Signposts, guiding lights and gentle protests: Candoco’s Over and Over (and over again)

Inclusivity is the bedrock of Candoco, a dance company founded in 1991 that has garnered national and international prestige for its experimental collaborations, and its presentation of, in its own words, ‘disabled and non-disabled dancers as professionals and as equals within the dance sector’.

Their new piece Over and Over (and over again) is a work of joyous empowerment and active imagination of a better reality as desired by the artists that make up its cast. Projected onto one of two curtains that drop down the stage are words that Candoco has reconfigured: Liberation, Love, Rest, Abandonment, amongst others. They serve as signposts, guiding lights and gentle protests.

Unity

Raquel Meseguer Zafe and Dominic Mitchell united as co-artistic directors of Candoco in January 2024. Over and Over (and over again) is their first commissioned piece for the company and welcomes back former Candoco performer Dan Daw, now of Dan Daw Creative Projects, together with theatre director Stef O’Driscoll, who has focused much of her practice fusing rave culture with narratives, as co-director.

As a queer, disabled artist, Daw epitomises Meseguer Zafe and Mitchell’s vision for the company’s future, one that continues to centre the lived experiences of disabled people, using ‘crip practice’. Despite advocating for the rights of disabled artists since its origins, the company had not previously commissioned a full-length work by a disabled choreographer. Indeed, the artistic directors intend to avoid commissioning non-disabled choreographers to create work for and with disabled bodies and minds.

I spoke to Daw and O’Driscoll following the work’s premiere in Ipswich, UK, and in anticipation of the European debut in Oslo and Marseille. Shortly after our conversation, the results were released of an Arts Council England funded research project, ‘Barriers to Progression & Employment in Dance for Disabled People’, a collaborative effort of several leading dance organisations, including Candoco. One of the key barriers found was ‘care’, or lack of it. While Over and Over (and over again) responds to a lack of access in the context of raves, it inevitably also speaks to the dance sector as a whole, triggering reflection on how dance organisations can better care for disabled artists, on-stage and off.

Rest

Rest is not usually welcomed to the stage; it is what happens after a performance, when the audience have gone home. Over and Over (and over again) integrates rest as a choreographic decision. For a languorous segment of the piece, the cast pile onto the platform, limbs tangled, using each other as cushions – and rest. The audience, too, are granted permission to recharge, a far cry from works that relentlessly stimulate their viewers. When asked by an audience member in the post-show Q&A about the aesthetic of access, Daw rejects academic labels and says that it is simply about letting access needs be shown, not concealed. By doing so, Candoco are reflecting a flexibility present in all that they do, not only within this piece.

Candoco’s new working model carves time and space for rest where it doesn’t usually exist. A paid, mid-week rest day – admittedly less practical in the run-up to a premiere – is Candoco’s attempt to alter the working model of our dance sector, so artists can create, and not break in the process. Over and Over (and over again) is testament that artists do not need to, in Daw’s words, ‘exhaust ourselves and make ourselves ill for something we love’.

A paid rest day sounds delightful, even essential to avoiding burnout, but it also points to a financial stability that many artists don’t have. Freelancers especially are rarely in a position to pay themselves to rest. When an artist is also disabled, it heightens questions of how many dancers are forced to underplay their access needs in order to fulfil a job.

O’Driscoll acknowledges the blessing that has been this creative process with Candoco, and that the kind of care experienced by artists and choreographers alike does not happen everywhere: ‘As an industry, we just need to get better at ensuring that that money is in the budgets. I say that knowing that we’re in a really tough time [economically], but otherwise, the people that suffer most are the artists, and if you truly are centring care then that’s not okay.’

After the cast have recharged on the platform, have passed around a notebook to jot down their needs and desires (voyeuristically filmed on a phone by one dancer, and projected for us to see), Annie Edwards stands, and she dances. This moment is hers; the others look on. O’Driscoll later speaks of movement scores, invisible frameworks between which artists, like Annie in this moment, are free to explore. Daw speaks of probing the dancers: ‘How would you move if you didn’t have to remember or replicate the steps?’

