The Dramaturg

A note our wonderful IGNIS dramaturg Laura Farnworth.

Last summer, I was extremely lucky to be introduced to Hubert Essakow by Anda Winters. Hubert was looking for a dramaturg for his next dance show and the project intrigued me. Although primarily a theatre director, I previously trained as a ballet dancer, and so I was really excited by the opportunity of re-igniting my love of dance and combining it with my love of narrative and theatre. To learn that Sara Kestelman was also involved was amazing and I was so excited by the challenge of how we could create a fusion between dance and theatre.

In early conversations, it became clear to Hubert and I that we were particularly inspired by the idea of exploring fire as a metaphor for our emotions. We talked a lot about what fire meant to us in human terms and how it made us think of our ambitions, passions and loves. And so we became interested in the story of an older woman who is looking back on her life, meeting and coming to terms with her memories, regrets and lost loves. It seemed to make sense that the dancers would be these memories, dancing around and interacting with her through a series of vignette encounters.

During the research and development I learnt that Sara was also an excellent poet. Sara’s poems really spoke to Hubert and I - we felt they captured the tone and emotion we wanted to establish in the piece. Sara was extremely open to including her poems in IGNIS and she generously worked with me, listening to my ideas and making several adaptations - in fact a new poem, which Sara called IGNIS, was born out of the process by merging together several of her original poems. 

Working in dance is obviously very different to the world of theatre. In dance you can afford to be abstract, but in theatre, because it generally involves speaking, or at least characters, you are immediately in some kind of human story. What has been excellent for me about this process is learning how to approach story in a whole new way. Hubert and I knew the framework of the story we wanted to base the show around – but for me, it was more a case of finding the opportunities to tell this story in the choreography that Hubert was making, rather than imposing it on the performers. The result I hope is a journey that is accessible to many, but that remains open to individual interpretation and experience.