NEST’s Interpretation Of Homer's The Odyssey Almost As Epic As The Poem Itself

Photo Barnby Steel. Performers New Movement Collective.

Most of us probably read Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in high school–or skimmed the SparkNotes guide at the very least. In 2013, thousands of years after the original poem appeared, who’d have thought that The Odyssey would be staged in The Welsh Chapel, a disused 19th century era church-cum-nightclub in West London and set to booming club music, electrifying lasers, and post-post modern dance?

NEST was just that–an immersive performance collaboration that took place in August 2013 at the former Limelight nightclub on London’s Shaftsbury Avenue. Dreamt up by digital artists, architects, composers, costume designers, animators, and members of the New Movement Collective, a prolific group of dancer-choreographers drawn to the creative possibilities between technology, new music, architecture, and dance, NEST’s interpretation of The Odyssey was, well, epic.

Photo Sandra Ciampone. Performer Patricia Okenwa.

“We work with a lot of collaborators to produce theatrical events that are new and hopefully innovative,” New Movement Collective member Jonathan Goddard said. “It was really exciting for us to have access to such an iconic venue. The performance brought it back to life with such a bang.”

The Creators Project caught up with Goddard and talked about nightclubs, lasers, and XXX.

The Creators Project: NESTwas a performance piece that took place in a former nightclub and which had a certain gritty club vibe to it. Do you ever think about nightlife itself as theater or nightclubs themselves as theaters? Jonathan Goddard: When you enter a nightclub, unless you’ve been there before, you’re not quite sure what it’s going to be like or what’s going to happen, so it is quite theatrical. It’s about pushing down boundaries and trying to make something new.

Photo Sandra Ciampone. Performers Patricia Okenwa, Renaud Wiser, Malgorzata Dzierzon, Jonathan Goddard.

The thing that stuck out to me about the performance right away was the electrifying club music.
For this production we worked with two fantastic composers, Anna Meredith and Christopher Mayo.We knew we wanted electronic music, and they are both trained classical composers who work with electronics at the moment. The venue we were working in had quite a checkered former past. It was built in 1888 but it was very well known in the 1980s as The Limelight Club, a kind of super club, probably one of the most known clubs in the country at the time. In between it being a nightclub it had also been a bar, and then it laid empty for six years and then we were given it to create the performance to signal the rebirth of this building. So because it had this kind of checkered past, we knew we really wanted to work with electronic music.

Was the performance in different movements? There are moments that were clubby and dark and then there were moments where it was much softer.
We always work in unusual theatrical settings. Often they’re promenade performances, and for this production we tried to get the balance right so the audience could go wherever they wanted and also keep it a bit more structured. It was quite a job for a composer because they had to compose for the whole building. Individual rooms had their own scores, periods of transition around the building also had their own scores, and the way the production went was that two things could be going on at the same time.

Photo Sandra Ciampone. Performers Joseph Walking, Jonathan Goddard.

You’ve spoken a lot abo*ut creating works in non-traditional spaces or disused spaces, and there’s a whole history of artists, musicians, and even club promoters creatively activating or reactivating disused urban space. What does the possibility of disused space do for you artistically?*
Part of it is necessity. The building we had in central London we had for a year, which you would never have for free with a theater. So partly it’s economic. And I suppose the other attraction is that for the past four years now we have been working closely with architecture and architects. We began an association with the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and we are tutors in a postgraduate diploma in Spatial Performance and Design. It’s a one-year course and during that course an event or a performance is made that has three iterations and travels around the world. It’s a bit more thrilling to be doing these unusual things and be much closer to an audience that isn’t sitting. It feels slightly more alive and dynamic.

Photo Sandra Ciampone. Performers New Movement Collective.

The piece is quite visually arresting, too, with the lasers and projections. Did you work with lighting designers?

We’ve been wanting to work with a creative studio called Marshmallow Laser Feast for a while, and this was the perfect opportunity because obviously the history of building as being this clubby thing. But also we knew we wanted to work with light as structure as well as architects and solid structure. So, impermanent structure and permanent structure was important for us. We turned to Marshmallow Laser Feast, and none of us knew what the collaboration would be in the end. They used interactive light technologies to create a nest from light, a reactive nest, and it lit the piece theatrically which I think is quite unusual for them, to use technology to light a piece.

Photo Barnby Steel. Performers New Movement Collective.

How did you come to use The Odyssey?
The first thought we had when we went into the building was it felt like an adventure. When we first opened the door it was cold, dark, and it still had all the remnants the bar that it used to be. It’s a huge building – labyrinthine, passages, tiny rooms – so we had this real sense of adventure and we knew we wanted to try and give that to the audience. What kept coming up was that the audience would be the journey of the hero and the audience would be the hero, so we needed to find a vessel that would take us forward. Fairly late on in the process we finally decided we were going to do The Odyssey. It really fit in with the epic nature of the building but the experience the audience had was definitely one of adventure and hidden spaces and unusual pathways.

Photo Sandra Ciampone. Performers New Movement Collective.

It seems like there’s a movement towards using space and technology to create immersive environments or participatory theater. What do you think is causing that?

I think it’s a desire to engage in a different way. Going to a concert or going to a nightclub, trying to dissolve those boundaries so a theatrical experience could be any of those things, more than working within something that feels more limiting. Different formats throw out different possibilities.

Photo Barnby Steel. Performers Renaud Wiser, Malgorzata Dzierzon.

Even in your genre-defying stance – an already postmodern gesture – how does the New Movement Collective see itself?
We’ve all met in establish dance companies, but we’re really looking out to different disciplines at different stages of development. Architecture and dance are at very different stages in their history, and seeing what they can bring to each other – music, light technology or just light in general – and seeing what can happen when you collaborate.

The most interesting work always emerges between disciplines, fields and cannons, don’t you think?
It’s fantastic – it’s like walking into a party with a bunch of people you don’t know but they’re all really interested in what you have to say.If you move into a room of architects then all of a sudden you’re the interesting one. It’s such a fruitful methodology of working.I think we’d be post-post modern dancers now – postmodernism is gone. I don’t know what we are. We’re just out there, on the fringe trying to get people in.

You can watch a performance of NEST below:

NEST - Inspired by Homer's Odyssey from New Movement Collective.