Q & A / Cwestiwn ac Ateb: Dan Canham

We caught up with choreographer Dan Canham to find out more about the creation of dance-documentary piece, Ours Was The Fen Country, which comes to the Weston Studio on 30 March.

Rydyn ni wedi bod am sgwrs gyda’r coreograffydd Dan Canham i ddarganfod mwy am y gwaith sydd y tu ôl i greu cynhyrchiad dawns-ddogfennol, Ours Was The Fen Country, bydd yn ymweld â Stiwdio Weston ar 30 Mawrth.

What was it about the Fens that captured your imagination and inspired you to base your production on them?
Ours Was the Fen Country is an ensemble piece of dance-theatre built from a series of interviews I’ve conducted with people of the fens in East Anglia. The fens are a unique landscape – mile upon mile of unbroken fields with precious little to distinguish any of it. In the past, I’ve walked there for hours on end and seen no one. On a good day it is a stunningly peaceful place and on a bad day it’s bleak as the end of the world. Many of the people who live there are the sort of people you don’t really find anywhere else – with ways of life on the edge of existence.

And so, without really knowing why, I responded to this evocative place by riding my bike and walking around the fens, seeking rare and uncommon characters with whom to discuss the place, their lives, their thoughts on the world and pretty much anything in between. It took around two years to shape the resulting audio material into a piece of theatre. In the show, we use some of the words and interviews I’ve collected alongside music, dance, lighting and sound design to articulate some of the strong feelings and atmospheres you find out there. It’s a show about a specific landscape but that landscape has become the frame for a far wider ranging piece of work about rural ways of life, transience, loss, the power of nature, the disappearance of small things and the nervous system of the eel (among other things).


You worked closely with the people of the Fens, using their stories as a basis for the show. Who was your favourite person that you interviewed?
I was so privileged to speak with many of the people I met and to be given a brief glimpse into their lives. It’s hard to pick a favourite but Peter Carter from Outwell was particularly good to speak with. He is an eel-catcher and when it came to trying to actually get an interview he was as slippery as his catch.

He’s a bit of a local legend as his family’s been catching eels on the fens since 1475, and he’s the last of the line. He was a hard man to pin down and it took many missed calls, facebook messages, emails and about 40 miles on my bike until I managed to get to speak with him. I reached his shop in a last ditch attempt to meet with him, only to find it closed. I staked it out for a while before he happened to emerge - at which point I jumped him for an interview and having admired my persistence, he willingly obliged. He actually came to see the show when we toured to Ely (of all places) and it was a great experience – the first time he’d ever been to a theatre.

I’ve also spoken with pedigree horse, cattle and bantam-cock breeders, young farmers and a wonderful fenwoman of 92 years among others. The process of meeting and talking with people with whom I would never normally come into contact with, has been both a humbling and amazing experience in and of itself.


How did the piece change and evolve through the development process? Did you discover anything unexpected along the way?
We use dance in the show to help tease out and expand upon some of the atmospheres and feelings the words suggest. The challenge of turning the words of quite practical people into something that might suggest the poetic and artistic was an exciting one that led to some beautiful surprises.

With one man, Ralph Sargeant – a nature reserve warden for 35 years – I’d sat and spoken to him on the fen for a hour or so and not felt particularly happy with what was coming up in the interview – where I was looking for poetic meditations on the power of nature he would give me lists of animal species. It wasn’t until I listened back to the interview that I realised there was a poetry in and of itself in the way he spoke about animals. Adding music to the interview unveiled a whole other element to it and finally adding choreography and movement to that music deepened it even further.

On the whole that has been our approach – to honour the words of the interviewees and seek theatrical ways to enhance the words, without getting in their way.

Ours Was the Fen Country looks at ways of life that are dying out. What do you hope audiences will take away from this performance?
It’s a piece about the world and our place within it and so it’ll act as a mirror in some way to some of those wider thoughts we all have. It’s also been designed for any audiences to appreciate – including those that might not have ever heard of the fens – and so I hope there is some overlapping of the themes with rural communities all over the country. It’s also got some funny bits, and beautiful dancing.

Three words to describe the performance...
"An exquisite evocation".  (Lyn Gardner)

See Ours Was The Fen Country in the Weston Studio on Sunday 30 March, 8pm. Click here for full details, and to watch a short video with more details on the research and development of the piece.

Dewch draw i fwynhau’r perfformiad Ours Was The Fen Country yn ein Stiwdio Weston, ar nos Sul 30 Mawrth am 8pm. Cliciwch yma am ragor o wybodaeth, ac i wylio clip fideo sy'n sôn am y gwaith ymchwil a datblygu.