Theo Clinkard
Choreographer, Designer, Teacher and Performer
The Voice of His Gremlin
“You talk the talk, but I don’t see your ideas in your creations”
I’ll look for it.
I will look for the one person in the room whose eyes are flickering away or they’re slightly doubting what I say. So I’m now in a process where I’m looking for evidence of my hypothesis. I’ll also read it into silence and assume that means they didn’t rate it; or yet again I think I have got through to something but it doesn’t reach people. Silence plays a big role in making me feel invalidated.
At times the Gremlins voice makes me resort to things I know. It also makes me write less, making less public the ideas around the work so people aren’t looking at the gap between what’s happening and what they thought would happen.
I have to remind myself ‘This is the work I’m making, I’m making a body of works, this is my next piece in a long journey of works’, versus ‘this being the be all and end all and what people think of it being a thought on me as a person’.
With This Bright Field, because it was a ‘big opportunity’ I think this became a lens through which people looked through and I didn’t feel I could say … ‘That was fucking hard, harder than anything’; because it looked like everything was offered on a plate, when really it took four years to get to that place.
The ubiquitous ‘They’ in dance:
For a long time there has been this idea of ‘they’ think; ‘they’ are very smart; ‘they’ see all the work around Europe; ‘they’ know what works; ‘they’ know what audiences like; ‘they’ know what dancers like; ‘they’ know what’s critically important and ‘they’ think this. So I’m actively trying to dismantle this myth that ‘they’ even exists. It’s all subjective and everyone’s having a different experience.
I’m not always in control of the basis on which their expectation is built.
I like what I make but I know it sits in between lots of ‘camps’ which are a lot more solid for people … I feel like it’s quite often that I fall short in most expectations, a bit like a jack of all trades, and then other times I like this murky in-between place where it’s even maybe awkward.
I think the benefits are it makes me understand the context in which I need to make, what are the optimum conditions. It asks me to be more rigorous with how my ideas are embedded in the work.
When is an opportunity really an opportunity? When is your inclusion simply acting as currency for an organisation? There is so much to be unpicked about opportunity giving. My friend Charlie Morrissey reminded me that ‘it’s up to me to decide whether it’s an opportunity or not, you can’t offer an opportunity’. You decide whether it’s an opportunity based on what your own pathway is and what your interests are.
I keep coming back to the distinction between what I want and being wanted. I realise I took so many jobs because people wanted me to do it.
I have this idea that we need to have a thick skin and a thin skin. Thin enough to respond to the world and creatively make a statement or a question with a work; but a thick enough skin to withstand the opinions of others that you don’t necessarily even ask for. I now take more care when I’m at my most porous.
Reading about other artists’ process and looking sideways to the visual arts starves the Gremlin. I cherish hearing how another artist got to this piece, not necessarily the aesthetic or the work itself, but what the process was. Often as part as result that, identifying with other people’s doubts, you’re able to understand that your fear is in a big network of other people’s fears that is there for everyone.