Edwards gradually lets the beat make its way into her body. Her feet remain rooted to the stage, and the other dancers remain resting like sleeping lions in brightly coloured streetwear, a grounding surround. Hands to chest, shoulders loose, she grooves. It is the result of restoration, a necessary ceasing of energy and output, proving that once you have rested, once you feel safe, only then can you truly let go.

Abandon

Raving as subculture emerged in the 80s/90s, and has compelled O’Driscoll for most of her life. Raving, she explains, has always been ‘a place for marginalised identities primarily to find a sense of liberation, unity and freedom on the dance floor. It’s been a space to shake off your burdens and your struggles that you’re dealing with, that are usually to do with lived experience and identity.’ For Daw, raving has represented a public space where he feels most safe to be ‘unapologetically’ himself, a space to soften, and as he describes in the post-show Q&A, to let my body do what it does without hiding’.

As an audience member, I reflected on the kinds of spaces which let one feel completely disinhibited, as rave spaces do for O’Driscoll and Daw. The piece epitomised how public, shared spaces can be fertile ground for intimate connection – which presents a paradox of sorts. The dancers of Candoco find disinhibition that feels authentic in a performative setting. Though they don’t exactly adhere to the proscenium stage etiquette – for example, a pair of dancers tumble into heated intimacy against an off-stage wall – the fact remains that is a performance. Movement scores anchor the piece, prevent it from unravelling into something formless as it explores the wild and free sensations rife in a rave. Narrative vignettes too, give form, revealing snippets that are playfully interrupted before we learn too much. The choreographic pacing and intimate collisions contain the uncontainable: a rave, bursting at the seams, suspended in time, or escaping it altogether. And yet, the dancers nevertheless succumb to a genuine release. Temitope Ajose moves with a raw abandonment. She claws the air, energy charging upwards through her body in erratic ripples and then shooting down into the ground with restless stamps. She is enthralled by the present moment, the beat of a soundtrack that too is restless, jumping track by track from pop to R&B to house and back again. Often, it is Ajose that riles on the others, the source from which a chain of movement is triggered.

The creative process itself is to thank for this visible release on stage. ‘Intimacy was the basis, the starting point,’ explains Daw. ‘We were able to really spend time getting to know the dancers as humans, and not simply bodies who are our vessels.’ Supported by the luxurious length of the creative process, the dancers of Candoco dedicated time to understanding the intricacies of each other’s bodies, to the way Maiya Leeke’s wheelchair moved for example, and the things each dancer needed. ‘Provision of access is intimate,’ adds Daw, warranting ‘deep questions we don’t talk about every day, and we should.’

O’Driscoll also feels that the dancers, who were working together as this specific group of five for the first time, felt more comfortable on a stage before an audience than they do in a rave setting in the real world. Though not reflective of all rave spaces in the UK, an experience the company had at one rave in particular emphasised that such spaces can be unpleasant ones for disabled people, especially if they claim to be accessible but are not in practice. Over and Over (and over again) presents an imagined world, one in which we can do better, where there are no barriers to disabled people experiencing the kind of liberation in a rave context that other, non-disabled people can, and do.

Liberate

The end of the piece – which comes amusingly abruptly, a reminder that people still need to travel home after finding utopia – is a poignant solo by James Olivo. As O’Driscoll describes, each dancer seeks and lands upon their own way of liberating themselves, and for Olivo, this is only when everyone has left. A projection of the word Solitude forms the backdrop. To gentle piano, his limbs arc and bend to what seems like breaking point, spiralling, collapsing, curling inside out. What could be perceived as a body disobeying, as discomfort, may well be a body being itself, doing exactly what it wishes to do. A complete abandonment of muscle tension sees him softly bounce back, over and over. Olivo’s casual movement until this moment is thrust into doubt: that was fitting in; this is true abandonment, and it is beautiful.

