Ismene Brown

Remembering Rosemary Butcher – the choreographer who changed the way I see dance

My ancient Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary of 1849 defines choreia as ‘a dancing, especially with joy’. The word choros has a more technical definition: a round dance, or a dance accompanied with song (hence the word chorus). From whichever word ‘choreographer’ is declared to derive, the British dancemaker Rosemary Butcher, who died last month at 69 after a career barely visible to the public, embodied the first idea in a way that I see with hindsight changed my eyes emphatically in realising the marvellous range of ways to enjoy dance-going.

Choreia: ‘a dancing’ – an act of dancing, a piece of activity, rather than the choros, a dance creation. Choreia: not a joined-up circle of answers in a finished work of art, but something that hasn’t an end product in mind, jazz-like, improvisation, provoking questions uncomplicated by anything else than the pleasure of asking them. There’s no box office tinkle to categorise its worth.

I’ve met endless people who say nervously how they’re wary of contemporary dance because ‘I don’t know anything about it’. They’re thoroughly intimidated by arts-subsidy rich choreographers like Wayne McGregor and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker who habitually write volumes of patronising, cod-intellectual programme notes that are a long way from the old days of contemporary dance when you might say the Peter Jay school of exclusivity ruled (as in, ‘this piece has been written for three people to understand, and you aren’t one of them.’)

Contemporary dance’s theoretical end once had a mulish charm due to the refreshing contrariness of some of its practitioners. I loved some of the American women who invented the 1960s Judson Church movement – those who wanted gracefulness and all that patriarchal crap, they said, could sod off. No to explanation. Twyla Tharp once erected walls around a dancework to stop people seeing it.

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