Just to say that this is taken this bit should be taken from a book chapter that'll
be published by Oxford University Press probably later in the spring of next year.
Five soldiers. The body is the front line.
It's a dance theatre worker choreographed in 2010, and it's since toured throughout the U.K., Germany and Spain.
The piece was made following a period of field research in November 2008, when I joined the fourth Battalion,
the Rifles, and was allowed to join in full battle exercises on Dartmoor and Salisbury Plain.
I then visited the Military Rehabilitation Centre Headley Court to see the effect of conflict and training on the soldiers bodies by focusing on the
embodied experience of the soldier rather than the moral values of war and
engaging with the visceral experience of the audience through the performance.
Five soldiers reframes war inside the context of the soldier's body, the enactment of the soldier's training,
the psychological consequences of that training, and the impact of injury.
Invite the audience to identify it and thus respond to the issue of what soldiers
are trained and asked to do in the name of civilian elected governments.
Although not overtly political, the work invites the audience to see war through the soldier's body,
therefore therefore influencing their perception of war.
Dee Reynolds And I argue that, especially in an era of great disillusionment with the political establishment,
choreography has a significant potential to affect audiences through embodied, empathic engagement that cannot be produced by verbal means.
Major changes in the post-Cold War era have made armed conflict too frequently much more disparate, diffuse and asymmetrical business.
The more conventional confrontations between nation states, however,
this dance work positions the body the body that is trained to injure and that is also itself injured at the centre of the Theatre of War.
As Elaine Scarry has argued, the main purpose of war continues to be the inflicting of injury and pain.
The piece therefore invites awareness of physicality at many different levels,
both through the subject matter and the strength of energy conveyed by the dancers from the intense rigours and
exhaustion of training to sexual aggression and tensions and the literal breaking of the body and pain of injury.
In a shocking final scene here, rather than disowning injury and its effects,
the audience is subjected to witnessing the prolonged pain of one of the liveliest members of the battalion slash troupe,
both in the military and choreographic contexts.
This is a controversial move since the emphasis in the military is on rehabilitation and positive attitudes.
While in contemporary dance, the trend is to emphasise how disabled bodies are able to move.
Rather debilitating effects of pain and trauma.
The work raises issues of sacrifice, a notion perhaps out of sync with the general public, but clearly articulated in military religious contexts,
with death being seen as the ultimate sacrifice of war in a political climate, albeit a democratic one,
where the population feels disenfranchised and powerless to change the government's foreign policy,
and where war is increasingly disconnected from reality and what the DARIÉN has called the Military Industrial Entertainment Network.
The viewing public can become indifferent to the seemingly inevitable and mediated horrors of war.
However, we argue that dance performance of peace offers the opportunity for a challenging and thought provoking encounter
with war through embodied kinaesthetic responses by portraying the horrors of war through the corporal.
The work uses the body and the body's power to convince and cause physical reaction,
where words in the case of the media and politicians have little or no effect.
In this chapter from the book, Dee Reynolds and I analyse how the body is the frontline by describing experiences of training with the army
and how those experiences shaped the making of the peace I underwent with the rifles at Headley Court.
I'm also going to describe some of the qualitative audience research,
and I'm going to look at two key moments within the work and focus on the audience's responses.
We're focusing on the live performances in two performance areas one at the Rifle Club and one in Nottingham,
which was a sort of much more mainstream, sort of normal theatre, I suppose.
First, however, I feel it's important to position the work in the context, the political context of the UK.
At the time of the first performance of that, five soldiers took place in the UK, which was April to June 2010.
Afghanistan was prominent in the news.
Also, debate was intensifying on whether it was time for Britain to reduce its commitment to the war effort on financial grounds.
Interestingly, audiences of five soldiers did not refer to any such reports or political discussions in their responses.
This was a. The argument that the public felt disenfranchised and disengaged from political discourse,
contrasting with the enshrinement of the Army in the symbolic consciousness of the British nation.
There's been remarkably little public support for the role that the Army has been asked to play in recent years.
In 2003, opposition to the Iraq war fuelled the largest demonstration ever seen in the UK,
with organisers claiming that opponents to the war were up to 2 million.
The fact that opponents of the war were powerless to prevent its outbreak resulted in a strong sense of disenfranchisement,
creating a pained distance between the public and the political class, which has had a lasting effect in the case of the war in Afghanistan.
