The Paris Opera Ballet dancers stood waiting for their cue as film played above them. Onscreen, a man swirled and dipped, as white fabric eddied dizzyingly around his body. Then the fabric disappeared, lights flickered and he walked off the screen and into the rehearsal space at the Opéra Bastille, a camerawoman filming him as he joined the dancers onstage, now moving sharply to a propulsive rhythm.
“Does everyone know where they are?” Morgann Runacre-Temple called out, as her co-choreographer Jessica Wright counted out the music in a mix of French and English.
It can be hard to know where you are or what you are watching in a work by Wright, 42, and Runacre-Temple, 43, who were rehearsing “Arena,” their new piece for the Paris Opera Ballet, which opened on March 11 alongside a new work by Marcos Morau, on a double bill called “Empreintes,” or “Impressions.”
Deploying real-time video, prerecorded footage and live performance, the two women, known collectively as Jess and Morgs, are the creators of weird and wonderful works that blur the boundaries between live performance and digital. “You have to look twice to see who’s real,” wrote Zoe Anderson in The Independent of their ballet “Hotel,” created for Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2022.
“Film is so intimate and visceral, and can give an audience access to these thoughts and ideas that might be in a dancer’s mind,” Wright said in a video interview a week or so before the premiere of “Arena.” I find that thrilling.”
The pair first made a name for themselves in their native Britain as the creators of witty, surreally ingenious dance films. In 2022, they garnered mainstream attention with their clever, sharp take on “Coppelia” for Scottish Ballet, a snappily updated version of the story that depicted the toymaker Dr. Coppelius as an Elon Musk-like inventor using AI to transform Coppelia — here an avatar rather than a doll — into a perfect human.
After “Coppelia,” the Paris Opera was quickest off the mark in giving Jess and Morgs their first major international commission — a big-league prospect that hadn’t crossed their minds.
“We were very surprised,” Runacre-Temple said. “We are still surprised!”
José Martinez, the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, said he had been impressed by “Curing Albrecht,” a short film Jess and Morgs made for English National Ballet in 2016 as a curtain-raiser to Akram Khan’s “Giselle.”
“It’s a real play between film and dance, in an amazing setting of an old swimming pool, with a very clever take on the original ballet,” Martinez said in a phone interview. “It had such highly cinematic imagery but kept choreography at the forefront.”
Martinez said he didn’t ask Runacre-Temple and Wright to use film when he invited them to create a work for the Opera in early 2024. “I left it very open,” he said. “What’s interesting is for them to have a dialogue with the dancers and the house.”
Pairing film and dance onstage isn’t new; both Runacre-Temple and Wright mentioned the influence of Hans Van Manen’s 1979 “Live,” which juxtaposes a dancer and her real-time filmed image, and many choreographers — Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, William Forsythe and Benjamin Millepied among them — have used film onstage to pointed effect.
But creatively experimental use of film remains relatively rare in dance, unlike on theater and opera stages, where video projection and the intersection of virtual and live representation is common.
“Ballet companies did put things onscreen, but it was always decorative, or a film of a stage production,” said Christopher Hampson, the director of Scottish Ballet, who first commissioned Jess and Morgs to create “Tremble” in 2019. “What stuck out with them was what wonderful disrupters they were to this usual way of working.”
Runacre-Temple and Wright met as teenagers in 2000 at the Central School of Ballet in London, and promptly became best friends. But they didn’t start working together until 2005, when both were unemployed graduates, waiting for a bus on a hot summer’s night.
“It was very random, intuitive and playful,” said Wright, who was the voluble foil to Runacre-Temple’s thoughtful quietness in the interview. “One of us had a Nokia, one of the better camera phones at the time, and we started playing with scale.” They began making little sketches, Runacre-Temple said. “Jess would say, what if you stood there, and my finger seemed to prod you and you fell that way? We were unemployed, with a long summer ahead, and we started taking it very seriously.”
After a friend suggested they enter a short film competition, “we were suddenly crunching carrots into computers for sound effects,” Wright said. Their film, “Out of Hand,” won a prize, and over the next few years, as both women danced and worked in different places, they continued to meet and collaborate on short films. (Wright danced mostly with Company Wayne McGregor, Runacre-Temple with a variety of dance-makers before turning to choreography.)
