Words by Florence Nicholls.
On the 13th of December, Romany Dear will be hosting their workshop, Constellations of Together-mess, with Independent Dance (ID) at Siobhan Davies Studios. Romany is a body-based practitioner, access worker, and the Co-Director of a temporary MA programme, Monstrous Futurities: Practices of (un)learning, (un)doing and (un)making, at The Sandberg Institution (Amsterdam).
In conversation with dance art journal, Romany untangled the term ‘Together-mess’ and delved into the symbolism of constellations, agricultural planting and geometric arrangements that orbit their practice. The workshop will include moving in threes – the magic number – and pouring our bodies onto the horizontal plane. We will be invited to connect with the possibility of reciprocity and the practice of forming multilayered connections in motion. As part of the workshop, Romany will offer a collective reading of their practice. Through this dialogue we explore Romany’s love for words and altered meanings. Defining and redefining their practice is like an infinitely expanding universe.
DAJ: Romany, Can you tell us a bit about what we can expect on the day?
Romany: Yes…so this workshop will bring together many different elements of how I understand my own practice and the moving relational body. I suppose that when you’ve been practicing for many years, part of the practice just exists within you, and so the process of planning is more akin to a harvesting, or a fine tuning of which elements to share for each specific workshop context.
For this workshop at ID, we will be working with scores for improvisation, across the imaginative and the somatic. We will cultivate speculative relationships to our bodies to investigate how we may imagine, perceive and expand our perceptions of what it means to be a body, in relation to others.
A lot of my work is interested in what it means to create temporary collectivity and how we might practice that together. Even if it’s only six hours of knowing each other, what could those [practices] of accompaniment and reciprocity look like?
The workshop will be a space to move and be moved simultaneously and a space that I hope will be full of laughter, tenderness, some shyness and equal parts of boldness! It will be as switchy as I am in my very Gemini self.
DAJ: I wonder how the term ‘Together-mess’ emerged for you?
Romany: The felt that the concept of togetherness lent itself to an ideology that being together is always harmonious and I am interested in thinking about the kind of mess, frictions, fictions and tensions that can be produced “in relation” … this might be the ways that I am working with my own body relations, or with an object or with collaborators. I love to play with words, and so this term kind of spoke to all the other stuff that’s often there on the periphery of togetherness that we don’t necessarily include, but is really a part of it. ‘Together-mess’ allowed me to really talk about and work with this [Romany gestured with their hands, showing a centre and its periphery] and its edges.
DAJ: Is it like a constellation of ideas?
Romany: Exactly. I was always talking about the concept of togetherness and then over the last year or two, I started to be like, it’s ‘Together-mess’. It’s been a kind of adaptation or translation of that concept, for me and my work.
DAJ: During the workshop, we might be moving in threes. I wonder what significance this configuration holds?
Romany: For a long time, I have been working with constellations of threes, trios. This was initially informed by an agricultural planting technique that has accompanied me through many different contexts in my life called the ‘Three Sisters’ or ‘La Milpa’. In the milpa method, crops like corn, squash and beans grow together, companionship planting methods support the plants to grow interdependently with each other, they can grow without each other, but they grow better together, with this mutual support system.
From this practice that I was busy with, I began to think about this as both a metaphor and method for my movement practice, inspired by the question that Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud ask, “What can we do together that we can’t do alone?” … or in my own words, “What is it about being together that can sustain our individual and collective growth?” Understanding our growth, in relation to the continuation and sustaining of our movements in each other’s company? I think that these practices of trios have been informed by many different things, people, practitioners, teachers, resources and references in my life.
DAJ: Can you expand on why your practice is described as a ‘spilling’?
Romany: I feel like I’m coming out again for the first time! (laughs) I’ve been identifying as a spiller for the past three years, maybe. I think this comes with the difficulty of being a freelancer and doing many things at once and constantly having to find and re-find the language. I’m a performer, I’m an educator, I’m an access worker etc, and I just kept returning to the term “spiller” ’ through lots of different understandings or etymologies of the word. One of them being the actual act of spilling most liquids down my own body and starting to understand that instead of that being something I needed to change or get better at, I would use it like a joke. I’m a professional spiller, whether I choose to or not; I have an amazing ability to pour all the liquids out!
So I started to write about this term, spilling, and I wrote lots of possible definitions about what it would be to be a spiller. It started to help me expand my thinking or the framing of my practice. How do we give language to a practice that is maybe still undefinable? Or doesn’t seek to become definable? A porous practice, or a practice that is continuously mutating?
And I think more recently, because I work a lot on the floor, or the horizontal is central to my work and also to how I work… both in relation to someone who spends a lot of time on the horizontal living with a chronic pain condition, but also in relation to understanding the floor as a place for us to undo or translate the vertical, that is so often proposed as neutral in a lot of contemporary dance spaces. … and so entering this through and with the term “spiller”, has kind of fused a new relationship for me with the ways that things spill out, expand, and spread across their surfaces, in multi-directional, or multi-centered ways, beyond verticality and horizontality. And so this term has become a kind of metaphor that I’ve applied as a practice, I would say.
DAJ: It makes complete sense to have abstract language in how we describe movement. You can really imagine what it feels like to spill yourself onto the floor. Maybe a technical term might feel more difficult to relate to than the imagery of spilling. What shall we bring into the workshop space with us, physical or otherwise?
Romany: I really invite everyone who comes, to just turn up with the conditions that they are present with on that day; if your body is shy, if your body is tired, if your body is full of energy. Bring it! There will be translations for all of the exercises in the workshop, and many different entry points for what someone can do, and also what that “doing” looks like. So, please bring yourselves, bring your curiosities and your compassion!
And bring a notebook and a pen! Bring a water bottle with you, hydration is very important!
The workshop will take place from 11am- 4.30pm at Siobhan Davies Studios, followed by a collective reading from 5.30-6.30pm, both led by Romany Dear with BSL interpretation by Samuel Rojas.
Prompts and invitations will be offered gesturally, verbally and with the written word. Notebooks and curious minds will be useful tools for the upcoming, Constellations of Together-Mess. Header image by Monica Munoz.