It has been a glaring contrast between mass opposition to engagement in the conflict and the platforms of the major UK political parties,
all of which have argued that the presence of British troops in Afghanistan was vital for reasons of national security and humanitarian engagement.
Those opposed to the war therefore did not find that views represented by mainstream politics,
and especially since the failure of the anti-Iraq war demonstration, public opposition to war appears to be deprived of a political voice.
The recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen rapid advancements in
personal protective equipment and in the medical management of severe trauma.
These gains have meant that increasing numbers of soldiers are surviving previously fatal and complex injuries.
At the time of my initial investigation, the Ministry of Defence was releasing fatality figures when they occurred.
Hidden from public view, however, were the injury rates incurred and the corresponding severity of the injuries.
The media began making amputation statistics available in February 2011 after previously resisting calls for them to be released,
along with published injury statistics, possibly for fear of further reducing public support in military action.
Through investigating this area, I stumbled upon a key aspect of the wars and also a defining bridge between the work of the dancer and the soldier.
Both risk bodily injury and face the experience of recovering from profound life changing injuries as part of their
job and managed to secure access to facilities that have now since been off limits to most researchers and press.
Perhaps the role of the artist seemed less of a threat.
However, I sense that the military felt overwhelmed by the high rate of profound injury,
particularly incurred in Afghanistan during Operation Herrick between 2008 and 2010,
investigating the injury and rehabilitation of the soldiers became a focus throughout the research and creation of five soldiers.
Having worked in dance and disability in the UK for many years.
I was struck by the force changes in attitudes to disability in the military as it struggled to deal with
both the high rates of amputees and new regulations regarding the armed forces and disability equality laws.
At about the same time, in 2007,
a former UK Army officer set up a charity Help for Heroes with widespread media
attention and a focus on highlighting the injury and disability of soldiers.
The charity has been highly successful in raising funds to support the rehabilitation of soldiers and ensuring public attention to these issues.
However, the term hero could be seen as problematic to a liberal, disengaged civilian population who saw nothing heroic in the invasion.
I also encountered responses from injured soldiers who did not see themselves as heroes, but as young men with uncertain futures.
The complexity of their new identity, together with public perceptions,
led to some soldiers to refuse to be interviewed or involved with publicity for the project.
Consequently, while public awareness of the injury rate increased and was made more visible in the media,
many soldiers were privately unhappy about the way in which their injured bodies
were being portrayed at a time of fighting for employment rights and compensation.
The public might see their injuries as the cost of war or their sacrifice, but many of soldiers had joined the Army for very different reasons,
looking for stable employment, training and education in the sense of strong identity.
The risk of injury was what one amputee soldier told to me as something that was just never going to happen to me.
But these representations of the injured soldier were perhaps the only signs of what the public encountered through the charity appeals,
X Factor, single hits and sponsored treks with a public highly detached from any sense of physical warfare.
The injured body was the only visible sign of the impact of war mediated by the title hero.
In contrast to this representation, the injury in our soldiers is starker, more brutal, shown without the aura of heroism.
The decision to focus.
On the injury of a soldier at the end of the dance piece in a shocking manner that highlights the loss of an individual's physicality was crucial,
influenced both the work, how the work was framed and its surrounding debate, as well as what was not included.
For example, there is no enemy in the work.
That choice was made after discussions about the tactics used by insurgents in Afghanistan and the highest incident rate of IED attacks.
With a human enemy seldom encountered by infantry patrols.
The use of weapons was also excluded, despite soldiers assertions that their weapons became part of their body.
It was felt that toy, like replicas, cumbersome and expensive,
would give the work an action and visual effect which would deflect the focus from the soldier's bodies and movement.
Because of its detailed re-enactment of specific military details, five soldiers this deceptively realistic term military audience.
However, the work is set in an imagined, claustrophobic compound an aircraft hangar, a base drill hall,
an empty room, the kind of place where soldiers in reality are grouped and told to wait.
Their boredom and lack of control. A real aspect of the soldier's life.
But dramaturg, actually providing a space where anything can happen.
It is both a real and a fantasy space where the soldiers fears or their memories are replayed or imagined.
Despite the impossibility of staging a realistic portrayal of war,
what is going on in the soldiers bodies and in their heads can be portrayed through the mix of identifiable signifiers,
of military action, and through the beauty and freedom of the dancing self,
allowing an ambiguity of place and meaning to be given over to the audience to interpret.
