’And then I was looking at the colour blue because I had the blues’

On the second weekend of the season opening, the piece ‘Navy Blue’ by internationally acclaimed choreographer Oona Doherty will be a guest at Gessnerallee. On the occasion of the first performances of the work in Switzerland, Oona Doherty and dramaturge Isabel Gatzke met for a chat before the summer to talk about the process of creating the work and Oona Doherty's choreographic practice.

Isabel Gatzke: How does one make a piece about class relations? It seems like it is something that is often attributed to your work.

You can kind of only just make a show about your own experiences and then maybe it's in it. ‘Hope Hunt’ was my first piece and it was about a lad in Belfast, but actually it's the same situation in the outskirts of Paris, or somewhere in Germany or Italy. It was actually more about youth and masculinity. But I guess there is a question of class in that and then other people made ‘Hope Hunt’ about working class. And I'm from Belfast. So, I think that's sellable to other countries – if you think I’m from Belfast and working class, which I'm not – but everyone needs to make a living. And then when you bring a show like that from home to a really rich town in Germany, then it's seen as Belfast working class. I think I used to get a bit stressed out about it, but now I don't – let them make up their own narrative.

But maybe just one more thing to add about class: I think I got confused when I was younger because my Mommy and Daddy were born very working class and that's the way they behave. And so you presume you're the same class as your parents. But my Mommy wouldn't be working class anymore. She worked really hard and is upper middle class now. And then I went to dance school in London and I was the Irish one and maybe they assumed that I was working class. And I don't think I ever was, I was middle class and now I've been dancing for so long – maybe I'm still middle class or it feels even fancier. I don't have loads of money, but this job now…  and going to all these fancy places.

‘Hope Hunt’ is a solo and for ‘Navy Blue’ you worked with up to 12 dancers. How did you approach this shift in the choreographic process?

Well, twelve came about when the funding was coming to me to make a new show. I got the ‘Big Pulse Dance Alliance’ funding which gave me 38’000 Euros of co-production money. I didn't really believe it, especially coming from Northern Ireland where the arts have just been destroyed funding wise. They asked me how many dancers I wanted so I went for twelve and thought they were like going to say ‘fuck off’ – but then they wrote down twelve in their books. 

And then you thought: ‘Oh shit’?

Well, I actually wasn't ‘Oh shit’ until the first day of having the twelve of them in the rehearsal. After all those auditions I met them for the first time together on our first day of rehearsals in a studio in Chaillot, which is a really fancy theatre in the middle of Paris. You look out of the window and it's the Eiffel Tower, bourgeois as fuck. I went down to this shitty studio that they have there, with no windows but with twelve top of the top - creme de la creme dancers. Only then did I realise, when I said: ‘I've made a ballet section’ and I looked at them thinking: they have fucking done more ballet than I've ever done. So basically I had a nervous breakdown. I cried while teaching them. They didn't know me well enough then to say anything. So, God love them for it, they just kept dancing. And I kept turning to Gabrielle, the producer, being like: turn it off, stop it. I'm not doing it – and then I just went in the next day and I said: Sorry guys, I had a breakdown. Now I'm ready to start. And then it was good.

In the piece ‘Navy Blue’ your dancers all wear the same uniform blue suits, reminiscent of workers' clothing. At the same time the colour blue appears in the title and in several other moments throughout the performance. What is your relationship to the costume and the colour?

I was sent to Marseille to meet (LA)HORDE, the national ballet of Marseille. I did a three-day workshop with them and I was really intimidated by the institution and by the group. The dancers were great, but I had been on tour nonstop for about four years on my own, no boyfriend, no everyday life, I  even missed vacuuming. So, I think I was quite lonely and depressed and then intimidated by the situation and… I was just very lonely. When I was flying home from Marseille, I went to a thrift market and there were these cheap navy-blue workers suits hanging up. So, I bought one because it was trendy at the time that people were wearing this kind of “work-core”. And I got back onto the flight with my MacBook Pro and my work-core jacket on, feeling like a dick, so empty.

Then it was the very beginning of 2020 and the lockdown happened and I started writing this idea for a Tarantino-style murder ballet. And I had this jacket on me and I spoke to Ruth Little, she's the dramaturg for Akram Khan, and I told her the idea was me with a gun playing Tarantino in the audience shooting at people, everybody carrying bags of blood, trying to make it very cinematic, which is completely the most incorrect way to try and show violence. It's different in a film, but nobody wants to see that on stage. And Ruth said to me: ‘if you have the blues, go back to that jacket and find out how that blue was made.’

And what did you find out about it?

It used to be like this: they dip the fabric in milk, and then they hang it in the air and the oxygen makes it blue. And people were poisoned making it. And then I was looking at the colour blue because I had the blues. The colour was cheap at the beginning and then through the silk trade the dark blue became really expensive. And then it became the colour of the navy and the army and it just had a history of violence, which suited my depression, like the world is fucked. And all this is happening at the same time as becoming pregnant and being offered your biggest commission opportunity yet. So, it all just got a bit mixed up in me.

These uniform blue suits allow the audience to perceive the dancers as a group in the piece, perhaps even as a unit. At the same time, one can easily keep getting stuck on single dancers and their strong individual expression. How did you navigate this relationship between individual and unison moments? 

