's a wonderful new history of Morris dance in England, (The Ancient English Morris Dance,) written by a man called Michael Heaney. It's such a pleasure from start to end.

There are a few conclusions he arrives at. One is that it was always a fluid and changing form. Women were always a part of it, and then “disappeared” for a moment and then came back, and so forth. And that it's not a ritual – this was a misunderstanding of the early collectors like Cecil Sharp.

I was talking to a dancer and caller called Fee Lock from Hastings not long ago, and she said something which really lingered in my mind, in relation to contemporary dance as much as folk dance.

We were discussing the possibility that the English Morris could be protected by the United Nations protected status for intangible heritage and so forth, which is something that's being discussed.

What Fee Lock said to me was:

“We disagree all the time about what is traditional and about what is Morris dancing – and the disagreements are the intangible cultural heritage, and UNESCO can never understand that.”

And I thought: how brilliant. It's not something that you have to agree upon; it's something you have to go on negotiating. That thought of hers has really redefined “the traditional” for me.

PETER:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, it is so complex and beautiful. I once was invited to score a Marina Abramović piece – we had it on video, it was part of our education – and we would score it.

I sat down and I was like: “Okay, she's right foot first, left, right, standing poised, her head forward, looking, moves…” – you know, every detail, trying to get every bodily tension and muscular structure, or dynamic, maybe. And then at some point I just was like, “But that's not what she's doing.”

Jonathan Burrows:
Right, yes. The analysis slowly erased what she was actually doing.

PETER:
If I could write her score – what was in her head – it was: “Sit down”, or “Walk”, or “Remember” what she'd practised, what she'd rehearsed. Very different, in terms of the intentionality of what it is.

I was lucky enough to go back to Rambert School, where I studied, to give them a “Fresh Friday” – a sort of freaky Friday moment where they can see what kind of careers are possible, mine being a sort of unconventional one, I suppose.

The exercise that I have been obsessed with for five years now is: I invite everyone to not dance. I say, “Don't dance, but if you feel as though you were dancing, do something else.”

So, you know, they're coming in and they're telling me, “I'm injured – my hip, my leg, my knee, my shoulder,” and I'm like, “Oh, I think it'll be okay,” especially with this first exercise.

But the fascinating thing that came up was really the speaking – it's the intention, it's the intent for why we were doing it. What are we doing?

I often feel that – you spoke (in your keynote address at the Postdance Conference, MDT Stockholm, 2015) about how the motor system conflates Trisha Brown and Michael Jackson; that they live in the same place (in the body), but the approach is very different. The intention of Michael was very different to the intention of Trisha, and how we grasp those and hoard those, I think, is somehow built into these feelings we have around what we enjoy doing.

Because my question maybe, if there is one in this long string of thought, is: your work – because you're working with Matteo – it could be music. I mean, it is music, it's beautiful, but it situates, if I understand correctly, most often in dance contexts, or at least maybe that's my understanding of it.

But there must be something that comes from you speaking about contemporary dance and your frustrations. So I think my question is: how does the context, how does the intention, play a role in the work?

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah. We often actually say that the work that we make is music, first and foremost.

But then again, twice – including recently – over the last 30 years we've tried to introduce a more strictly musical piece into an evening of work.

PETER:
Like Science Fiction (Rewriting and Science Fiction, 2021).

Jonathan Burrows:
Like Science Fiction. Not a long piece. In both cases when we've tried that, there's been a pushback: “This is not the context for that.” And that's been frustrating.

But then again I would probably argue that we're not musically virtuosic enough that we could present our work as music within a music context. So probably we've always been interested in working outside the frame of virtuosity and allowing that to give us permission to arrive at conjunctions of materials that are unexpected.

To some degree, we fall into a category of English performance – or even English comedy – which deals with failure. That's not something we consciously pursue, but, you know, Les Dawson's piano playing is… it's not an influence, but that idea that you can resist virtuosity has always been of interest.

It's not like we're deliberately “not virtuosic”; it's just that we're not! So dance has, in a way, given us somewhere which can tolerate that.

But at the same time, Matteo is slowly becoming a better dancer, and I'm slowly becoming a better musician. Also the pieces have their own virtuosity, because of the speed and complexity of the embodied thought processes in them. They do take a while – you can't just get up and do them. We do take pleasure in that, but it's not a conventional virtuosity of playing an instrument, or the notion of “the good dancer”. But if you wanted to perform in one of our pieces, you would have to be prepared to work three months or six months, and you'd have to do a little bit every day, because that's just how long it takes.

