#motionhouse

Motionhouse in Broken, London, April 2016. © Katja Ogrin.

STARCHITECTS: A Mission to the Moon! Birmingham Hippodrome, Friday 3rd February 2023 Motionhouse’s new production is aimed squarely at a family audience, in particular the youngest members of the family.  Five children, portrayed by grown-up performers, are having a sleepover, although sleep is the farthest thing from their fertile little minds.  With tireless energy, these effervescent…

Something to Crow About

Motionhouse: NOBODY Birmingham Hippodrome, Friday 4th February 2022 This latest piece from dance company Motionhouse seeks to externalise the internal.  Our inner voices, represented here by crows, are what keep us apart from others.  Our inner doubts, fears and concerns prevent us from achieving our potential as individuals and as a society.  The show begins with the performers moving like…

Daniel Connor grew up in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. He started dancing at school, then studied the subject at Middlesex University before transferring to The Northern School of Contemporary Dance to undertake his professional training. He graduated from NSCD in 2010 and was awarded its Annual Performance Prize. In 2011, Daniel toured with EarthFall Dance in At Swim Two Boys, and the following year he joined Simon Birch Dance for the creation and tour of Terranium – Dance in a Bubble. He also performed in Willi Dorner's Bodies in Urban Space as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

In 2013, he joined Motionhouse for Scattered's first American tour and for the creation of two new shows. As he prepares for a run of Scattered at The Peacock in London, he tells Adrian Arratoon about his life as a dancer.

The Widow Stanton: Your biog says you started dancing seriously when you were 14. Is that quite old for a dancer? Daniel Connor: I think boys generally tend to start late, especially all the boys in Motionhouse; everybody started at about 14 or 15. Dance was compulsory in my high school from the age of 11 so once a week you had to do a dance class. When I was 14 I could opt to do it for GCSE. I wasn't very academic but wanted to get into college so I knew I would do better in all the physical subjects. I took dance just to top my GCSEs up, really, and in those two years until I was 16 I fell in love with it. Then I did it for A-Level and just continued. Now I go back and teach at the same school.

That must be inspirational for the kids, knowing you started there and are now a pro. I was invited back to my high school last November to be guest of honour at their awards ceremony, which was overwhelming, and really strange to be introduced as a 'success story' almost, because I don't consider myself successful as such; I'm just doing something I really love. But when I think about being 14 doing one dance class a week in that little studio in Ellesmere Port, actually I have come a long way.

What did you do at Middlesex University? I auditioned to get into the conservatoire schools straight after A-Level and didn't get a place in any of them so I went to Middlesex to do dance. At that point I was going to become a dance teacher in secondary schools, like the teacher who taught me. But I'd fallen in love with the Northern School of Contemporary Dance by then. When I was at Middlesex I'd made a group of friends and we all loved NSCD. We all auditioned for it while we were at Middlesex and all managed to get a place, which was great. We all moved to Leeds and studied together, and we're still best friends now.

How did you know what style of dance you wanted to do? I don't think I did, at that point. I just liked being really physical but I didn't like 'pretty' dance. I don't have amazing flexibility but I do have strength; I liked to play football and sports and do PE at school, and this was another chance for me to be physical. It was only in my second year of training that I thought I could actually do it as a job and get paid for it. That's when I thought I needed to push it. At first, I was sort of on treadmill, meeting friends, dancing in the studio and it was only when it was coming to the end I had to decide whether I wanted to be a teacher or performer; did teachers who had performing experience make better teachers? That was all going through my head. 

I'm really good friends with my high-school dance teacher and she said: “Dan, if you can, go and perform; you can teach at any time but performing has a shelf life. So go and do it and if you still want to teach at the end of that then it's always an option.” I did four years at Northern, three on the undergraduate degree then a year with the post-graduate company.

Looking at things you've done, I was struck by Terrarium: Dance in a Bubble. I presumed it was some sort of metaphor, but no, you were dancing in an actual bubble! Yes, that was my first contract after I left Northern. It was bizarre: I thought the same thing as you, that it was an abstract concept but I turned up and there was an actual bubble there [laughs]. We had to build it up every time we were going to perform. It was basically a giant snow globe. It had these huge vents that pumped air in, which was great because it was a duet between me and either a man or a woman and they wore a huge dress. If I put the dress over the vent it just ballooned and covered them so they disappeared; it was part of the choreography. It was a bit like Scattered; the set had a curvature you could play with. 

Speaking of Scattered, what made you want to join Motionhouse? I actually studied Motionhouse at school, and they were my number one company, them and Jasmin Vardimon, DV8; I loved that physical style of dance. I auditioned for Motionhouse when they were looking for two dancers. One of my best friends at Northern and I basically just went to say ‘hi’ and let them know that we were interested in the company. We were really young and thought we wouldn't be what they were looking for. Then in the audition we got down to the last handful. But they said sorry to all the boys because they had offered the roles to two girls. One of my best friends had got one of the parts so I came along to class. Then I found out one of the boys from the company was leaving so I called Kevin [Finnan] and Louise [Richards], the directors, and said, ‘Instead of having another audition, if I come down next week would you give me a private audition?’. They agreed and luckily they offered me the job.

