Dance and nature unite in The Alnwick Garden
Couple's mission to smooth the way for county's young talent
A bonus for anyone visiting The Alnwick Garden later this month, and a very good reason for choosing to go on that day, is a special performance that has been long in the making.
This becomes clear while chatting to Lily Horgan and Charlie Dunne at nearby Alnwick Playhouse where they are artists-in-residence.
Dancers by training, they take a broad view of what dance can be and do, and they certainly don’t set it apart from other art forms or even other aspects of daily life.
That’s why, in the lead up to their performance in front of The Alnwick Garden’s famous fountain, they have worked closely with a running club, a camera club, a craft club and similar groups across Northumberland.
They set up Meta4 Dance in 2018 and are on a mission to open people’s eyes to contemporary dance and create opportunities for young people, or indeed anyone, keen to follow in their footsteps.
Perhaps because they’re still young themselves, they understand the obstacles to achievement that exist in a rural area.
“They can be all sorts of things,” says Charlie. “They can be financial or to do with accessibility needs or transport.
“People who haven’t grown up in that situation might say, ‘Well, you could get a bus’. That’s true, but maybe there’s only one bus and it might take an hour and a half to get where you want to go.
“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, I’ll hop on the Tube’ like they do in London. Living there was brilliant and we used to go and see all sorts of stuff, but that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t have access to all that.”
Lily’s from the Northumberland village of Felton, Charlie from Shropshire, but when they met at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, they realised they had much in common, having been brought up in the countryside and come late to contemporary dance.
“I didn’t know about contemporary dance until I was 17,” recalls Lily.
“I went to dance school in Alnwick which had ballet, tap, modern jazz and all that sort of thing, but I’d never seen a contemporary dance show. No-one was telling me about that.”
Charlie chips in: “That’s not to say the teachers we had were keeping things from us.
“We had fantastic teachers but they didn’t specialise in contemporary dance and there weren’t companies coming to do that stuff.”
After graduating, the pair stayed in London for a bit, revelling in the chance to see dance and theatre shows, but they soon felt an urge to give back to the sort of communities they had come from.
“That’s why we’re here,” says Lily.
“We want the younger generation to have their eyes opened to opportunities that exist in the creative industries. We didn’t really have that when we were growing up, so that’s what drives us.”
They chose to settle in Northumberland, in the coastal village where they now live with their young son, because it’s Lily’s home county and Charlie has become one of its most passionate advocates.
“I’ve been here for five years and I love it. It’s where my family is now and I want to make sure artists from elsewhere come here to do stuff so the young people we work with can go and see it.”
But they have also been supported in their ambitions by Dance City, in Newcastle, and Alnwick Playhouse.
The Covid pandemic was a blow but they had some Arts Council money which they used to livestream dance performances from locations including the top of Newcastle Castle and a field at Guyzance.
Recalls Lily: “That period also gave us time to hone what we wanted to do and it catapulted us into the growth of the last four years where we’ve been getting out into various communities.”
They’ve worked with children and people with learning disabilities, launched a podcast and, in striving to dispel any perception of stuffiness, created a show called Jumpers for Goalposts which toured the region.
The idea for an ambitious project about man’s relationship with nature was conceived about three years ago. It was to involve workshops, exhibitions and screenings and culminate in the performance we’ll see at The Alnwick Garden.
A funding application was submitted to Arts Council England… and then submitted again and again.
Their idea was sound, they were told, but there just wasn’t enough money to go round. “It was quite dispiriting,” admits Charlie. “We got to the point where we were saying, ‘Do we keep going with this?’ We’d come so far.”
They were in Ireland when another email arrived from the Arts Council. They waited until they got home before opening it and finally got the news they’d hoped for.
“We’d already started planning a different project,” says Charlie.
Lily remembers the excitement. “To put it in perspective, the first time we submitted our application I wasn’t pregnant. The last time we submitted it, we had a nine-month-old child.”
With the green light, the Desire Lines project was set in motion. Overtures were made to all sorts of groups.
Charlie explains how he involved running colleagues at Alnwick Harriers, offering warm up sessions informed by his dance training. “They loved it,” says Lily. Charlie, expecting a couple of sceptics, soon found the warm-up room was hardly big enough.
The crafters from Warkworth explained how they knitted ‘twiddle muffs’ – handwarmers with bits inside to fiddle with – to calm dementia sufferers and agreed to make some for Met4 Dance to offer at performances.
Participating groups didn’t have to dance, stress Charlie and Lily. The aims were to make connections, familiarise people with contemporary dance and build a potential audience.
The hour-long Desire Lines performance in The Alnwick Garden will mark the climax of all their efforts and it should be quite something.
A reworking of an earlier piece called Confluence, Lily says: “It’s got some narrative but it’s quite abstract so allows audiences to imagine for themselves.”
It will feature four professional dancers – Lily and Charlie along with Ashling McCann, from Newcastle, and Melissa Heywood, from Edinburgh – plus 30 others from communities across Northumberland.
All will wear costumes designed by Newcastle-based Lucy Minta-Reeves and sound artist Tom White, who has gathered recordings from across rural Northumberland, will be on stage mixing a live soundtrack in response to the dancers.
Producers Rachel Birch and Andy Newcombe, from Newcastle-based Moving Art Management, will be watching with interest and Davey Poremba, from FLY Films UK, will be filming the performance with a view to interesting venues across the country in programming a version of it.
And already Charlie and Lily are planning ahead, using a recent grant from the Northumberland Dance Development Fund to initiate a project about the county’s fishing heritage.
Desire Lines will be performed on Saturday, May 24 at 2pm and can be seen by anyone visiting The Alnwick Garden at that time.