Andrew Sutherland

In 2021, I was asked by contemporary dance artist and curator/mentor Bernadette Lewis to make a 15-minute dance work for a program titled 900 Seconds of Movement at The Blue Room Theatre in Boorloo (Perth). As someone whose early career practice has been entrenched primarily in text-based exploration, I took this as an opportunity to engage with my perceptions of dance forms and western dance ‘legacies’. This extended into an attempt to think about how text and narrative might be treated choreographically within live performance. At the core of this work, I turned to ideas of time and nostalgia, and their relationship to the body; how such narrative meaning-making could be choreographed by spoken text and demonstrated in the body in space simultaneously.

Part of this is an extension of the praxis direction of my larger body of work – as an HIV+ and Queer artist dipping in and out of the theory of scholars, like Elizabeth Freeman in her book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories,¹ and Tim Dean’s essay “Bareback Time” contained within the book Queer Times, Queer Becomings,² whose works I received via editors Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt’s book Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century.³ My engagement with these texts considers ways, for instance, in which housing the HIV virus might challenge the body’s understanding of time, and subsequently how the daily practice of taking antiretroviral medication might serve as a means of re-orienting, or choreographing, that time. This ongoing exploration of theory, and how it might consequently be articulated into my embodied practice, underpins the construction of this work and the ways in which I wish to respond to time, even when the HIV virus itself is not textually apparent.

More simply, however, in developing this work I found myself returning to the material fact that I was about to turn thirty, and almost a decade out of drama school, and so much of my identity structures as both an actor and a gay man had been organised around co-dependent ideas of youth and desirability. I turned to literature scholar Svetlana Boym, whose The Future of Nostalgia⁴ I refer to in the performance text below, as well as to the ballet Swan Lake, whose queer imprint has persisted and evolved across texts that both have a continuing pop-cultural relevance and a place in my own personal history (the all-male Matthew Bourne staging, for which I experienced an embarrassingly-amorous response as a confused fourteen-year-old, the popular films Billy Elliot⁵ and Black Swan,⁶ and so on).

What this pointed to, for me, was the tension between the embodied and the imaginative inherent in live performance: to ask the audience to imagine a past that never happened while simultaneously watching me materially train toward enacting that past. In choosing to train in a form like ballet – a fixed form and known cultural commodity, which I had ‘play-acted’ a mastery of without ever materially training or embodying any real knowledge of the form – within the impossible framework of a 15-minute performance, I also gesture toward the abject-as-ridiculous, the very queer act of failure. In attempting to learn technique in front of the audience, I would give it my all – try earnestly and with great attention – and it would still not be enough. This structural format served also as a means of coaxing the audience, through the sincerity and comedy of a genuine attempt, toward my premise; toward thinking and imagining with me.

I was joined on stage by theatre-maker David Vikman, whose presence and mirrored narrative is highlighted in the text below. This work was also created with mentorship from Bernadette Lewis, a dancer and dance-maker whose artistic and mentoring practice prioritises patience, care, and creating testing grounds for experimentation and productive failure – all qualities which I sought to entrench in both the construction and performance of this work – as well as dramaturgical support (including a single ballet class) from my long-term collaborator Michelle Aitken.

Swan Twink [pas de youth]

The work begins with a ballet warm-up at the barre; a fixed form of exercises, which David taught me in our time together rehearsing the work. We are dressed identically in black tights, white singlets and ballet shoes that we purchased together, although David is probably a foot taller than I am and towers over me on stage. Light piano music, possibly from Tchaikovsky’s score to Swan Lake, plays over our barre warm-up, and I address the audience.

one time, on a plane home from drama school
I got seated next to this man
who told me he could tell I was a professional ballet dancer
and he could see how amazing I was
and we spent the next five hours talking about it

he built the whole narrative around me
and I just agreed with everything he said
because – why wouldn’t you want to believe it?
after five hours, I did believe it
I was so committed to the fiction that when I got off the plane
it took me a while to remember that I wasn’t a ballet prodigy

I hope he doesn’t see this show
spoiler: I can’t do ballet

around the same time
acting school, ten years ago
I started doing this thing
where I’d go out to gay clubs
and tell people I was the actor who played Billy Elliot
in the movie Billy Elliot
and people would believe me

and a lot of people bought me drinks or hit on me
which made me do it more
and you’d think that if I was I was the star of hit 2000 film Billy Elliot
I could afford my own drinks?
but maybe they thought I was a washed-up child actor
and my glory days were behind me?

no one really challenged me on the lie

except – once, this guy at Connections⁷ asked me to prove it, so I stood on really bad pointe for the rest of the night. More because I found it funny. Then I got home the next morning and my toes were all fucked up and bloody, which was also quite funny.

they’re fine now.
all healed.

but other than that – why wouldn’t you want to believe it?
it’s a night out
it’s cool that you met Billy Elliot
and that he was super nice and super cute
it’s just kinda … perfect.