For some people that's intolerable, and I perfectly understand that – that's not what they want to spend their time doing. But I have a really deep pleasure in slowly accumulating an embodied knowledge of, and memory of, something until I can do it, and then do two other things at the same time. I love that.

And there are plenty of other art forms that draw upon those kinds of embodied skills in ways that we never question.

I think that in dance, at a certain point, because of this fear of “the choreographic” as being limiting or authoritative, we perhaps have lost something of those pleasures of slow practice – of arriving somewhere you wouldn't have arrived otherwise. But, you know, you should do what you want to do. I like doing it. If you don't, do something different.

PETER:
Because that was sort of my question. You come from quite a virtuosic dance training, right?

Jonathan Burrows:
Well I was a bad ballet dancer – but I got away with it.

PETER:
You couldn't have been that bad – it was 13 years or 12 years!

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, I know, but the thing was that The Royal Ballet, when I was a student, was being run by Norman Morrice, who was the man who had taken Rambert Dance Company through into being a contemporary company.

He had seen what I was trying to choreograph as a student, and so he invented this role for me of being an “apprentice choreographer”. When I arrived into The Royal Ballet, in a way, the people whose job it was to rehearse the pieces and stuff… they didn't quite know what to do with me, because I wasn't at the technical level of some of my peers.

But then I was very fortunate because the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan started to give me small things to do, and then that increased into bigger things. And then, when somebody gives you confidence, you get better at what you're doing. So I became good at doing what I was doing. And I actually enjoyed it.

PETER:
Because that's the thing I'm curious about: it's lovely that dance has this porousness, this ambiguity that allows us to take something like you've taken – this practice of “rehearse, rehearse, rehearse until it is in your motor system, in your body”.

That's something so beautiful with dance. But was that something you were enjoying then?

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, actually, to be honest, something that people don't often realise about ballet companies is that they're very, very busy and you work really hard. The repertoire is quite big, often, and there are many performances. So you perhaps don't always rehearse things as much as you could do.

Because I was technically not as proficient, I tended to go away into a corner and practise until I could keep up with the others. So that became a habit.

Also, in a ballet company, when somebody gets injured half an hour before a performance; a member of the staff comes up to you and says, “So and so is injured, Can you do their part?” And you'll go, “Well, I normally do the other side, but yeah, okay, I'll try and figure it out.”

So you would go on in front of 2,000 people not having a clue what you were really doing and have to be absolutely alert. Even though ballet is seen as the opposite of improvisation, I never improvised as much in my life as I did in ballet.

So, yeah, it was those things that combined to send me in the direction I went in – and then also the influence of Rosemary Butcher, who by then I was already dancing with. The Royal Ballet, to their amazing credit, once even gave me time off to go on tour with Rosemary Butcher, which… I think they understood that I needed to be there.

Her work, although primarily improvised, had a level of – how would you say it – cognitive detail that she demanded through a very long process of constantly fine-tuning the approach to the improvisation. Which I don't really use – I've never used it directly in what I do – but it's always been something I could draw upon somehow.

PETER:
Yeah. So beautiful.

Is it silly for me to ask: what are you busy with now? Because I haven't actually asked it – I assumed earlier.

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, I'm continuing with this research into the felt sense of choreography, and I'm waiting now to hear whether I have academic funding for it – but it will continue anyway.

I'm tentatively beginning a slow process of research with the dance theorist Scott deLahunta on the ways in which we language dance in practice. This has crossover with what Chrysa Parkinson is doing.

And I have been writing emails to my long-time collaborator Matteo Fargion suggesting an idea for a new performance, but so far he's not given very much response. I just keep casting the line into the water, adding details until either it grasps his imagination or, more likely, he'll come back with a better idea.

I'm not entirely convinced enough by what I've been suggesting to him to suggest it to you. But each time I reject it, it keeps boomeranging back in a way that I then get briefly excited and send him another two-page email. That's how it's always worked.

PETER:
It is these moments of excitement and joy, right – that sort of play of it all.

And your research, this thing of the “felt sense of choreography” – I see it through the lectures that I've listened to and also in the performances. You bring up very much the living with a body that speaks, that has a choreography involved in it.

How do we dance with that? How do we live with that? How do we continue? 

Jonathan Burrows:

Yeah, that’s right.

PETER:

It's a strangeness that exists in dance.

I often quote you – I think you're quoting someone else, so I should probably look it up. I mean, you often are in A Choreographer's Handbook – but you speak about electric guitars, and you say it actually in another performance. Now I'm rambling, but…

Jonathan Burrows:
Oh, I do, yeah – I can’t remember what my own quote is now…

PETER:
But the thing of people…

Jonathan Burrows:
Oh yeah. What I observed was that – I mean, you can tell my age by the metaphor of the electric guitar – but when people formed bands, it tended to be because they'd heard a record, right? And then: “I'd like to play something like that.”