While the story of soldiers is often a male story,
a very deliberate choice of one female upsets the balance of male identity narrative and allows for a scope of tension and drama,
as well as a realistic reflection of women. Now on the front lines.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the genesis and making of the piece after a severe knee injury in 2007 and the resulting surgery.
I had a vision like dream of flying on a desert war zone and realised that my left leg had been blown off.
I could still see my legs fall to my right, a large lump of bone and flesh dislocated from my body, but still my body.
My first thought was shock. My second thought was surprise.
I discovered in my dream state that I could lose my limbs, but I didn't lose my soul while my body was my dancer's identity.
By losing parts of it, I didn't lose myself.
Switching on the telly the following morning, I was confronted yet again with images of more soldiers killed in Iraq.
I stopped and looked at them. The dreamed memory of the battlefield still within me.
And I saw and felt the connection between the dancer's body and the soldier's body.
I wondered how a soldier could risk not just injury and the potential loss of limbs,
but even his life for a job to the role of soldiering and the physical act of soldiering mean that the soldier is willing to take those risks.
Is that perhaps even a thrill? An enjoyment? A love of soldiering?
There have been war artists, war photographers, war poets.
But the medium of the profession is their body.
Perhaps a war choreographer could get under the skin of a soldier and portray how it actually feels to be a soldier.
In her work, the body in pain alone.
Gary points out that although injury is an inevitable by-product of war, it continues to disingenuously be described as accidental or unwanted.
She argues that civilians and politicians discuss war in a way that is remote from its real purpose,
its true nature, and talks of how, by contrast with this language,
a real wound can stupefied us into silence or shame us with the shame of a
powerlessness to approach the open human body and make it not open as before.
Theodore Nelson and trained to kill. Talks of the sexual arousal of mortal risk.
The unbearable building up of tension being released by contact,
and the strong [INAUDIBLE] thrill of shared conflict with the comrades I once discovered.
Was there a link between aggression and repressed sexual feeling?
Is killing itself sexualised? US Marines use the term eye [INAUDIBLE] to describe setting their sights on a target.
And Glenn great hooks the lust for life conflict in the Warriors War is all about force and domination.
The dominator and the dominated women are now embedded in the US UK military but have an ambivalent role.
They're not part of the infantry and they're not able to front fight on the front line.
However, women are very much on the front line, particularly in their role as medics.
Also, although women cannot have close combat roles, they are in very dangerous situations, carry weapons and are often under fire.
Indeed, following an announcement by UK Defence Secretary in May 2014 that he was ordering a review of women's roles,
it now looks very likely that women will soon be eligible to serve in combat roles in the British Army for the first time.
It took me nearly two years to secure and became my attachment to the fourth Battalion, the rifles for rifles.
I was finally able to join them for a two week period on training exercises in Dartmoor Barracks in Beaufort and on exercises on Salisbury Plain.
Following this attachment,
I also secured a week's account at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre Headley Court and visited the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine,
then at Sally Oak Hospital, Birmingham.
The two week experience with full rifles was highly demanding and full of incredibly strong and powerful experiences and emotions for me.
It began with a four day and night exercise on Dartmoor,
where I struggled with the £70 burger and helmet and body armour over a continuous
march with battle exercises taking place throughout each day and early dawn attacks.
The following account is from my diary, written during the secondment.
As dawn came, eyes played tricks on you. Every bush looks like a soldier.
Very eerie. Silent. Serious pain begins in sweating like a pig.
So many layers of close friend. The troops sitting along the bank, almost invisible in the darkness.
Quite bizarre with their packs and helmets. It look like soldiers from the Somme.
My role within the battalion certainly changed as the two weeks progressed.
At each stage I was being tested, assessed and encouraged.
This participatory approach afforded some great benefits.
After encountering shared sleep deprivation with a group of soldiers,
the guards would be lowered and the men stopped presenting macho defensive postures and
opened up about their lives and experiences both in battle and on return to the UK.
In fact, after the initial hostility, there was a general openness to questioning and quite a sociable atmosphere.
It's worth stating that at times I felt my dance training was extremely useful during this learning phase.
The military world is a world of unspoken rules, regulations, instructions,
and highly subtle and complex power hierarchies with a dancer's instinct to watch carefully and unobtrusively.
I was able to follow the rules, fit in, and do the right thing without being spotted as out of place.
Despite this, I had quite a constant fear of getting it wrong.
As the following diary extract reveals, Fear of being late is more than being wrong.
It's like everything starts to become a moral issue. Being late is a moral issue.
Being in the wrong uniform is a moral issue. Being late is probably a cardinal sin.
Why does everything seem to be a moral issue and why do you want to be good?
Is that how the training works? You always want to be a good girl or a good boy.
So you obey instructions. And so you just do as you're told because it means you're good, even if what you're doing is not good.
Not good at all. I suggest that this attitude corresponds with a dancer's training, good behaviour, good physical abilities.
Praise one wishes to avoid mistakes, avoid looking weak or stupid,
and say both dance and the military encourage an atmosphere of doing what you're told.
I became absorbed in the new language of the military world and used it to understand how personnel coordinate and analyse troop and battle movements.
As a choreographer, some of the battle manoeuvres were quick to read the no, no.
The notion of no movement without fire really struck me. Soldier work and work in pairs were two part groups of soldier one firing at the
enemy to give covered soldier to who advances while the enemy's heads are down.
One soldier to which is the forward position the soldier swapped role, a sequence called fire manoeuvre.
While the movements it was easy to do in theory, in practice, it was difficult to execute on tricky terrain, even in only simulated exercises.
The eye becomes all important. A bush and hill become a crouching soldier to the tired eye,
an unknown and unaware enemy spied through the sides of a rifle, a cause of pleasure as you seek your target.
I felt generally tolerated, even if not accepted by most of the soldiers, rarely encountering overt sexism or any kind of bullying towards me.
But my diary extracts reveal a sense of general intimidation at times.
It's okay, I tell myself. You're bound to feel a bit lost during the bloody army.
The real army is intimidating. Don't make your idea of yourself.
Hold your dignity and pride. I also sense a contradiction of how the soldiers talked of their mothers, wives and girlfriends,
and how women in general were were discussed with references to prostitutes, strippers and slags.
Women were judged only on their appearance alone, and yet I was treated with a rather old fashioned gentlemanly charm at times.
I did feel that it would be hard for. Most of these men's take orders from a female officer.
I also sensed a lot of positioning around me among the men as they judged one another.
The men analysed each other's strengths, weaknesses and leadership capabilities.
Constantly, at times, their tone of conversation, particularly during meals, could be adversarial.
And they made a decision to always answer back. This seemed to be effective and gained a certain grudging respect.
After my secondment with full rifles, I then spent time at Headley Court and at Sandy Oak Hospital at Hadley Court.
I shadowed a rehabilitation instructor, a physiotherapist and a clinical physician.
I was allowed access to the patients,
and I was able to talk to them about their injuries and their experiences of both war and their life after injury.
After these experiences, I took quite a long time to deal with the challenging intensity and depth of the subject matter,
and then started to process what could be made out of this to create a work of dance theatre.
I began to form my creative team and was delighted to meet with the visual artist David Cottrell,
who had visited Afghanistan with joint medical forces and spent time at Headley Court and Sally Oak.
These are some of his images.
Being able to share our thoughts was incredibly helpful as we found parallels across both individual experiences.
Together, we had a small window of insight into the world of the soldier in training,
the soldier on deployment, and the injured soldier in hospital and rehabilitation.
You have to sit here, as was no courage.
And these are his images from Afghanistan.
And with these experiences still vivid in our minds, we agreed to work together to represent the soldiers physical experiences on stage.
I'm going to jump ahead a little bit and not talk through how the work was made.
So. This is us in Baton Rouge training in the studio and the wee wee wee did the
training at work sent to me overnight to do battle exercises around the campus,
which terrified quite a few students. Five in the morning.
And we we we had some some some real weapons.
And then the theatre actually had to get new insurance to allow the weapons into the studio, and we had to block out all the windows.
It was terribly exciting. The director was very excited about this.
And once we sort of had I did a lot of preparation with the dancers and once we sort of they had training with weapons expert security experts.
We then went into the studio and we started sort of trying to define that point,
abstract qualities that trying to find movement vocabularies through the military means, but also turning it into dance as well.
And then some of them went on a two day training weekend.
One was one dancer was a former soldier in the Polish Army and one was a former cadet.
And the contrast of the tracksuit bottoms, the cartoon tracksuit bottoms in the boots,
I think one of the dancers said it was great because her feet didn't get injured because she was in boots all the time.
And normally dancers get really messed up, bare feet and oops, we stopped.
And this is us.
