What were you hoping for when you set out to make this film? Initially I was looking for the roots of how I danced, and wanted to tap into memories of old footage from dance films that I loved as a child – The Jacksons, people flat-footing on porches etc. I also wanted to investigate, and attempt to explain, some of the connections between the histories of different kinds of music, and different forms of dance. For example, Routes begins with a scene of bare feet, flatfooting on a square wooden board in the Appalachian Mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina. To many, the dancers appear to be primarily drawing on British traditions of Irish and English step. But the forms of dance or movement have evolved together in the maelstrom of colonization and slavery merging in communities before electricity, amplification or radio and television.
As the film rolls on, influences unravel in performances by different communities. The Tuscarora Indians perform a smoke dance, containing steps related to the earlier flatfooting. Interviews revealed that a flatfoot move bears the name “Indian” and we have seen the same step in breakdance for 30 years. The African American step form bears the name ‘buck dancing’, after the term for a male slave. The young hip-hop dancers in the Memphis ‘hood’ call their moves ‘bucking’. They use mime, not sound. The dances are beautiful and poetic. Social, political and cultural significances are clear.
How does the finished film differ from your early cuts? I understand for example that you removed the original voiceover. The first cut had a voiceover and interviews but I was never comfortable with it. Firstly, the language that I wanted to communicate in was dance and music. Even if I used words, I could not get all the information in that I wanted to and also felt very emotional about the project. My trip to New Orleans was like a pilgrimage as so much had come out of this city that had influenced me from afar. It is a unique and volatile place with a painful past and has been home to so many talented, creative people.
I had arrived there, though, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation was upsetting. Also the warmth and resilience of the people I had met, whose lives had been turned upside down, contrasted sharply with US and UK foreign policy at the time. The invasion of Iraq was on my mind as the London 7 July bombings had taken place only weeks beforehand, close to the dance school where I worked. We all got telephone calls to see who was dead or injured. And Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot in the subway close to my home. So I took the words out, partly because I was sick of what had been done with them in the weeks preceding my trip. I had marched peacefully against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in the biggest antiwar demo ever in the world. But it made no difference. We went to war upon words - or lies, there were no weapons. The English UN weapons inspector David Kelly, a devout honest man, committed suicide over leaked words for this. I was questioning how we could find any truth and wondered if perhaps there was a little in dance. Or perhaps there is a democracy in dance. Sometimes dance is the only creative expression we make; therefore it's political and contains the past. So, this became my tiny, negligible statement of protest.
How did you film Routes? In the opening scene I had the camera in one hand and the microphone in another. I moved, stepping over grassy mounds, people and guitar cases, pointing the camera one way, and the microphone another, even whilst taking the camera off the tri-pod. I felt as though I was painting with sound and image. The sound was recorded in an unusual, even opposite way to conventional sound recording. I tried to communicate a real sound experience that is connected to the movement and percussion of the incredible dancing and my own sonic experience as I also moved. I wasn’t looking for constant audio excellence. I was looking for grit, atmosphere and texture and my approach was instinctive.
One of the most important things was not to break the sound recording, as that would destroy the fluidity and momentum of the material. When it came to editing, I could have easily cutaway proficiently when the camera went awry, for example if I had fallen while filming, but I didn’t due to the commitment I felt to sound-synch and the immediacy of a unique time and place.
The film is genuinely distinctive. What are you hoping audiences will make of it? The subject and language of Routes, and my work in general, is dance and music. I want the audience to be lost in a language of dance and music related to landscape and environment - not a literal identification of place (a concept I have come to call ‘Choreogeography’). I hope they make connections in the movement and feel the emotions and beauty of improvisation before any rationalization takes place. We think with our bodies too; the expressiveness of performance is testament to that. That may lead us to consider why and how moves and music are connected - the anthropology, politics, history, on a conscious or subconscious level. But first of all I want viewers and listeners to feel, enjoy, be amazed, excited.
