Theo Clinkard by Chris Nash
“Theo had described this piece as having a pastoral feel to it, so I wanted a ‘natural’ lighting scheme. We shot it in the Main Hall, with long sheets of white material slung below the lighting rig, diffusing the light from the flash units.”
Chris Nash
“Over the last 10 years, Greenwich Dance have been an incredibly supportive ‘force of nurture’ for my dance making adventures.
The brilliant team helped me make my first tentative steps into dance making by offering me space, presenting my early works at the Borough Hall and gently guiding me through the running of my projects. This picture by the excellent Chris Nash is from 2017, taken during the very first week of the creation period for our company work; ’This Bright Field’. It was on this day that these 12 wonderful dancers quite literally met each other for the very first time- primarily through the experience of touch and moving together. Happy Birthday and thank you Greenwich Dance!”
Theo Clinkard
Rachel Krische by Chris Nash
“Rachel developed this piece from a script by Deborah Hay and it gave me an appropriate opportunity to try out some ideas that I had been thinking about for a while. I set the camera on a tripod and programmed it to take an exposure every 5 seconds for a duration of around 5 minutes and then left the main hall while Rachel performed. I then superimposed a dozen or so of those shots into one frame, creating a kind of trail of Rachels over the stage.”
Chris Nash
“Such a huge part of my professional, daily, dancing life was lived within The Borough Hall. So many important (to me) projects were researched and improvised and crafted and scored and refined and performed and watched within those wooden walls. So many mornings of taking and teaching class – that daily ritual of attending to and maintaining and developing the foundation of all our practice. But more than anything, it was the people – the community I always felt that I belonged to, because GDA gathered us together with such generosity and warmth and support, both emotional as well as physical.
I remember creating this image with Chris like we did it yesterday, up on the actual ‘stage’. Chris up a massive ladder. We stuck to the choreographic practice ‘rules’ that Deborah Hay (the choreographer) stipulated – to always practice this work whole, in-one-go, without stopping – never any section or moment in isolation. So that’s what we did. I pressed the metaphorical bodily ‘go’ button and just ran the piece and Chris just fired away. ‘Let’s see what we get’ was our mutual approach – born out of deep mutual trust. Chris’s original idea, of layering each shot on top of each other, shifted to him working his usual magic in an alternative way – he selected and so choreographed himself the sequence of shots that make up what you are seeing now in this single image.
Friendship, creative respect and being-in-relationship was at the heart of the collaboration that created this image. And this was long nourished over the years by having a place – to gather and work and trial and error and laugh and support – that sustained us, all of us … together.”
Rachel Krische
