friend is a dance performance created by Choreographer Gillie Kleiman. Gillie worked with 4 Crawley residents from January-March 2024 in weekly online sessions to create a dance performance.
Andy is a father of 3 children and lives in Crawley. He has lived in Crawley his whole life and works as a Support Worker. He’s only ever danced for fun before now.
Becky – Community Producer for Creative Crawley – chatted to Andy to catch up on his experience of taking part in this project and what it’s been like getting creative with us.
Becky: Thank you so much Andy for joining us for a coffee in Starbucks in Crawley to chat about your experience with us. How did you hear about Creative Crawley?
Andy: Thanks for having me. I first met the Creative Crawley team when I was with the kids, with the boys and bumped into you at Broadfield shops, doing your pop-up to make the little zines and they wanted to have a go. And yeah, I was just down there to get some bread. So that’s where all the magic started. And Max got really talking, didn’t he? And ended up being invited for a podcast later. I’m so glad we bumped into you guys.
Becky: Snowballed from there, hasn’t it?
Andy: Yeah. We’ve been getting involved in everything, such as Creative Playground Come With Us trips and the Crawley Stories podcast.
Becky: Really amazing. Could you tell us about the most recent project you got involved in?
Andy: Okay, so it was called friend and it was a dance project orchestrated by Gillie Kleiman. And so every week we’d get together on Zoom and I think it was six or seven weeks in total. And each week she sent us out a little pack and you’d get all the information, all the things you need to practice for that week. And it got more and more each week until we did a performance. All of us did a performance each for friends and family in our homes.
Becky: That sounds amazing. What motivated you or encouraged you to take part in friend?
Andy: I just kind of like saying yes to adventures and just random opportunities and things. So I was just like, yeah, I’ll give that a go. I thought that maybe afterwards I’ll be able to dance or something.
Becky: What else did you expect to happen by taking part?
Andy: I thought I was just going to get a set routine of choreographed dance moves that we’d just have to copy and then do those in front of people, but it was way more in depth than that. It was a full performance, not just dancing. I learnt how to move about freely and about telling stories, leaning on people, and it was all about connection. And yeah, the karaoke singing, there was a lot more to it than just dancing. Yeah, I learned more about performing and stuff really.
Becky: That’s really incredible. Can you tell us about a specific dance or technique that Gillie taught you?
Andy: Trio A is a dance by Yvonne Rainer, an American Choreographer. It was first performed in 1966, and we copied a video from 1978. I had to learn these facts about it and speak them whilst I performed. It’s one of the most important dances in dance history and one of Gillie’s favorite dances ever as well. And I think the thing was that during the performance, none of the moves were copied twice. So she was doing all these different things. And at first I felt a bit silly trying to copy it because I wasn’t doing very well. But the more I copied it, the more I sort of learned and the more you sort of loosen up. I started loosening up and doing all the moves and it went smoothly in the end.
Becky: It’s brilliant how Gillie made sure the dances you learnt were contextualised as I imagine that made you understand what you were doing with more depth. How do you feel you benefited by taking part in friend?
Andy: I’ve realised that I can perform in front of people, whereas before when I’ve ever had to do, things like this, I’ve got stage fright. I think it helped, even performing in front of Sam (Creative Crawley Head of Learning & Production) whilst he was doing the tech rehearsal. I was really nervous about that. And then I felt a little more comfortable doing it in front of family and stuff. But I dunno, I learned that I could do that. I could get up and even though you feel really vulnerable and stuff, but yeah, I’m just glad I did it.
Becky: Do you think you’ve learned something new about yourself?
Andy: Yeah. It felt like I’ve achieved something. I was a little bit nervous about getting up in front of people and you just feel really vulnerable. So I feel like it’s an achievement just doing that.
Becky: Thank you for sharing, Andy. I’m going to ask one last question. How would you describe your experience of friend in three words?
Andy: I would describe my experience of friend as vulnerable, achieving and enlightening.
Becky: Thank you so much, Andy, for joining us today to share your experience of taking part in friend.
Andy: I hope I did all right.
Becky: You did brilliantly.
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friend was presented in Crawley as part of Creative Crawley’s ‘Give it a Go’ 2023/2024 season. It was performed to a closed audience of family and friends on Saturday 2 March 2024 in the living rooms of all 4 participants, in Crawley, West Sussex.
Thank you to all the performers – Andy, Fatima, Maria and Éloïse – for taking part in friend. Thank you to Gillie Kleiman and Beckie Darlington who led the creative process.
The ‘Give it a Go’ season was funded by Arts Council England.
Find out more about Gillie Kleiman and friend: https://www.gilliekleiman.com
Trio A by Yvonne Rainer: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/119867
Would you like to get involved with Creative Crawley in the future? Join our mailing list to stay in the loop. Visit www.creativecrawley.com for more information.