Whereas in dance, we often enter into dancing before we've actually seen a performance, and that's probably how it should be. But it is, if we then want to make a performance, a funny way round – that's what I was trying to point out.

PETER:
No, because it's an oddity with dance. I also agree.

I remember, I think maybe to mask the fact that I was a young boy doing ballet, I would tell people that I was at a disco and I pointed at the guitarist, but I was so small my parents thought I was pointing at the people dancing in front of the guitarist, so they took me to ballet school.

So I even have a sense that that was my trajectory as well – that I learned to enjoy dance through dancing, and in fact I wanted to play the electric guitar.

That was the feeling of it. But the role of the spectator and the role of the dancer – there is this very strange relationship.

Even for me, I've always felt there's a quality of “audience” with dancers. You try to provide a space that they could experience something. There's a possibility, as a dancer, to witness your own dance or to be…

Jonathan Burrows:
That's right, yeah. I think it's actually, even neurologically or neuroscientifically speaking, there seems evidence that we are activated by watching somebody dance – even to the extent that there was an experiment recently (I can't remember who conducted it) which followed this question: to what extent are we already learning movement patterns when we see somebody else execute them? The copying that begins in the child developmental stage.

The joy of that is that if you're making a performance that it appears the audience is disliking, you can at least rest secure in the knowledge that, even if they hate it, they're learning it. Which I think is brilliant. 

But I think you asked me what else I'm doing: I am interested in the idea of practice and daily practice, and the ways in which you can attend to the thing that you're doing – especially when you don't have money to gather together, to be in spaces. Many of the kinds of spaces which were artist-led have been erased by finances and more glamorous infrastructures that become bureaucratically dominated, rather than artistically led.

I try to take a stance that everything that I do in the day, that attends to what I think I am as an artist, is equally practice. So even if I'm playing English folk music, and then I write an email, and then I think about a piece, and then I rehearse something, then I have university supervision, or whatever – and I do include workshop teaching in that.

I have more and more of a genuine pleasure in those kinds of gatherings together in a workshop. It seems to me that there's a lot to say which is negative about what's happening within contemporary dance at the moment, but there is a sense in which the dominance of performance, hierarchically, has been slightly softened since the pandemic. I think we are realising that all the ways in which we gather together are necessary.

We're doing it because we need to. I love watching what people do in workshops – the way they engage and what they come up with – and I think many of us are involved in activities like that. There's a certain heart of contemporary dance that lies there.

You could say people would argue that that's exclusive – it's “just the people who are part of it”. But there are many of us. Many, many, many of us. And young people still seem really drawn to it.

I often just wonder if contemporary dance, like traditional arts, offers somewhere to be together doing things with other people, outside of a realm of commodification. This happens all over the world, all continents and all cultures. There seems to be an engagement.

It's not a perfect art form, and there are many reasons to criticise its past and present, but I think there are also many positive aspects. I certainly feel like I’m still enjoying and benefitting from them. I don't know about you.

PETER:
Oh yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

I feel, somehow – I keep saying this and I recognise it becomes worn out almost – but it's such an honour to have had dance in my life. I truly believe it. It has provided me a way of being in the world which is so joyful.

It does come up against, exactly as you say, the commodification of life itself: we're either consuming or we're being consumed; there's this constant productisation of our being.

Ironically, exactly as you say, the dance “industry” has that tension – it's trying to hold this beautiful practice we have, which I wanted to describe as: it's unlike a play or script where there's this authoritative text which we all bow down to.

We come together in a kind of muddle. We gather with this diaspora of diverse experiences and influences into the studio – this empty studio that births a relationship, which then continues onto the stage.

This podcast itself is exactly that. We didn't have to meet; we're not being paid – I'm not being paid – there's no money involved. But I'm so curious and invested in these encounters that I want to do it.

Ironically, that's what I wanted to say: of course this does make it a product as well. This could become another part of, or extension of, commodification of dance.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yes, that's true. I've heard other people say that to me. I think my wife Claire Godsmark said that to me recently – not to forget that it also becomes a product.

PETER:
Yeah. I think when I was young, because I was trained in “expanded choreography”, my critique at the time was very anarchic – sort of critiquing everything.

“Yes, it's expanding what dance can be, what choreography can be, but then it's just making it a product somewhere else; it always has to be sellable.”

What of the dances that escape that? What of the…?

Jonathan Burrows:
Good question, yeah.