I learned Scattered in the December and we flew to a six-week tour of the US in the January. I premiered in New York City, which was mind-blowing [laughs] – from doing UK gigs to New York, it was massive.

What's Scattered about? It's about water, about our relationship with water. It uses a colour spectrum; it starts at the north pole, which is white, then down into the sea, which is blue, then really green and lush in the jungles, then the desert as you get closer to the equator, then back into green lushness, then water again and the south pole. So it does a full trajectory of the planet.

What's the most challenging thing about the show? If I'm honest, it's doing somebody else's work, not having been part of the creative process when it was made: the show's eight years old and it's still going strong because everybody really loves it, which is great. I watched the show myself when I was a student and I wanted to go on the ramp and slide down and have fun. When you're learning a show there's not much time to get into what the piece is about because the piece didn't come from me, whereas all the other shows came from me and it's in here [taps his chest]. So that was a struggle. Physically, I think the show is a massive hit of stamina. It's 70 minutes hardcore; Motionhouse's trademark is just to go hell for leather – and to go up a 16ft wall, vertically, when your legs have got lactic acid build-up is a nightmare! The boys have a little friendly competition. I've only slipped down the wall once but there are times when you run up it and your legs just don't give you enough power to get up so you slide down and have to run around the back and go up a ladder to the top [laughs]. And everyone's mocking you [laughs]. It's all friendly stuff and it shows how much you have to build up stamina to do the show.

Because Motionhouse has quite a few shows on the go and you take part in them all, how long does it take to get back into the swing of a different one? Or do you have muscle memory about them? The body is an amazing thing. Muscle memory is a thing. Sometimes we come to a piece and put the music on to see what happens. My brain doesn't know what the next move is but my body's somehow doing it. We rehearse so intensely that it never leaves your muscle memory. It takes just one run-through for your brain to catch up, then you only have to sort out maybe two or three little blanks where you couldn't remember a move. Then it's just about rehearsing again. But you don't really spend much time 'remembering', cos it's in there. We're touring eight shows at the moment and there are only eight dancers, and all eight dancers are in all eight shows, so we have to know our stuff; we flit from one show to another.

We just got back from Ireland and we're doing aerial training – not just dancing on the floor but in the air – then tomorrow we're going to do Scattered, so you have to switch your brain, having taken in a lot of new information. 

Is there any water on the stage? Do you get wet when you're performing? None on the stage, no one gets wet, other than sweat. All the company take their clothes off at one point. I didn't understand it and was saying, ‘Why am I taking my top off?’. But Kevin wanted to show that even we're made of water, and everything lives because of water. So we just stand there and you can see how much we're sweating. It's quite a nice image – when you realise why he makes us do it!

Motionhouse do indoor and outdoor shows; how do find that? It's hard to say which one I prefer but I really love our outdoor work because primarily it's for people who don't go to the theatre, or who feel they're excluded from the theatre. My parents, for example, never go to the theatre because they don't feel like they belong in that theatre bubble, and an outdoor show allows them to see something that they would never pay to go and see. Then people realise they do belong and it's for everyone, and hopefully it'll bring more people into the theatre. The reactions are so different. Outdoors, people are so vocal, and in the theatre everyone's quiet then they clap at the end. Outdoors you get, “Oh, my God!” and they're screaming and chatting and it's a completely different world. I kinda prefer it; it's more real, more honest.

What's been the high point of your career? Oof, oh God, that's hard one. I think when Motionhouse performed in Marseille when it was European Capital of Culture. We do a show on JCB diggers. I was new at that point and I didn't understand the scale of the shows. We had the sea as a backdrop, and the show was on the beach. A digger scooped us up out of the sea then put us on the sand in front of the audience. It was like a James Bond moment, like I was on the set of a film. Also, the reason why we were in Ireland is that Aarhus in Denmark is the European Capital of Culture this year, and we're performing at their celebration in September. So we're going to be 75ft up in the air on zip lines and wires doing dance. I have a feeling that that might top the digger dance. I'm excited for it, anyway.

I hope you're not scared of heights? [Laughs] I am extremely scared of flying, but I don't know if that relates to heights because I've not been that high yet. We were only at seven metres when we were training and that was pretty scary but we'll see… hopefully not [laughs].

NB: headline edited to reflect Daniel’s married surname

Picture credits: Sharon Bradford

Daniel appears in Scattered by Motionhouse at London's Peacock Theatre from 26-29 April. For tickets see here

Twitter: @DanielConnor1; @MotionhouseDT

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter