Found: Interview

“It's connected to a story that hasn't been written yet. Some things we do know are that there is man and he finds a letter, and he reads it. It's not his letter. I think the audience then see and feel the effect it has on him. There is also a woman who is in some way connected to the letter.”

Found begins with a question: what would you do if you discovered a letter that belonged to somebody else? Bringing together a cast that includes Luke Sutherland, author of Venus as a Boy and featuring both live music and film, Found is another example of how cross-platform work is becoming the norm.

Choreographer Christine Devaney is fascinated by the way that people respond to each other. Found looks at how the most tangential encounter can influence and change lives. And through her creative process, she has captured a way of allowing the form of the performance to reflect its content.

“When I think about the show it starts to feel like it's about the impact that people and their stories and memories or their imagined lives - or even just having a sense of someone - can have on us,” she says. “But hopefully it's also as much about the immediate visceral effect of the interplay between the live music and the movement as well as between the four performers. Threads of narratives emerge but we are not telling one story. I feel that there is a simplicity to this show but there are also many layers. I'm looking forward to hearing what others feel it is about.”

This inter-weaving of technique and narratives makes Found a coherent study of the difficulties associated with actually understanding other people, even exposing how they can affect our own personalities. At the heart of the drama lies the question: to what extent are other people merely projections of our own imaginations?

Devaney has used her collaboration with Luke Sutherland as an inspiration in the creation of  Found. Sutherland, who most recently impressed as a musician in his staged version of Venus as a Boy with Tam Dean Burn, provides live music and has been involved in Found from the very beginning.

“The process for creating Found has come completely from improvisation,” Devaney recalls. “When Luke and I were doing our early improvisations I seemed to want to try find and something to improvise "about" before we started. I soon realised that this was futile especially as Luke would usually say very little and as soon as I started dancing and Luke started playing the violin or guitar what we were doing together would become about something else - it was about what was happening in the time we "played" together. We gave ourselves simple parameters like time - sometimes two minutes, sometimes thirty or who was "following" who. We would sometimes say afterwards if particular images and thoughts came up but it was also great for me just let things go.”

Eventually this inspired the idea: “I wonder if I can make a dance inspired by a film based on a story that hasn't been written yet”. In typical Curious Seed style, this led to further collaboration. “Luke invited musician Jer Reid to be involved and I asked performer Michael Sherrin, both artists we had distant creative histories with. I did have a slight worry that things would get a bit diluted.”

Nevertheless, the idea continued to grow. “Quite the opposite happened. We have worked in the same way to create the raw material for the show. Then there is the input of the other creative collaborators - designer, film maker and lighting designer and the putting together of the work into a whole.”

This multi-media extravaganza respects the founding principles of Curious Seed. Devaney formed Curious Seed in 2005 to explore her “own creative voice in a way that meant that I was more responsible for the overall vision. I think finding the right process and collaborators for each Curious Seed production seems to be emerging as a very important aspect of the work”. The layers of text, film, movement and music fold together into a whole, capturing the patch-work process through which one mind develops an understanding of another.

Found is concerned with a mystery, and the way that this mystery can evolve and impact on an individual. Perhaps most excitingly, it is not consumed by a mere interest in the formal aspects of performance, and sees the breaking of genre boundaries as a way to emphasise the nature of the narrative and engage the audience, rather than as just a technical trick. Live music adds an immediacy and poignancy to the dance, and the juxtaposition of film and live movement gives a unique depth to presentation and feeling. Found is a subtle, emotional story that will remind the audience how experimentation can be moving and that complexity does not mean confusion.

Read our event review of Found