A turning point, Runacre-Temple said, was meeting the filmmaker Margaret Williams, who taught them that the camera could be used to guide the viewer’s eye, not simply as a theatrical framing device.
“In live dance, it’s a wide shot all the time,” Wright said. “We became interested in edits, creating very precisely achieved illusions, seeing how you can make something physically impossible appear possible.”
Several films and numerous festival prizes later, they began a collaboration with English National Ballet, creating “The Last Resort,” (2016), “Curing Albrecht” (2016) and “Tremble” (2019), which was described in The Guardian as involving “frenetically dancing waiters, red jelly and a thrillerish edge.”
For “Albrecht,” they worked with a large cast and a professional cinematographer for the first time, and it was a breakthrough for them, Runacre-Temple said, both in terms of exposure and creative growth. “We could think about the counterpoint between camera and body, the relationship between space and movement.”
In “Tremble,” Wright added, they began to explore the direct relationships between the performer and the camera, and the idea of a transformation of identity. Our thought, she said, was: “How can the camera instigate the action and affect the dancer?”
They began to use the camera differently, Runacre-Temple said, with Busby Berkeley-like overhead shots, changing perspectives and sudden cuts — camerawork as choreography.
Their growing film experience fed into “Coppelia,” in which they used live cameras for the first time onstage, with a dancer as cameraman. The work received rapturous reviews: “A successful stride into ballet’s future,” Lyndsey Winship wrote in The Guardian.
Runacre-Temple said the starting point for “Arena,” which is set to a commissioned score by Mikael Karlsson and has décor by Sami Fendall (collaborators from “Coppelia”), was the relationship between the onstage camera and the dancer.
“We had been mostly working with narrative and we wanted to approach this in a more movement-led and experimental way and not anchor ourselves in a concrete time and place,” she said
Nonetheless, some themes emerged.
“Audition, competition, the idea that one person would be selected and that could signify celebrity, fame, riches, status,” was the way the dancer Loup Marcault-Derouard described “Arena.” He was cast as Number 81, the winner of an unspecified competition. (In responding to a question about whether the creators had been influenced by the hypercompetitive Paris Opera environment, Runacre-Temple replied that it was more a matter of creating a context in which the Paris dancers’ technical virtuosity could be displayed.)
“Arena,” Marcault-Derouard said, was challenging on many levels. “There are classical as well as contemporary elements, all to very quick precise music. You also need to be emotionally present, precise with your gaze, the angles of your body, because the camera is showing you up close. But you are also dancing for a public who can choose whether to look at you onstage or onscreen. It’s a lot to think about!”
Caroline Osmont, Number 81 in an alternate cast, said that the choreographers’ rehearsal method felt strange at first. “They each work separately with a group,” she said, “then cross over and bring their own touch. And they each have a choreographic identity; Morgann is more grounded, more contemporary, Jess more balletic. But it comes together in rapid, explosive, energetic movement.”
“There is a lot of speed in the work, and it’s almost overwhelming in the solo for 81,” she added. “Sometimes I feel I am in the ‘Hunger Games’!”
Two cameras, manipulated by a dancer and a camerawoman are explicitly present, Wright said. “It’s not a documentary, the camera’s eye is not invisible,” she said. “The dancers are performing for the camera, seeing representations of themselves; we watch them watching themselves.”
The echo chamber of representation is one we are all familiar with in our daily lives, she said. “Anyone can be an influencer, and we are all self-publishing and documenting ourselves continuously.”
She added that their work had always addressed ideas about versions of the self. “Who, what is the real self? When, to whom, are we visible?” she said. “Images,” she added, “take on a life of their own that you can’t always control.”
Sometimes there is no screen image in “Arena,” Runacre-Temple added. “We are always asking ourselves why we are using a camera in this or that moment,” she said. The reason must be that it will show the audience something they can’t otherwise see.”
The post Looking Twice to See Who’s Real: A Play Between Dance and Film appeared first on New York Times.
