The Here & Now showcase will bring together experimental and bold dance artists from across the world to Edinburgh Fringe festival next month.
We are spotlighting a selection of dance artists presenting work at the festival including Wet Mess, Dickson Mbi and Ziza Patrick.
Luca Rutherford will be presenting You Heard Me, a collaborative work brought into being by Luca, Maria Crocker, Melanie Wilson, Tanuja Amarasuriya, Linzy Na Nakorn and Betany Gupwell.
Ahead of the festival, we chatted to Luca about You Heard Me and what makes Here & Now such a supportive programme for independent artists.
Q: Tell me about your practice and artistic journey?
A: I make theatre as well as dance theatre, public art, short film and audio. Collaboration is at the heart of what I do. I’m interested in making work that takes on big themes and bites into them with a sense of play and joy.
I would say I explore what feels messy; previous shows have been about death and an acceptance of our mortality; the overwhelmingness and loneliness of politics and my current show is about power and sexual violence.
I write, perform and dramaturg. My artistic vision is to create work that is softly fierce and fiercely soft. In process and final design, my practice revolves around the creation of community, holding space for conversation and humour. My work is rooted in intersectional feminism. It is for the adventurous, and also the shy.
I started out as a storyteller about 10 years ago, specifically children’s stories. I started making theatre in studio fringe spaces and am now working in midscale spaces. This feels really significant because often I think we close down the scale and aesthetic of one person’s performances. My own theatre work is just me on stage although it is made with big beautiful teams. I am interested in messing around with form, and creating high production shows.
Q: What drew you to presenting work with Here & Now as part of Fringe 2024?
A: I have been super excited by Here & Now by their previous curation of work and artists. I am a big fan of Action Hero & Deborah Pearson, Figs in Wigs, Javaad Alipoor Company, Rachel Mars, Raquel Meseguer Zafe, Ray Young who were amongst last year’s lineup of artists.
Plus, Here & Now is a huge supportive funded platform. You get to be part of a cohort of other artists. It is brilliant to be going to Edinburgh alongside Dickson Mbi, Krishna Istha, Nwando Ebizie, Tim Etchells with Bert & Nasi, Wet Mess, and Ziza Patrick. I have been following Wet Mess for years (they designed a tattoo for me ages ago!!) so I am really excited to see their show TESTO.
I am really looking forward to seeing Dickson Mbi’s work as we’ve met only once and they were absolutely lovely.
Ziza and I both live (mostly!) in Newcastle and it is such a joy to be in their company and presenting work alongside them. They are doing some joyous work across, and interviewing, many mediums. I am so intrigued to see where they go next.
I have seen loads of Bert & Nasi’s work and every time left feeling more playful and slightly flawed. I missed Krishna’s First Trimester when it was at Battersea Arts Centre but heard such brilliant praise. I have not seen any of Nwando’s work before but am fascinated to hear more about their Distorted Constellations. It’s such a pleasure to be presenting work amongst such brilliant companies.
Q: What can audiences expect when experiencing your work? What won’t they expect?
A: You Heard Me is a super physical piece of theatre. I am the only human on stage but I am very much performing intricately with sound and responsive intricate lighting.
“The power of art is sometimes invisible; it’s not so quantifiable and therefore too easy for people to underestimate.”
The show is a conceptual representation of a true story that happened to me. There’s a dramaturgy of minimal spoken text which is weighted more on the deliberate choice of the words not said. We wanted to forensically examine a woman facing male sexual violence, outside of the notion of statistics, nor the act of retraumatising audience and performer. Instead, magnifying the ordinariness of the details of internal thought and the everydayness of the encounter.
Our intention is to capture the messiness, ugliness and intangibility of connecting to your power through an approach rooted in care for audiences.
Q: Who or what influences you the most?
A: My contemporary artists and collaborators are a big influence for me. It’s hard making a live performance; building a world out of nothing but an idea in your head! It’s fun but it’s also painful.
Conjuring a piece of work with collaborators is a feat and the team that made You Heard Me are a huge inspiration to me. We made our own ecosystem, a way to navigate shitty days and celebrate the smallest of wins, as well as all the big wonderful things. We traversed through a global pandemic, chronic illness, new motherhood, more motherhood, care around a collection of individual trauma and different ways of processing! I am super proud to be part of the team.
Outside of the team, major influences come from dance and circus as well as reading. I am just about to finish Miranda July’s novel, All Fours, and it is blowing my mind. I saw The Making of Pinocchio by Cade & MacAskill in Bristol at Mayfest and was mesmerised. It was an absolute masterpiece in theatre making, art making, storytelling and weaving the huge big political into the small, specific and tricky details of being alive.
In terms of great minds Octavia Butler and Ursula K Le Guin are the two main influential mentors I have in my head at all times.
Q: What makes art so valuable to society/culture/communities, in your opinion?
A: It is thinking out loud, feeling out loud, failing out loud; together. Art can be a manual, a safe place, a wake up, an en-rager, a soother. The power of art is sometimes invisible; it’s not so quantifiable and therefore too easy for people to underestimate. The arts have continuously been sapped by the current government and it’s harder and harder to keep making it, let alone for younger artists. If we stop feeding the arts, we are f**ked.
I know that art keeps me learning, keeps me curious, keeps me sane, comforts me when I don’t feel sane. The things I enjoy most in life (apart from being outside and in the company of good people) are all wrapped in the arts. I’d be bored without music. I’d be lonely without books. I’d be less travelled without cinema. I’d be more 2D without theatre. I wouldn’t understand form or beauty without sculpture, textile, or visual art. I wouldn’t understand risk without circus. Art shouldn’t be an added bonus, an extra, nor should it be accessed only by those who have money to experience it.
You Heard Me by Luca Rutherford will be presented at Zoo Southside from Tuesday 20 – Sunday 25 August at 4.30pm presented as part of the Here & Now showcase. Find out more here. Header image by Simon Shaw.