WHEEL ME OUT - Matthias Sperling

Matthias Sperling throws himself into Riff, his solo performance

Matthias recently performed his London premiere of solo piece, Riff. Here he sets the record straight about contemporary dance

Interview by Victoria Ford

Contemporary dance is related to modern dance but it isn't the same. Can you explain the difference? Contemporary dance is hard to pin down because it covers so many different kinds of work, but basically modern dance, like modern art, is a bit dated and contemporary dance seeks to be something of this present time.

Now choreographers work with other art forms. Often you'll have elements like text in a performance and collaborations with visual artists, working with music and sound in a different way. Sometimes it can turn into something more like performance art rather than conventional modern dance.

If it can be all these things then how do you define it? Are there rules? I think the rules are getting broader and broader. I recently went to an experimental dance festival which happens in Nottingham every year, called Nottdance. One of the shows was a Spanish artist called Juan Dominguez.

All he does is pick up little cue cards that have text printed on them and places them in front of a video camera. The camera has a live relay to a projection on a screen and a story develops on the cue cards, so the only movement is him picking up these cards. And I'm convinced that this is a dance piece. He's a dance artist who makes work that comes from his background and he's very concerned with the body.

So the definition of contemporary dance can be very broad, and audiences are becoming more at ease with the scope.

Do you think knowledge of dance practice is needed to appreciate it? I think that with a good piece of work you don't need any preparation for it. Often the most experimental work turns out to be the most easily accessible because it's so human.

For example, when someone is on stage and starts speaking to the audience they become human, they're not just porcelain dolls in the way that they might be with ballet or modern dance.

But how can speaking be dance? Well, one way to approach dance is thinking about the body, and that category is completely unlimited. Everything we can experience and everything we do is done by the body. Framed that way, anything and everything can be dance.

Is this definition of dance more about art than pattern or technique? Definitely. In the last few decades there's been a movement towards work that contains engaging ideas rather than complex patterns or displays of virtuosic technique.

What place does technique have then? That is a huge question that I'm really concerned with at the moment and I don't have a definitive answer. I feel like the most artistically exciting work right now doesn't focus on technique but I'm still pushing to find a place for technique and movement.

I think that when someone is performing you can see there's a whole history of training in their body, even if they're not demonstrating all of it. And if you can see this is missing, it doesn't work as well for me.

In your current solo work, Riff, you've sampled from three works of dance. How did you choose them? The first extract is from a dance film by international star William Forsythe. The second is by a well-established, UK-based choreographer called Shobana Jeyasingh who works in a combination of classical Indian and contemporary western dance. The third choreographer is Laila Diallo, she's a good friend of mine and her work is not as well known yet.

I chose them because they represent a range of work that I feel a connection to, but they're also extremely different. So that serves the purpose of making me think about how I can bring them together into a more coherent working practice.

It's important for the three samples to be visually distinct from one another so the audience can see the flips from one to the next - although I don't actually flip in the performance!

Moments captured from Riff

Where did you get the idea for 'sampling'? I was coming out of a long period as a dancer in other people's work and I was really steeped in other people's physicality. I wanted to begin formulating an individual voice so I explored this not by trying to make any unique material but by manipulating existing material to make a new work - in a similar way that a DJ or sound artist would.

In the beginning of the piece I do very simple cutting and pasting, taking parts of existing material and cutting it together in big chunks, and then smaller chunks, and then very fine individual movement chunks. Then I start to cut it up into body parts, so I have a little section where I take the top half of the move from one part and the bottom part from another and sew it together. As the piece develops, all the samples dissolve into tiny bits and I riff on them.

Are you the first person to do this? No, but I don't know that anyone has taken quite the same approach and done it as physically as I have.

How can people who don't know about contemporary dance feel confident understanding it? Maybe I'm a bit naive because I've been doing it for a long time but I like to imagine that if a work is really good it shouldn't make you feel like someone is doing something really strange that you have no connection to. It shouldn't shut you out, it should put you at ease.

What do you think about the message relayed through the movie Footloose? What would happen if we outlawed dance? (Laughs) Well actually I wonder about this in places like Iran and I find it hard to comprehend that there are places in the world where dance is outlawed. And we all need to call on Kevin Bacon to sort it out. WMO

Watch an excerpt from Riff and see what else Matthias is up to

www.matthias-sperling.com