‘Freedom practice’ in its very nature means different things to different people, but one meaning describes it as creating dance in a way that dreams of better, kinder, more liberated worlds. The term has frequently arisen both in description of and conversation about Candoco’s new work, and sits at the heart of Mackenzie Wark’s book, Raving, as well as, ‘Rave as Practice’. Wark’s work, in the words of ArtReview, ‘explores raving as a means of temporary freedom and (if-only-brief) liberation to those from the queer community.’

Raving forms one of two textual stimuli for this piece, alongside Emma Warren’s book Dance Your Way Home. In the post-show Q&A, Meseguer Zafe discusses DIY approaches to freedom practice and pleasure activism that attempt to build worlds that do not yet exist by honouring all voices and experiences. In the broken state of the world as it is, where seemingly instant political changes result in long-term harm to marginalised communities especially, freedom practice is in itself a protest. Freedom, or the seeking of it, seeps from the stage, an immense consideration for each other’s differences, and an intimacy that nevertheless allows space for that diversity.

Over and Over (and over again) follows the structure it sets for itself of words and their definitions but leaves plenty of breathing room in between to freely explore each definition with the upmost pleasure. Leeke finds liberation in her wheelchair atop the platform, arms raised as if to consume the sweeping light beams that bounce from her sequinned outfit. Edwards and Olivo find liberation in the background with a house duet, happy feet in conversation. Liberation oozes from slow-motion scenes in sumptuous hazy light, as each dancer senses their skin, their limbs at every angle, as if observing themselves in motion, with attention, for the first time. Touch is a source of liberation. There is liberation in the groove for and with another, in the vignettes of duos and trios, and in the groove that is intended for nobody to see. Though letting loose often implies fast, frenzied movement – the images conjured by the term ‘rave’ – this piece tunes into the quieter moments, the in-betweens, where pleasure of an equal satisfaction resides.

Freedom does not come easily, however. A struggle opens the piece, as each dancer battles with an item of clothing, shoes squeezed onto knees, jackets on backwards; a body forced to change shape into order to be allowed entry (to the club). The piece’s ending, which initially felt like ‘going home’, can later be interpreted instead as going back to reality, one that does not yet let all people, bodies, and minds indiscriminately through the door.

Dream

One year in, Meseguer Zafe speaks of her co-directorship with Mitchell as if it is very much still new, which makes sense considering their sizeable ambitions for the company. Candoco’s ‘northstar’ goal is to eradicate all barriers in art so that the disabled dance community can thrive with richness, proudness, and most importantly, with the things that it needs, especially from each other. Daw’s takeaway reinforces this last point. Having earlier reflected on previous creative processes, on giving everything to a work only to realise he has left himself behind, he now embraces ‘the importance of interdependence and acknowledging that we’re not doing it alone. We don’t have to do it alone.’

Though Over and Over (and over again) at times felt like a dream, it prompts questions very much rooted in reality. It not only served as representation of disabled lived experience in the context of a raving scene, and in that sense, any place where marginalised people have sought escape, but it felt as though interdependence and care dictated the way of working itself, and therefore the performative result. As Daw points out, ‘there is no dance without the dancers’. The needs of the artists came above the vision of the choreographers, who admit to letting themselves be led in the creation of a piece in flux, still expanding and deepening.

Thirty years since its formation, Candoco too remains open to learning, evolving and carrying forth its inclusive legacy while responding to the circumstances of the present day. Dance is both a constantly evolving response to, and suffering victim of, an unstable economy and fickle political climate. It therefore feels less welcoming than it is crucial for care to be centred in the way it is at Candoco. O’Driscoll aspires to take with her back to the world of theatre a kindness to herself, while being creative, an antithesis to the stereotypical concept of the tortured artist. ‘I think you can centre care no matter how long you’ve got, she says, and Daw agrees.

A paid rest day might be a mere dream for some, but kindness, openness, and a willingness to listen to the needs of others are not inherently dependent on funding or resources; for Candoco, they are non-negotiables. The question is, why isn’t this the case everywhere? ●