We, we actually took the work to Paderborn and we did a residency and we worked with families, teenagers, families over in the base there.
And we did a whole week of workshops exploring. They didn't necessarily want to talk about their issues,
but actually exploring things through dance meant that it was another way to look at things that were already affecting them.
And we put together a curtain raiser and they performed to their families.
And then we did the show. We converted the cinema at the base into a sort of theatrical space.
It premiered in Birmingham in April 2010.
The work has a three part structure, so just confined in a pen like set where they wait between periods of action.
The weighting structure allows the boredom intention to build each scene, being an imagined evocation of a true to life scenario.
The first part builds in ideas, a training and drill with the soldiers forming a machine like identity through long,
complex drill manoeuvres and double time marches.
They aim an aggressive, honed attention at the audience.
This training section is intended to dehumanise the participants,
but also to allow the audience to become lulled by the almost meditative quality of the repetition and rhythm.
The second part lets the audience see the soldiers as humans attacking each other, playfully dancing and fighting together in a nightclub,
preying on women and the intense stress of waiting for long periods and close friendships.
The audience is shown relationships, forming tensions, building booms, bonds formed together.
Part three is in effect on the ground and starts with a helicopter scene which develops into a skydiving dance.
We build the long wait for an attack or explosion with a section called Patrol.
The rising tension evident on the faces of the soldiers as they carefully tread on unsafe land.
When the explosion comes, the moment is stretched out.
The youngest soldier spinning and spinning before hitting the ground injured.
The final part is an intense solo at dances, legs strapped so that he appears to be a double amputee.
His colleagues sit along beside waiting again as he fights to find his new identity.
Good talk a little bit about the qualitative audience.
Research director Professor Reynolds became involved in researching audience responses to five soldiers.
After my collaboration with the owner on a project in 2008 called Watching Dance.
In some ways, the new research was a natural continuation of this collaboration throughout his research.
My choreography, which explored the effects on spectators of their awareness of the physical presence of
performers and particularly effort breathing in the impact of sounds produced by dancers bodies.
The body was at the centre of this new work and I was intrigued to see how this would play out in the context of the military theme.
So she attended the premiere at the festival in Birmingham and then performance in the Writers Cup in Mayfair.
After that performance,
interviewed by telephone audience members who were either members or former members of the armed forces or current or former dancers.
Subsequently,
they attended films at Lakeside Arts Centre in Nottingham and conducted a focus group involving ten audience members of the general public.
And the reason for including military personnel and dancers in the research was that she was interested to certain what effect
the particular professional backgrounds and training of these groups would have in their experience of the performance.
Individual interviews were chosen in order to explore the responses in some depth.
Responses to physicality emerged as a key theme right across the discussions, albeit with different emphasis.
Frequently, it was the audiences embodied visceral responses that led them to reflect on the wider implications of what they were watching.
Their comments focussed both on the general physicality of the dancers performance
and also some key moments that were picked out for attention across the cohort.
These included the nightclub scene, the helicopter scene, and the final injury scene.
Interestingly, given my wish to explore the links between the embodied experience of dance and the military,
both officers and dancers responded very strongly to the athleticism and expenditure
of energy which they related to in terms of their own personal experience.
Each group was surprised at the other's physicality. James, an officer, commented that although this was a dance show,
actually there were so many parts that were hugely physical and they kept up that stamina endurance for a long period.
It was very impressive.
And had you not known they were just dancers, if you'd photographed them not dancing in a different with their look and dripping with sweat.
Do you think that was a psychology of training or having just been running around of Africa, in Afghanistan in 40 degrees of heat, your hands.
An officer was surprised by the energy. I was absolutely fascinated and no one ever stopped in the whole one hour and the energy.
For his part, John, a dancer, was surprised by the physicality of the soldier's experience.
The power that I see is amazing. I didn't quite realise how physical.
I mean, I understand soldiers would have to be very strong and very well trained and all of those things,
but I didn't quite think it would be so hard and so regimental and so athletic and physical.
MARTIN An officer said that he was amazed at the physical sort of levels that they had.
He felt this went beyond acting. It was very tough and it wasn't acted physical.
It was it was it wasn't acted physically.
It was very physical as well as the degree of effort put in by the dancers and the high level of physical fitness.
The effect of the dancers physical presence broke through visual distance by impacting on other senses effectively.
If you would near enough, you would have been able to smell them.
They were sweating, Jesus. They were sweating. And you could definitely tell that.
