"A choreographer's job is to communicate," says Mark Bruce, whose company are currently communicating his dark vision to an ear-shattering rock soundtrack in Sea Of Bones.
Now 39 and based in Frome, Somerset, UK, Bruce has long ploughed his own furrow, taking his inspiration from grinding blues rock and apocalyptic cinema as much as from the classical myths and legends which are explored in Sea of Bones. "I don't think what I do is really aimed at dance audiences," said Bruce, as he prepared with his seven strong company for a performance of Bones in Tewkesbury - which with its blood spattered history seems an appropriate venue for a show which opens with dancers bearing severed heads and majors in gothic imagery.
"Everyone crosses over nowadays, you have to," added Bruce, who lists David Lynch, Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Aliens and the filmmaker's favourite graphic novelist Frank Miller as influences on his work. "I see making work as an ongoing process and I always have bits of projects in my mind but I can't predict how they will evolve. I don't think I'm a pessimist - it's dark but not pessimistic, and people turn away from the darker things before they look at them, I just don't avoid it and I don't contrive an end result."
"I do think I see things that way though," he says of a range of visual and musical sources and soundtracks with a palette of blood red, the deepest blues and stygian black. "They've all informed how I do what I do, and I think I've been hugely influenced by movies and music all through my life, it's bound to be part of my way of communicating."
Orpheus' Lyre is just one prop in the stunningly designed Sea Of Bones, much of the grotesque and unsettling look of which is down to Bruce's artist mother Marian, whose visual influence on his work is strong and continuing. He even chooses his dancers for their striking appearance - although, have no doubt, all are highly skilled terpsichoreans careering, crawling, spinning, fighting and flinging themselves through Bruce's obsessively imagined dreamlike otherworld.
"It draws from a lot of sources, I think one of the main things is the linking of those archetypes, in reality we are still the same creatures who made those myths and legends, we are a product of our history," Bruce says. "It's not important to follow the individual narratives it's more important to be able to feel things than to make perfect linear sense."
Article comments