Richard Chappell’s most ambitious work to date, Infinite Ways Home, resumes touring in Oxford in March. David Mead caught up with him to discuss the piece, and his approach to dance.
The idea of community is never far away for Richard Chappell, whose latest work, Infinite Ways Home, is now touring. He freely admits that it feeds through into his company, its ethos, its outlook, and his work. “Dance for me is a way to make a place for myself and the people around me. It’s how I communicate, understand the things that are both beautiful and traumatic for me, that are both harmonious and chaotic. I always wanted to make a space where people could be not only themselves, but also be something bigger than themselves.”
Photo Richard Chappell Dance
Chappell believes he couldn’t make the work he makes for Richard Chappell Dance with other companies. His dancers have known him a very long time and seen him grow and change, as he has seen them grow and change. “So, the histories in the room feed into our abilities to dig deeper in certain ways.”
With other dancers, it’s about understanding where the sentiment, shared history and middle ground is, he says. “What is important for those people about being with me? And what is important for me for creating work in those contexts.”
Chappell decided to set up his own company and focus on choreography rather than performing quite early in his career. He explains that, in his adolescence, he had a lot of energy and a huge appetite to expel it through dancing. “At times it was playful, processing trauma, at times it was using dance as an outlet to make sense of the world and to understand what my place in the world was as a person, as a citizen, as an artist. I felt my most self when I was with my friends expressing my creativity and making dance with them.”
During his training at the Rambert School, he got lots of experiences in different spaces and with different choreographers. While taking part in the Young Creatives programme at the Royal Opera House during his second year, he says he was incredibly inspired by what a career in dance-making and choreography could be. “But, in all of those spaces, I couldn’t see myself being a dancer. I had the appetite to move but I didn’t have the heart for it. The heart for me was more in relationship building with people and finding a tribe or a family of artists that I felt safe with, challenged by and at home with. So, choreography kind of gave me all the fixes that I needed.”
When it comes to describing his movement style, Chappell says he’s cared less about the phrase as he’s made more work. “At first, I was very pretentious. I would say it was ‘movement language’. Now it’s just a form, steps, physicality that’s from all my lived experiences as a playful dancer, whether that’s from ballet or contemporary dance or floorwork.”
Photo Jack Thomson
As he says he does in Intimate Ways Home, Chappell is adamant in his belief in giving audiences a spectacle that’s full bodied and that has a visceral, highly charged movement language. Equally, he wants people to have a kinaesthetic empathy with what they see and a deeply intimate experience that resonates with their own histories.
“So, people who have been lost in their lives might see spinning and resonate with that. People who have felt like they are falling, might see falling in a very different way. People who have experienced intimacy might see touch in a very different way.”
He sees his creative process as very much a dialogue. “I really believe in co-authorship. The people who I collaborate with have a huge plethora of physical and other experiences which aren’t in my practice, but they bring that history to the table in the process. At the same time, he says he’s very conscious of appropriation and ‘cleaning’ things that he doesn’t particularly understand as an artist.
“I guess if I was to describe RCD work, I’d say it was like a dirty pint. Lots of different drinks all put into one. I love the anarchy of that.” He accepts he does have a process and a way of doing things that sits well with his sense of self-expression. “But anything I can do to stay in those parameters but introduce a bit of chaos, I will, and a lot of the time, that comes from the histories of the people in the room.”
Turning to Infinite Ways Home, Chappell says he feels it’s his piece most representative of who he is. Looking back, he says the seed for it was planted before he realised.
A 2019 commission from Bristol Museum that explored magic and the Celtic past took him back to his love of history. “It was great to be able to go round the archives in a museum and make a dance piece from it.” As Above, So Below featured Faye Stoeser in a solo based on ritualistic elements described in Celtic and Druidic practice. Although only 14 minutes long, it was designed to be performed hourly for three hours. “So, it was kind of a study on ritualistic exhaustion as well.”
At the same time, he moved to Cardiff with his fiancée. “I really had a home for the first time in my career. Before that, I’d been relatively nomadic. Suddenly I had a place to nest and situate myself in. I was questioning what that meant for me.
Photo Dan Martin
What it means to be ‘home’ became the core of Silence Between Waves, which brought together three Singaporean dancers with a community cast from Torbay. Performed against the dramatic landscape and seascape of Brixham’s Berry Head, it invites audiences to consider what home means to them as it connects two places across the sea.
Then the pandemic hit. Although Chappell is unapologetic about using Infinite Ways Home as a vehicle to unpack the trauma of Covid-19, he insists it is absolutely not a reaction to the pandemic per se. “We made it all living together. Six people, two toilets, one shower, six weeks, one flat, bubbled together in March 2021.”
While the piece does highlight and celebrate individual strength, dependency on each other and the idea of community is deeply embedded within it, he explains. “So, you see individual performers, whether a violinist or five dancers, having their own journeys to empowerment and intimacy but also group energy and how people can redefine their sense of home as being with each other rather than necessarily a place.”
He also makes connections between Druidic practice and the outdoors. “Liminal spaces between water, earth and sky; and how that brought people together to have a spiritual experience. It seemed very similar to the 21st-century experience people have from rave, and how they come together to have something that’s transformative, playful and cathartic.”
Photo Dan Martin
Similar sentiment is clearly visible in Chappell’s Heart Land, a short dance film recently shown as part of the BBC’s Dance Passion season. An exploration of our footprint on the world and contribution to the climate crisis, it features seven dancers who seem to grow from and be at one with the landscape. Although we see them as individuals, what really comes through strongly is the support for each other and sense of communal experience.
The music for Intimate Ways Home is by violinist Enyuan Khong and electronica duo Larch. “I could see the potential for their music to work well together. I was kind of painting the picture of this old and new catharsis, trip, ritual rave. All of these things coming together to make something kind of otherworldly.”
Having said that, he feels it’s also a piece that you can just sit back and enjoy as dancing. “I feel really passionate that people need to feel safe coming back to theatre. I wanted to make something where people felt they were really entertained, not psychoanalysed. So, you can dive into it and see all parts of your own history of the last couple of years or before, or you can just sit back and appreciating the talent of people.”
Infinite Ways Home resumes touring on March 14, 2022 at the Oxford Playhouse. For further dates, and performances of other productions, visit www.richardchappelldance.co.uk.