although it does occur to me now
that maybe people were just humouring me

I did, like, a term of ballet at drama school
ten years ago
in the way that they make actors do things
not to actually become proficient at the thing
but to imagine what it would be like if you could do that thing
and hope that it would make you a better actor
better at pretending
but I turned out to be a pretty average actor, anyway, so
maybe I’m not so good at pretending

in the final scene of Billy Elliott
we see Billy as an adult
waiting in the wings to dance the lead in Swan Lake
he’s dressed as a swan
and he’s obviously incredibly hot
and his father shuffles into the theatre
and the music swells
and Billy leaps onto stage
his father gasps
and we all gasp
and that’s the end of the film

perfect ending

and there’s this very specific thing, I think
when you’re twenty
or when you’re at drama school
or on a night out
about to leap onto stage
that you’re always on the cusp of becoming someone totally different
it’s just … right there in front of you
the possibility
that you’re about to transform into something new

which I realise is not the case as you hit your thirties
and you see that you’re only ever going to be yourself
and the fantasy is behind you
perfection is behind you

what you do have is that other reality
of things that didn’t happen
things that were only true for the second you believed them

there’s this scholar called Svetlana Boym
who defines nostalgia as a longing for a past that was never actually there
so it’s a romance not with the past itself, but with your own fantasy

and I wanted to do this thing
where I actually learnt some part of Swan Lake
finally learnt ballet
and made it all come true
and either you all watched me fail at it
or you watched me and then – the gasp

but I didn’t really learn very much
which is okay
it was just a fantasy

but that’s why David’s here

David’s been trying to teach me little bits of technique that make up the Swan Lake solo
and I’m never actually going to do the whole dance
it won’t ever be complete
and you’ll never see it
but we’re going to work at it anyway

The music stops. The barre is pushed to the corner of the performance space, and David attempts to teach me, in front of the audience, a different technique or exercise from ballet that he has not shown me before. Each night it is new: pas de chat, pirouette, chasse pas de bourree, etc. Within a short timeframe, we attempt to find both the physical observation and verbal communication that will help me to process new technique in my body, without training or prior knowledge. At the same time, our focus is split, as we improvise a conversation about David’s personal history and relationship to ballet training.

David trained at the Swedish National Ballet School from his early teenaged years, with the intention of entering a company on adulthood. At seventeen, he damaged his knee and stopped dancing. His life took him to the other side of the world; studying performance-making at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. In many ways, he lived out the fantasy that I had occasionally play-acted, though his career, like mine, would remain a speculative fiction from a different direction in time. Each night, I try to find the place to ask him how it felt to lose that future, and feel the answer might be slightly different each time it is asked.

The performance must move toward its end, and after several attempts at breaking down the physical actions of each technique, I attempt to put the pieces together and cross diagonally through the space. I don’t know if it is comical, or frustrating, or sad, for an audience to see how little progress has been made; that there is no space for illusion; that no matter how David articulates himself, or the quality of my listening, there is no way to reach any real proficiency or growth in such a tiny span of time. 

there is going to be a part of Swan Lake
David’s going to dance the solo
but before it happens, I need you all to close your eyes
and listen to it
and imagine it
close your eyes
it’s not a trick
it’s not a joke
close them.

Each performance, almost all of the audience can be coaxed into keeping their eyes closed. Music plays – an orchestral recording of Odette’s Act 2 solo from Tchaikovsky’s score – but it is faint and slightly distorted, as if the sound is reaching the performance space from a distance, echoing from the next room. (If you are reading this, I might encourage you to find a version of this music and listen to it now. You could even see it danced here, by Céline Gittens of the Birmingham Royal Ballet. I stand in the upstage corner, as David begins to dance the solo.

I was thinking
as non-dancers occasionally do
the only perfect choreography is the things that never happened
the things that you imagine
the romance with your fantasy
it’s an impossible form
that pure choreography of time

in this piece, Odette the swan is dancing by the lake
in the daytime she’s a swan, but in the moonlight
for the briefest moment
she can be human

later, she is cursed to be a swan forever

this is happening in front of you
but I still want you to imagine it
imagine David dancing
or imagine it’s me
imagine it’s yourself
imagine swans

and listen
to the music, preserved in time for 150 years
to the sound of David’s feet crossing the floor
to David’s breath
all that effort
all that potential

you can hear the eight years he trained
and the day that he stopped
and all the years since
and you can hear all the things I never did
but fantasised I could be

moving toward
or away
from time

The dance ends.

and
open your eyes.
the moment is finished.
it was incredibly beautiful.
it’s all in the past.

Andrew Sutherland (he/they) is a Queer Poz (PLHIV) performance-maker and author based in Western Australia, on unceded Whadjuk Noongar land. He has worked as an independent theatre practitioner between WA and Singapore over the last decade, most recently as director for Mother of Compost and Democracy Repair Services by Noemie Huttner-Korros. He is a sessional lecturer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and a teaching artist for a range of arts organisations. His debut poetry collection, Paradise (point of transmission) (Fremantle Press) was shortlisted for the Small Press Network Book of the Year Prize in 2023.