You could tell when people were having a break effectively just because they needed to.
And you could hear the sound of people hitting the ground as well, which was also pretty brutal.
For the officers, the experience of watching the piece evoked memories of combat in preparation for combat as experienced in the body.
Then going actually out an operation, being dropped by helicopter and getting ready and so on,
you could feel the tension and that was really communicated.
And there's a lot of tension because you don't quite know what's going to happen and your body is getting prepared and the adrenaline is starting.
That brought back memories for Tim and other officers.
The tension is connected with embodied memories triggered by the performance,
whereas for the dancers it's more about an embodied experience of war as provoked by the
performance itself and felt in the moment of watching this sometimes had a discomfiting effect.
There's self triggered reflections on the war situation.
There is no pretence, you know, it's just hard, if not harder.
So you have absolutely no. It's all there. You can see exactly how hard they work, how much sweat.
And it's kind of frightening to see that. And sometimes it makes you feel uncomfortable because there is no sort of an illusion.
It's not a piece that she dreams out of nowhere. That's what's happening.
I'm going to look at to quickly look at two key moments of the work and the audience responses.
One part is the so-called night club scene. It's not it's not a nightclub.
No disco ball comes down or anything. It's just an imagined space.
And this was inspired by conversations with soldiers about how they let off steam when they returned from Iraq or
Afghanistan and how they loved going out with their soldier means because only they understood what they'd been through.
The dramaturgy of the work means there is never a total specificity of exactly
where they are in the way they're trapped forever in this aircraft hangar.
And these are at once imaginings, memories and fears.
Night club scene is an evocation of many experiences I've been told about,
often because the men are used to being an all male environments, they do prefer to let off steam together and behave badly.
It's a non-specific outpouring of male aggression and tension, including sexual tension choreographed to pop hit.
I got a feeling by the Black Eyed Peas. The nightclub scene starts with the floor bump dance by the male dancers, but gets progressively wilder.
Pogo ing jumping turns to pushing, which quickly turns to violence.
The physical needs of the men are strong. They need to touch one another, even if that touches violent.
At first, the violence breaks through their skins until they can legitimately hug.
And hold on to one another. Underneath, they are scared.
Young men that don't develops until they're almost brainless with the perceived physical effects of drink.
And then they see a female. All through this time, the female soldier has retired from the men and seems to be in her own space,
but perhaps in her own room at the front corner of the stage, slowly removes her clothes,
neatly folds them and takes down her hair from its tight bum.
Female soldiers talked of letting go of their soldier mask, but only in the privacy of their rooms and needing time to be alone,
to feel like a woman and do girly things such as hair care, body cam.
The women start to pay to herself with talk. And this scene is based on a true account of a woman soldier in Afghanistan,
talking about how vital her talk was to preventing sweat rashes and making her feel better in a combat zone.
In the work we use as a theatrical device, the men becoming aware of the scent,
an aura of a woman near them, conducting recorded interviews with soldiers at full rifles.
I asked the soldier what he missed most while away on tour, and he cited cited the smell of a women's perfume.
The dancers, too, remarked on how they smelled the talk, and it brought them out of their masculine world of fighting and brawling.
On stage, the men finally see the female soldier, and the setting is deliberately ambiguous.
Is she a dancer in the club, a stripper prostitute, or is she the same soldier alone in her room stretching and dancing alone?
Or does she exist only in the men's imagination if she starts trying to seduce the men?
Or is she a fantasy in their heads? The stage allows for this ambiguity to work into the magical and disturbing quality of the scene.
The female soldier has all the power in the room for seconds.
She has the power of sexuality.
The men almost seem to fear her, but through their looking it tends to last in the last full hour turns to stalking and they look like hungry wolves.
They act like a pack, honing in on their prey. There is a threat of rape and they each grab a male partner and pretend to [INAUDIBLE] each other.
Eyes locked and the women playing again, intimidating her with her sexual desire, dominance and deep aggression.
Tension builds the men chase until she turns and stops them with a dignified and strong stare.
Stare at their mothers, their wives, their sisters,
the power shifts and the female soldier goes through a transformation as they subjugate themselves before her literally worshipping her.
She is queen country, all women and all motherhood.
To them, the sacred goddess.
