Words by Qiao Lin Tan.
Ebony Rose Dark (she/he/they) is a vision impaired cabaret and dance performance artist whose work addresses gender, disability, vision impairment, race and the LGBTQ+ community. Ahead of the premiere of their new work, Out There, In Here, we sat down with Ebony to discuss their creative journey, their practice, and their thoughts about their upcoming performance at The Place.
What was your journey towards becoming a creative?
I wasn’t initially planning on becoming a performer, I was going to go off into a totally different world at sixteen years old. I went to a recreational dance class at the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford and I fell in love. I was like, “Wow, what’s this? [laughs] This is amazing. Dancing is beautiful and it’s so fun.” I managed to change my BTEC course at school and became a performing arts student. So that’s where it all started.
In this course, we worked first on contact improvisation because that’s very important for vision impaired people as a way of moving and creating work. That was where our work came from. There was, you know, a bit of weight bearing. There were a few other bits of technique, such as traveling across the space, extending, spatial awareness, playing with shaping and framing, and a tiny bit of ballet. I also did drama and music during my three years in this course.
I went to university for a year but it didn’t work out – it was the year where they were trying to make arts courses accessible to disabled people but it didn’t work for me – they pretty much broke me mentally and made me absolutely petrified of university institutions. I left and got a scholarship to join the Candoco Dance Company foundation course in 2004. This absolutely changed my life.
I joined Amici Dance Theatre Company in 2005 and I’m still with them. I also trained as a community dance practitioner, received my teaching certifications and taught in arts centres, community centres and theatres. I had the opportunity to work with choreographers like salamenda tandem, Candoco Company in The Show Must Go On at Sadler’s Wells and more.
My cabaret journey started with Adriana Pegorer who’s a tango and contact improvisation teacher in London. I used to go to her classes, both contact and tango, and she took me to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 2010. I met a promoter there and that year, I had my first cabaret gig at Bar Wotever. I loved it. It was so much fun to transform, you know, into my other self. Into me. It was really special.
And I loved the community, the people are great, and it became a real good platform for me to try out new material, avant garde stuff. And I became a resident artist there – the longest resident artist they’ve had – for four years.
How do you experience dance?
I’m drawn to improvisation and somatic practices. I recently trained as a Skinner Release teacher – that technique really invites me to be aware of my body and its alignment whilst also having fun as well.
There’s no ‘proper’ way of doing things. It’s about what you’re feeling, the practicing, the doing, and the regularity of doing it. How that affects the body and how, all of a sudden, “Oh, yeah, I can go into a deep squat. It’s easy now, but yesterday it was horrible.” It’s also knowing that some days, it’s not always going to be easy, but that’s okay because that’s what practice is about.
It’s funny because I also love a salsa class. There’s still a level of needing the teacher to be quite descriptive and clear in what they want the feet to be doing exactly and the terminology and stuff. Sometimes – let’s say in a tango class – I’d go, “Okay, could you actually physically come and show me? If you need to move me around that’s perfectly fine.” I’d rather do that than be doing the wrong step. So yeah, quite different approaches towards movement practice for different contexts.
You will be performing your new work Out There, In Here at The Place this September 10th. Can you tell me a bit more about the title and what it means to you?
The phrase “Out There, In Here” is, for me, the world out there. And then there’s my world that I see, that I feel, that I sense. With my eyes open and closed. This performance is an invitation to look into my world. How I sense and smell and see, and the complexities of that.
This is your first full-length work for the contemporary dance stage. Is creating for a contemporary dance stage different to creating for a cabaret stage?
For this piece – I don’t want to give too much away and say too much about the seating – but you don’t have that option in cabaret. Generally, you don’t have that freedom to ask how the space is going to be and how can it be changed because normally you’re in a line-up of acts. The space is not going to change for you.
I don’t want to use the word “luxury”, but there is something quite luxurious about having that space all to yourself and being able to play with it and shape it. That’s the difference [between cabaret and contemporary dance stages] for me – I’m creating an experience for people to be in. And that’s really special.
Sometimes dance can be very much like “Oh, we’re here and you’re there”. That’s not what my show is about. My show is about having all of us on a journey together.
As a performer, one is always being watched and hardly does the audience receive the same treatment (at least in Western theatrical tradition). They get to sit in the dark and watch the person on stage. In Out There, In Here, how do you explore the idea of being seen and not being seen?
The work has audio description built into the soundscape. They way I created it was by recording myself describing the movement, listening back and re-recording it again and again until it was tight.
With audio description, some people will see and some people won’t see, but that’s okay. Sometimes, people with full vision don’t see things, and that’s also perfectly okay because that’s how it is to be visually impaired. I don’t get the clarity or the sharpness that a fully-sighted person gets on a daily basis. I only get to experience that when I’m sitting on my phone, zooming in and holding the phone close to my face and taking all the time there is to examine this picture. That’s when I get my version of clarity.
Do you have a favourite moment in the piece? Whether to create, to perform, or for others to experience.
I do have multiple favourites. I’m really intrigued with the middle section and what audiences are going to experience, because it’s a section that has been ummed and ahhed about extensively in the creative process. There’s been a lot of questions about how it sits, where it sits, and I’m looking forward to hearing the audience’s reaction to that.
I also love the beginning of the piece as well. It’s what this show grew out of, and it was inspired by a group piece that I did when I was a 17-year-old student. I had taken that group piece and recreated it into a solo that I performed during my residency at Bar Wotever. And that came with me to Choreodrome at The Place and from there it’s now become part of the show.
I love the whole show, but the beginning is very special for me because that is where this baby grew from. I’ve really enjoyed the process of creating it, embodying the show, and working with different props and materials as part of it. It’s nice to create illusions; I love creating illusions when I’m moving, and props help that happen while also shaping the space.
Out There, In Here by Ebony Rose Dark will be on at The Place on Tuesday 10th September, 7.30pm. Tickets can be booked here.