Ben Duke
Award winning Choreographer, Artistic Director and Performer
The Voice of His Gremlin:
“I don’t know what to do now”
The nature of creativity and my expertise can suddenly feel like nothing. This intangibility feeds into the idea that I’m an imposter and that I’m just bullshitting.
My Gremlin is a bit like Sadness from the Pixar animation Inside Out.
Physically it feels tense and makes me just want to put my head in my hands.
I want to either make myself disappear or everyone else to disappear. I need everyone else to go so there isn’t any kind of expectation on me coming up with an idea about what should happen now.
It feels like a glitch … There’s questions, there are expectations, there’s something that’s meant to be happening and I’m supposed to be the person who’s moving that process forward, but I can’t.
When I ask dance to do something specific, I shut down its potential.
I recognise this gremlin as a part of my identity. The moments that it’s not there are quite rare; this stuttering insecurity that I’ve welded and wrapped up together with my personality and creative process. I almost wouldn’t recognise or trust my creative process if I was in a space where I thought; ‘wow I really know what I’m doing and what I want to happen.’