The moment ends and the infatuated sergeant tries to win her over, making a laugh to take away the memory of the so-called attack,
the tension of the scene with the female soldiers, very feminine solo,
her male colleagues, aggressive pursuit of her and the threat of imminent potential assault was commented on by many of the non-military spectators,
while also striking a chord with the officers interviewed.
It was a very, very good portrayal of the sort of sexual issue that arises on a six month tour away from your wife and girlfriends.
The unleashing of the sexual charge is quite sudden. It's sudden and unexpected.
As the female soldier without her fatigues reveals a new feminine identity,
which her colleagues have difficulty dealing with and which triggers aggressive rivalry between them.
There's also the thing of a whole lot of guys and one girl and the jealousy between them.
And when you want her, every woman looks amazing.
And if you particularly she looks even more amazing in that a real sort of very realistic thing that people have to sort of deal with,
which at one point this girl, often very slight pretty girl, other than, you know, I think it's a mate.
And the next thing she has a bit of a romantic interest. The next thing, she's just a sort of colleague.
This account is the complexity and the confused feelings that can arise in a soldier situation and the other spectators could also relate to.
One of the dancers interviewed said that her husband was in the parachute regiment in the T.A. for two years,
which she felt helped to connect to the emotions of the piece.
So on one level, she was thinking of her male soldiers experience the presence of women.
From my experience of knowing soldiers and hearing about them,
very true to probably what happens 99% of the time that they're having to kind of hold back as well.
And there'll be moments when they're just it's just another moment and another moment when they suddenly look at each other and think,
gosh, they're really stunning or, you know, there's a sense of attraction.
Both the female dancers interviewed were particularly affected by the scene with a female soldier,
which was the first example they cited when they asked them to describe a moment of moments which they remembered for doing.
This was a situation she could relate to as a woman. Made me think about the tension.
If a woman is over with a bunch of men fighting in a sexual tension for that long.
Being away from loved ones, I guess it was a kind of I was kind of concerned for that woman.
Peter, a dancer, also chose the section as the one he particularly liked in the focus group.
There was quite an extensive discussion about the scene in the way express conflict between frustrated sexual desire for the.
Women on the one hand and respect for her on the other.
People like this ambiguity, in contrast between animalistic group behaviour and the emotional needs underneath,
which made the men gentle and respectful. Several people expressed their agreement with Maria when she described her interpretation
of the female dancer's behaviour as facing up bravely to the soldiers aggression.
As if she were saying, Remember, I am one of you. We're all the same here, so don't come with that.
And she goes and they just face away. I thought that was so powerful.
Amazing, powerful and wonderful were adjectives used by other women in the group describing this section.
The final section of the work where one of the soldiers is seriously injured and takes the audience in the performance and a long build-up of tension,
intensity and meaning.
The scene shifts from choreographed movement, movement that is realistic, recognisable as military into a world where dance is allowed,
a freer rein and movement becomes a symbolic place of multiple meanings and readings.
There are sort of moments where it almost refers to the rights of spring with
a young male body as the sacrifice of war rather than a young female body.
And it brings the work into the realm of the metaphysical, as in addition to evoking specific military conflicts.
It also evokes a human quest for meaning and redemption.
The dancers begin to chase one another ganging up on the weak soldier until he's chosen.
Don't be so lifted in a crucifix crucifixion position.
And then he's sort of placed in the centre of the stage.
The dancers spin and then fool around, leaving him alone, spinning in the centre, a middle to building cacophony of sound.
The lights dim until a soldier is lit by a single spot.
There's a flash, an explosion, and he drops to his knees, accompanied only by a high pitched ringing.
He dances a solo, pulling back, struggling, dragging his lower body until he lies at the edge of the light,
shaking and convulsing in a replication of the shock reaction to blood loss.
The scene in which one of the soldier loses his legs in the blast was taken from
a description by a soldier who survived an IED blast that cost him his leg.
He was thrown upwards, seeing lights, then moved, then sky, then mud again as he went head over heels four times.
Then all he heard was the screeching in his ears, totally deafening.
He wanted to scream and fight and run, but it took him a while to realise that he did not have his legs.
And then he started shaking. Soldiers can lose all their blood and minutes of their arteries are not tied to the tourniquet.
To describe how time seemed to stop and everything was distorted.
We took that literally and distorted all the moments.
The quick things happened slowly, ever so slowly, as a soldier struggles to fight until he collapses,
the other foot jump up and instead of running to him, as one might expect,
they have to very carefully feel and pick their way across the stage to him.
