Any Table Any Room is a performance conceived and created by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, which invites four local artists to join them onstage in each new space. For the Brighton shows, the two artists will be joined by Janine Fletcher, Claire Godsmark. Sue MacLaine and Scott Smith.

We spoke to Jonathan Burrows as he prepared for the show. 

Where did the idea come from for Any Table Any Room?

The starting point of Any Table Any Room was me wondering about the pleasure of doing things together in time with other people, and at the same time the way that doing things together might limit your choices as an individual. So the six performers in this piece share a score, but all the time we must negotiate how to be together, or how to allow each other not to be together. And as we worked on the piece we found words that we sing, from popular music and theoretical texts, which also question what community may or may not be. The piece is at times quite chaotic and I love that chaos, and in other moments you get this sense of togetherness which resonates. 

The Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts is the opening of the piece, but in each place we visit afterwards, beginning in Coventry, Brussels, Oslo and Essen, Matteo and I will invite six local artists to join us onstage after a three day rehearsal period. The short time of meeting before we perform, comes from the observation that there’s nothing better than watching experienced performers fly by the seats of their pants.

How did you get involved working with Matteo Fargion?

Matteo and I have worked together for 27 years, for the past 15 of which we’ve toured constantly around the world to share this growing collection of pieces we’ve made, all of which are somehow a kind of physicalised music. He’s a composer by training and I was a ballet dancer with the Royal Ballet for many years, so we met over our love of formal means and our love of disrupting formal means.

Tell me a bit about the artists who will join you onstage…

We have a wonderful cast in Brighton, with theatre luminary Sue MacLaine, choreographer and performer Janine Fletcher, dancer Claire Godsmark and legendary dance improviser and musician Scott Smith. This was the group of people who helped us slowly develop the piece over the past year, so that it’s ready to go on the road with changing casts.

What do you want the audience to take from the experience?

Choreography is different from theatre in that the meanings are often less stable, more a combination of intuitive empathetic response, and a constant and quite virtuosic reading of fleeting references and emotional states. Human beings are brilliant at reading these kinds of pieces and everyone knows when it makes sense to them.

What’s next for you?

Matteo and I work hard to create the elbow room to do things that we haven’t yet had permission to do. For our last project we were commissioned to make an interruption in a large scale orchestral concert of Schubert in Switzerland. The conductor sacked us after the morning rehearsal, then changed his mind 30 minutes before it started and we did the interruption and got a standing ovation. I’ve never been so frightened in my life. For the next project we’ve formed a one-off rock band for an event in Bergen. It seemed like a good idea at the time and now I wake up at night thinking why, what were we thinking? 

What are you working on?

After the performance at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Matteo and I go to Havana to perform. Then Matteo has shows of an extraordinary choir piece he’s written for the Norwegian choreographer Mette Edvardsen, where the choir suddenly sing from the audience after a long series of spoken and LED texts. And I return to a research project at Coventry University where we’re looking at the language people use to describe why dance seems good or important, and the possibility that the value of dancing might be exactly that it resists attempts to quantify or assess it, almost like it has no concrete value and that is its value, which is somehow liberating.

Any Table Any Room will be at ACCA on 17 October at 8pm. 

Tickets are here including Pay What You Decide- http://bit.ly/2xZhEcP