I wanted to try and make a community. And for that you need a range of different people in it. Originally I wanted an old man, the youngest kid that we could get on stage and all in between. But since I work in dance, if I do an audition, there’s a type of person who shows up: really good dancers, not a mixed bag of people. So even though there are people who write that they are very different, actually, in my eyes, they're quite similar. And the individualism in the movement and all – that's just because of how good they are. 

We did go through that one week during rehearsals where we were saying: Everyone be the same! Let’s go clean it. There is something very satisfying about it as an outside eye or a choreographer and the dancers are able to do it. But I think when you do it really set and in unison, then you lose the people. So that was a decision that we made together with the dancers – to get it so clean that then, when we perform it unclean and it's a choice for us on the inside, you see the people rather than my choreography. But then I've had comments after it played, like you weren't clean enough, or you weren't messy enough and that it never really landed. It's just slightly in between. But I think it really brings up what people desire when they go to see a dance show.

‘Navy Blue’ premiered in 2022 and has been touring internationally ever since. When was the last time you saw it and how has your relationship to the work changed? 

I mean, I don't know if I can fully answer that properly, because I normally don't go on tour with the work. Because I’m a mum. I’m a single mum. So it's been a long time since I saw ‘Navy Blue’. We did a show close to Paris recently, I think I went to that one. The final solo in ‘Navy Blue’ is different every two nights. It's always a different person doing it. Then all the solos in part three, I rotated them too. So the show is different every night. Because they've been on tour for two years now, they must be sick of it. So, they need a little bit of: oh, fuck, where am I now? So I just did that. I go when my rehearsal director isn’t free. 

And how was it for you seeing it then again, after all this time?

It's weird. Some nights I love it, some nights I don’t. And I love it just because I think fuck, they're amazing, these dancers are so freaking amazing. I'm very, very grateful to have met them. I feel quite honoured that they'd be dancing with my name associated with them, they're just so brilliant. But sometimes I feel really sad because when my new show came in my head, I just wanted to work with my ‘Navy’-dancers again. But I was kind of pushed into not doing it because the agent, the producer and administrator, those people also need a salary. And if the tour stops, they don't get a salary. It’s a company survival thing. So, every time I see it, I feel different things, you know.

And also going into the next show, I feel a bit like a hypocrite to write a speech like that in ‘Navy Blue’ and then make another show. 

The speech you just mentioned specifically addresses the working and production conditions for artists, counting these numbers and costs and allowing the audience a glimpse into that part of the world. At the same time, you've connected it so gracefully to bigger questions regarding the meaning art can have or produce. With this in mind, what would you actually wish for you and for your choreographic work and your dancers together for the future? What would be conditions in which you would like to work?

I would love to have a space, my own studio that is secure and that I would always have a key for. It would mean I could bring the kid to school, go to work and then collect the kid from school and maybe one night I could get a babysitter at eight when she goes to sleep and I could just go there and have a practice, just go and have a dance. I haven't danced in the three years since she's been born.

The sound in ‘Navy Blue’ leaves a strong impression: Sergei Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, a dark soundscape by Jamie xx and your voice. You blend distinctly different elements, merging contemporary pop culture with a classical piece from the early 20th century. What connection do you see between these two worlds?

I knew it was Rachmaninoff from the start, that was the birth of it. In the lockdown just before I woke up pregnant, my old ballet school that teaches kids ballet was shut down and I could get the key to the place because it was just me on my own. I went to the studio every day and what I naturally just kept doing was ballet. Maybe because I was in my old ballet school in my own hometown, I was regressing a bit. I thought if I could dance anything I wanted to, and I knew nobody was going to look at me, I would practise my ballet. I started to set a dance routine aside a part of the day just to do it every day as fitness because going into the studio and having an Eureka-improvisation was not always going to happen. And I was listening to Maria Callas and I landed on Rachmaninoff. 

The second half of the work was inspired by Hildur Guðnadóttir, the composer from Iceland who made The Joker and Chernobyl. That was the sound of dread. I asked her to do it but Hildur just said no to me, I guess she has lots of big movie deals and projects.  

But since I knew Jamie xx, I thought, you know what, I'll ask him, because he might say yes. And loads of people will come to my show if Jamie xx agrees to put his name to it. But I also thought Jamie's music is innately joyful. He doesn’t make sad dread music, his music is full of hope and joy. So originally, that's why I didn't think he was the right person. But then he said, okay, I'll do it. And what Jamie really worked loads on was the duet with my voice and I think I could not be happier with the music that he made for the speech. I think it's fucking wonderful.

And to Bush Moukarzel who I wrote the speech with I said: you're going to have to find hope at the end of it, because I don't have it. And he helped me find hope in it. And I said the same to Jamie. And the hope in the music that Jamie did is the whole brilliance of the show. The show is nothing without that phrase of music at the end.

That's beautiful how you’re saying that you needed your collaborators to give you something that you couldn’t give yourself at this point.

Totally. So Jamie did that music at the end, which is… it's love. He brought love back into the room and Bush wrote: there's nothing else to do but love one another and die. That and Jamie's music are the two strongest heart punches. The dancers as well, they are brilliant. The only thing I would love to change about the music is the fact that Jamie and I were not in the room together during the process. That's another thing if you ask me about the future of my dancing: a key to the studio and to afford to have the musicians there too, everyone in the room.