Fingertips representing the thin metal sticks used to check for IEDs.
This is based on real life train bomb training I received in Dortmund.
The youngest soldier was strip chained into T-shirts and his legs are bound.
He's lifted, cradled, held, then placed down onto the stage.
We call this part of the piece The Rehabilitation Centre.
It's based on soldiers experiences of stabbings. The first shoe adaptations that are given to patients who are learning to walk on prosthetic limbs.
Two soldiers hold the young man's arms on the other side, with another walks in front to help.
If he falls, takes a few painful steps forward, he falters.
Falls is held back up until he finally shakes off his help and wants to go it alone.
And he begins a dance solo of the moves from earlier in the work.
But now on his knees he tries to dance. But the anger, pain and frustration are obvious.
The fourth is watch him and step aside, returning to their places, waiting for what might they be ordered to do next.
In this final scene, it was decided that the soldier's ankles would be tied to his thighs using military straps that look like tourniquets.
This means that when he's on his knees, he looks as if he's lost his lower legs.
As the scene changes, this shown in rehab, heavily caught.
And for me, this was a key scene of the world, controversial to civilian and military audiences alike.
Both injured soldiers and rehabilitation staff talked of however realistic the scene was to them, describing it as hard but truthful.
Kay wanted the audience to feel sorry. I wanted the audience to feel the literal breaking of the body and the pain of the injury.
Non-military audiences and participants often felt the scene was too long,
although one focus group member said that she felt it conveyed the reality of the experience more effectively.
One of the officers interviewed who had experienced this sort of event firsthand, expressed with some.
Difficulty finding the right words. His appreciation that it was presented in a non emotive way.
We had it strikes and we lost when we were in Afghanistan this last time and it was, you know, as a battalion we lost of stats,
we lost the same number of guys and sort of injured as well where I thought it was very good and portraying it with that, making it very emotive.
So, I mean, one of the things was almost the frantic, tragic ness of it all and trying to sort everything out and all that kind of thing.
Does Dawn a Dancing had no military connections or experience describe how this made her feel?
She responded with reference to specific muscles and expressed how the emotion and subsequent reflect shown were rooted in a physical response.
LEIGH Tragic. I think I got quite emotional and I was well, I didn't expect that.
I think it went back to the man who did the introduction at the beginning.
Frank Gardner had done an introduction to the beginning of this performance.
But it was funny because they put his legs back into the straps in the dancer's legs, and so his quads were really tightly bound,
and then he standing on his knees, I kept thinking, that must hurt for the dance, really putting himself out there as well.
I mean, think of the broader context.
Just I think she did a good job of visualising the severity of people going out there and dancing because it's bodies, not words.
You know, I've seen that before.
I've thought about it before, but it made me think about it in a different way because I saw the guy as a body minus the legs and his struggle,
which is trying to deal with that in the last couple of minutes of the piece.
So I'm going to jump to the conclusion.
So it's important for me that the piece should indeed end on potentially negative and angry notes for the broken body.
Despite all the rhetoric, politics, technologies and enemies, it's the individual body that takes the brunt of all wars.
I did not want an empathic hand, an end in which this tragedy makes us cry, but an ending that makes you face the reality.
I wanted to express the physical frustration of the young soldier and the waste of war on the body itself.
As noted above, the spectators at these performances did not engage in political discourse from responding to the work.
We made a connection with the context that encouraged political disengagement.
However, it's clear from the spectators responses that through the work they experienced
in bodies of four embodied effects that led them to reflect on the issues.
Although mediated in different ways and often with stronger responses to the directly physical, the more theatrical aspects of the work,
reflecting whether they had personal logic, knowledge of military training or armed conflict or dance training or close connection with the military.
Well, none of these facts matters. Spectators from all categories with support reported experiencing embodied effects that
provoked in them awareness of the soldier's experience and led them to reflect on war.
The work repeatedly brings audiences closer to the embodied experience of war and makes them uncomfortable for its military and dance audiences.
The work evokes lived felt in the body experiences that can open up memories of warfare and complex senses of identity following injury.
The lived,
empathic experiences of spectators provoked painful awareness of the live body as the tug of war and opened up a space for critical reflection.
Given the political context that lines the beginning of this paper, we'd like to suggest a direct,
embodied approach to performance that brings spectators to reflect on the body as a front line via an empathic
and sensory experience of dance is a powerful means by which to open up in a creative and effective manner.
The Legacy of war.