Film: Bound but not gagged

Lloyd Newson has never set out to please. Which is why Australian choreographer (and creator of deviational dance company DV8) can still slag off dancers, audiences and arts councils and yet attract the crowds. By Louise Levene

Lloyd Newson's new piece for DV8 may be entitled Bound to Please, but audience satisfaction is not the choreographer's chief concern. While other contemporary dance-makers hunger for audiences, this 40-year-old Australian, with a string of critical and popular successes to his credit, is actively seeking to undermine the huge hit he enjoyed with DV8's last production. "Enter Achilles was a populist piece. It was very obvious what it was about," he says.

A witty but disturbing look at the need for men to be butch, this award- winning 1995 piece followed the far stickier MSM, which was about picking up men in public lavatories. "I know that, after MSM, I felt the need to make Enter Achilles a more accessible piece with a bit of humour. The new piece is a lot more subtle."

A more old-fashioned showman would recognise the impulse to maintain a varied output as a canny strategy for sustaining audience (and press) interest. But Newson's decision to unsettle his public isn't about box- office - on the contrary, he is responding to what he sees as a dumbing down of dance in the face of scary market forces. "Over the past two or three years I've felt like there's been a really major move, particularly in Britain, to safer pieces which are 'accessible'. If I really believed that 'accessible' just meant 'intelligible' I'd be fine but it often means lowest common denominator - a lot of unison, a lot of pretty pictures, stuff that makes people feel good." Newson sees the trend at work in crowd- pleasing mega-hits like Riverdance, Tap Dogs and Joaquin Cortes: undemanding spectacles that bypass the brain. "There's a very big move towards light entertainment at the moment, a move away from difficult pieces to producing pleasing, escapist forms of theatre."

Bound to Please is designed to buck the trend. "I have to admit that it is not an easy piece; it requires the person watching it to work more than usual. I don't know if that's going to do me any good on a funding level. There is a feeling that you've got to make the work quite popular in order to justify your Arts Council grant." Such snobbish disdain for an audience's tastes would be insufferable from most choreographers but Newson, whose works are regularly given extra matinee performances to satisfy popular demand, can get away with it.

Not only do companies feel bullied into pleasing at all costs, they must also confine their creativity to the discipline they have selected. Tick the box marked "dance" and you'd better keep your mouth shut. Cross-genre work is frowned upon because it confuses the grant-awarding bodies. "At one point, the dance department of the Arts Council were saying, 'We can't fund Nigel Charnock because he's using too many words: he has to go to the theatre department.' There's an enormous pressure for DV8 to be Pure Dance. It would be almost impossible for the funding bodies to deal with us if we started doing lots of words and started bringing in actors. The Combined Arts budget is minute compared to theatre and dance."

Newson, who has often used text in his work, is beginning to feel painted into a corner by the limitations of his chosen art-form. "After doing this piece I need to take some time to think: how do I progress? Do I want to use film? Do I actually want to combine dance with language? Yes, the body can say some things that words can't but we're having this conversation in words not in movement." Part of Newson's dissatisfaction stems from the effect that a lifetime of dancing lessons can sometimes have on the human body. A dancer's gluteus maximus may swell like a watermelon, but his cerebrum shrinks to the size of a walnut - and those are the bright ones. Not only can the traditional dancer's education make it a struggle for them to bourree and chew gum at the same time, it doesn't always bring out the best in the very art-form that the training is designed to foster. "Dancers are so obsessed with how the body works that they don't think about motivation."

This might sound like a classic case of balletophobia but Newson's attack is more general: "I don't find that much difference between ballerinas and contemporary dancers. Most contemporary dancers are still putting arabesques and curved arms into their work. They all train doing tendus and fondus. If you use those basic principles every day, they permeate into what your work is about.

"We spend our lives training our bodies but we actually end up using them in a very restrictive way. Over the years, just walking into a gym people have said to me, 'Oh, you're a dancer' - and that's just the way I walk! The training starts making people very similar, it takes out the individuality because we all have this perfect arabesque to aspire to. Yet actors can do Hamlet 40 different ways. Nobody says, 'You must do it like Olivier.' It's one of the few trainings I know where you are not asked to give your personal interpretation. There's an interesting parallel between social etiquette and what dance often speaks about and what it's power often is, ie uniformity, niceness." In Bound to Please, the whole rigid, life-denying business is summed up in the arabesque. "I think it's the first time in 11 years we've done an arabesque. I'm intrigued by it. What does an arabesque mean? What is it about? Why is it done so often?

"In Bound to Please I raise the question by looking at the metaphor of dance and unison and doing things as agreed. Why do we get so upset when we see somebody who isn't jumping and landing at the same time as everyone else? We go, 'Oh, they're not professional.' What does that say about us?"

Not only do the steps need to be performed just so, the dancers themselves have to look the part. "Most dance is executed by people who are very similar in terms of body shape and age range. How many old dancers do you find? How many fat dancers? How many balding dancers?"

For Newson, this insistence on physical perfection is symptomatic of the body fascism that lies at the heart of all physical culture. This mass cloning of perfect specimens doesn't just suppress the dancers' individuality, it can actually inhibit a choreographer's creativity - a view he shares with William Forsythe: "It's got a lot to do with the raw material. There is very little extremely challenging work being made because dance is so much about obedience: people can execute the steps fine but can't actually think about the reason behind them. I remember my brother saying to me once, 'What can you do after 10 years of training?' and I said, 'A triple pirouette' - which is, after all, a major accomplishment - and he said, 'Is that it?'."

Such an earnest concern to transplant a brain into current dance output might cause a delicate audience to get its coat, wary of new dance practitioners who suck the life out of what should be a vibrant theatrical form and leave punters glassy-eyed in shock at the desiccated spectacle that results. A glance at Newson's track record should lay such fears to rest. Newson may wear his psychology degree on his sleeve but he never loses sight of the need to delight as well as instruct. Just like Enter Achilles and MSM before it, Bound to Please promises to be lubricated with humour, without which - as Newson would be the first to admit - his behavioural treatise would risk disappearing up its own arabesquen

'Bound to Please', Cambridge Arts Theatre (01223 503333) to Sat; High Wycombe Swan, 2-3 April; Glasgow Tramway, 10-12 April; Warwick Arts Centre, 25 April; Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton, 23-24 May; Lyceum Sheffield, 30 May; QEH, London, 1-3 August