Guest Post: Helen Rickerby & “JAAM 28 Dance Dance Dance”
I have mentioned JAAM 28 Dance Dance Dance briefly on two occasions recently, here and here. Today I am delighted to have one of JAAM 28’s two editors (and fellow Tuesday Poem Blog poet), Helen Rickerby, as my guest on “… Anything, Really” to discuss the evolution of Dance Dance Dance.
Welcome Helen!
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The idea for JAAM 28: dance dance dance came from my co-editor, Clare Needham. Among many other things, Clare has worked as a dance producer. The idea came when she was producing a show Sleep/Wake, itself a blend of dance, theatre and science. She says, ‘Many dancers I know also write, or paint, or compose music. Many of the dance shows I’ve worked on blend different genres and disciplines to create new and exciting art. I was thinking about how exciting it would be to get writers thinking about dance and dancers thinking about writing, then see what happened.’
Clare and I took over the management of JAAM a few years ago (after being involved in JAAM since its beginnings back in 1995), and had jointly edited JAAM 24 – Clare selected the prose and I chose the poetry. We decided to take a similar approach with this issue.
When Clare first mentioned the idea to me, I thought it sounded exciting – I enjoy genre-bending and experimentation – but I certainly didn’t have the same relationship to dance as Clare did. I confess the few performances of modern dance I’ve been to have sometimes left me cold – it seemed very abstract. What sold me on the idea at first was dance as a metaphor for life and living, which, curiously, is how dance is often used in the writing that ended up in JAAM 28.
But as we kept on talking about it, I made more and more connections between literature and dance – especially poetry. Like dance, poetry can be formal, with set steps, or free-form. But even a free-form dance or poem is made up of steps and rhythms – even if uneven. The way words are placed on a page is like a dance, and dance is such a powerful metaphor.
As the submissions came in (flooded really, we had around 450 individual pieces submitted by about 170 people) I was fascinated by the diversity of work related to one topic, and excited to see the connections they made with each other.
We were delighted at how contributors interpreted the theme laterally as well as literally. Some work is about dance or features dance – such as the poem below, ‘Siegfried’ by Hera Bird, which is one of a series of poems inspired by the ballet Swan Lake. Other work dances on the page, or sets up dance rhythms. In many pieces dance is metaphorical – people dancing gingerly in their relationships with other people, or dancing with death, for example.
We didn’t get as many non-fiction submissions as we hoped, so we decided to fill that space with a few mini interviews with dancer/writer/choreographers Michele Powles, Linda Ashley, Lyne Pringle and Sam Trubridge. They are just a quick turn around the floor, rather than being long and in-depth, but we get some lovely insights into the place of dancing and writing in the interviewees lives, and how those different art forms interact.
The more visual art includes artefacts – drawings and poems – from dance projects, and a series of photographs that capture the vibrancy and movement of dance in South America. We’ve used one of those photos – a swirling image of a night parade in Bolivia – on the cover, which I think is really striking.
In the end, reading through the finished issue, I’m amazed and delighted at the variety and the vibrancy. It’s definitely worth a read.
— Helen Rickerby
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Siegfried
Thigh white birds stitch themselves
muscle deep into the night.
Plaster trees crack themselves open, hollow as globes.
Their roots split the varnished forest floor.
They are growing.
Their leaves are cut from paper but they still fall
black into my mouth, narrowed as eyes.
I was afraid the night
my mother gave me a weapon
and told me to find a wife.
I held my crossbow like a compass.
in the dark throat of the woods.
(c) Hera Bird
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About the Editors:
Helen Rickerby is the author of two collections of poetry: Abstract Internal Furniture (Headworx, 2001) and My Iron Spine (Headworx, 2008), and recently had a sequence of poems, Heading North, published in a hand-bound edition by Kilmog Press. As well as being co-managing editor of JAAM literary magazine, she runs Seraph Press, a boutique poetry publisher. She lives in Wellington, in a cliff-top tower, and works as a web editor.
Clare Needham is a writer, policy analyst and former lawyer. She has worked as in-house legal counsel at Penguin Books UK, production manager for the stage show spectacular Maui: One Man Against the Gods, and a theatre and dance producer.