PETER:
But it's beautiful that you – as you say – there is a daily practice of playing your instrument, going to the football field (maybe you didn't say that, but these external activities) which inform our practice, inform our thing.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah. I think of them as parallel practices. They may not all be shared, but they all inform, in some way, an attempt to understand the confusing but delightful overlap of everything that happens and that you feel when you dance.

PETER:
Yeah, yeah. And I think for me the struggle has been: how do I honour those things and give them respect?

One way has been to try to produce little stages. This is very fresh – I was only thinking about it recently: when do they fail? When I go out and record myself looking at stuff – this bizarre dance-like activity of naming the things I see while I walk through the park, for myself, for no one else.

Then you listen back to it and you think, “What am I doing? How am I spending my time like this?” And yet, if I can find a way of staging it – even if it's just staging it for myself, taking care of it and putting it in a notebook or putting it on my website – then I have it as a sort of archive for myself.

But yeah, it's a beautiful, fraught relationship in the midst of it all.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah. I was thinking of something that my friend Dr 'Funmi Adewole Elliott said to me recently. We were talking about style, essentially.

It was in relation to hip-hop, because I had been accidentally immersed in hip-hop dance through Jonzi D and working alongside him, and also the artist Robert Hylton, whose PhD I was supervising at the time.

'Funmi Adewole Elliott used this description:

“It's about the body attitude of the form.”

I think that's a really extraordinary, precise articulation of the relationship between the feeling – the body attitude – and the form, the choreography itself.

Even though krump or popping or breaking are improvised dances, nevertheless the body attitude of those forms defines itself through the doing.

In that sentence, in that instance, there's a cultural specificity but also a general specificity. So this idea of the “felt sense of choreographing”, or “the choreography already within the dance”, I think has something to do with this meeting “body attitude” and “form” – which is such a good way to put it.

That seems to include the emotions, the psychology, the physicality, the memory, the expectation, the desire and so forth – but also the body attitude of the form, moving towards something which can find its own definition, either collectively in relation to what other people are doing, or in relation to a field of inquiry, which is how experimental contemporary dance has developed.

PETER:
Yeah, yeah.

The form, the body, the thinking… I don't have anything intelligent to say, I'm afraid. But it does make me – I've been reading a lot of Catherine Malabou and her work on plasticity.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, there's some kind of connection there.

PETER:
Yeah. There's this ability that form can include, in itself, its own destruction. I think this is what she…

Jonathan Burrows:
Yep. Arrival and destruction.

PETER:
Yeah, it's beautiful.

Like I said when I emailed you: “Is there an assignment, or is there a thing?” I'm not going to ask you to now produce one.

Jonathan Burrows:
Oh yes – something that somebody could… You were suggesting I might have something I could suggest that people could do.

PETER:
Yeah, or we could do.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, but I think, I don't know – I think everybody knows what they need to do. 

PETER:
But I love that. It's so great.

Because I think that's the thing I wanted to provide: exactly like you say, you're already doing it, or the access to do things is extremely close. Maybe these conversations can be a prompt in order to go to those places – or not, as you say.

So maybe we leave it here, and we leave them with a silence and wish them luck in their world and lives.

[PAUSE]

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah. Thank you for your thoughtful questions, but also observations. I really appreciated listening to your ideas.

PETER:
Yeah, it feels very sporadic, and I'm hoping in the listening back I will feel more confident with my naivety, but…

Jonathan Burrows:
Well, feel free to rechoreograph the discussion – choreograph it in any order that you find more conducive and helpful.

PETER:
But it's clear you're doing loads of workshops. You have a website; I will link everything, and I will also try to transcribe what we've spoken and I will list the references. So I will ask you for spellings and things like that.

But also, people can find everything you're doing on your website (burrowsfargion.com), which is – I want to say it right – burrows and fargion…

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah – Fargion. F-A-R-G-I-O-N.

PETER:
…dot com.

Jonathan Burrows:
And there's a link to the work on Vimeo. Since the possibility of streaming, we've made it a policy to make the work we'd like to share available to anybody who wants to watch it, and they're in full – they're full pieces rather than edited pieces…

PETER:
And they're very watchable. I've been watching them all week trying to recap. They're extremely enjoyable.

Jonathan Burrows:
Oh good, well, thank you for saying that. I mean, you don't have to watch the whole thing. I'm just saying if you watch 10 minutes and it's enough for you, go and have a cup of tea.

PETER:
Of course, like everywhere.

But yeah, thank you so much, and I hope people find your workshops and find your work.

Jonathan Burrows:
Yeah, thank you.

PETER:
Thank you. Nice one.