JOS BAKER

“Doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways”

Jos Baker is a wonderful dancer who worked as a dancer, actor, and collaborator for Peeping Tom, and he also worked for DV8 and Damien Jalet.

-You have an outstanding career. What do you think is the key to your artistic development, that makes you able to reach important goals?

“When I was a student, after being in the studio for almost 12 hours a day, I also spent time in the studio by myself pretending to be a cat, a lizard, or a horse, just because I was interested and I wanted to experiment. And now I am good at being a cat. And then, eventually, I have a lot of repertoires, with little special ideas, I can bring whenever I want and use them. I think, in a dance career, you need 3 things to have success: talent, luck, and work hard. But you only can really control one of the three. Talent is something that you already have, even if you can decide how you want to work with it. Luckily, you can manipulate it a little bit. But you can control how hard you work, this is the only thing you have. You need to work hard, taking it seriously but the light at the same time, but play around a lot.”

-From 2008 to 2014 you worked with Peeping Tom. What fascinates you about this company? And how does it work for the creation of a piece?

“In the beginning, it was not the direction I expected I would go, even if I was always interested in dance and theatre. But the work that I saw was so well-made, they are able to create really good performances. I saw the piece “Le Jardin”, and it was beautiful, funny, touching, weird, surreal, impressive, all this together, and I was fascinated. I auditioned for the company and they changed my view a lot. They help me also to develop my personal process, and don’t be afraid of presenting my personal ideas. In a company you really have to have your way of thinking, because, as dancers, we have a lot of independence, to try around and play with things and it should be different from what other people are doing.”

-How important is for you the theatrical component in a dancer?

“An old teacher of mine says “Acting, singing, and dance are three branches of the same tree”, they are almost entirely the same thing. They are all about using your body, and the voice, that it is an extension of the body, to communicate ideas and transmit empathy to the audience. And anybody who is on stage has a character. Even in walking, there are so many ways of walking. If you see a dancer coming on stage and standing, it can be from a traditional dance perspective, thinking about my weight, the position of my feet, my arms, and there is nothing wrong with that, but most of the audience is going to analyze that as a human being coming on stage. So if you ignore that the audience is watching you as a human being walking on stage, you are ignoring a really important thing. You always have a character, even in the most abstract piece. So trying to draw a clear line in between dance and theatre, it doesn’t make any sense.”

-You also worked in DV8. What do you like about the work in this company?

“I worked with DV8 for a short period of time. I was fascinated by how they use the body to tell stories, how they use physicality in real environment and life, to see things in different ways. DV8 focuses a lot on sexuality or political issues. There are particular issues that are really well-done with the body. Their precision and accuracy of their work."

-How much do you think is important in the process of researching and improvising?

“The process of improvisation is more about building and re-find vocabulary than just being spontaneous. You can be spontaneous and it can be amazing but it is limited. But when we improvise we usually use paths that we already use with our bodies. There are three modes of improvisations for me: just for fun, without a particular plan, for research, when I try to think about an idea and how this takes me and affects my body, in a constant process of understanding and experimenting with my body, building material. And then you can play more, because of your knowledge developed in the research and you have the technique of your quality to control your movements. So the last one of the modes is improvising in performance and it is linked to the previous two modes, because you apply all the knowledge, making choices on stage, on the basis of information you already have. And at the moment you can surprise yourself.”

-How do you react with bad days and struggles?

“In your education, there will be classes, teachers that you will like, someone not. It would be strange if everything is great all the time, that means that you are not paying so much attention. Sometimes things are not going to work how you want. You need to be really honest with yourself about that and find a solution. If you take a class, but you are feeling sad or tired, why do you have to pretend you are not tired? Try to think instead of doing the class embodying a character that is actually tired: that can be nice. It can be an interesting character. You cannot be the same every day, you should accept the changes in yourself and play with those and this can help you to push yourself further.”

-You are also a choreographer and I had the beautiful opportunity to watch “Of no fixed abode”, an amazing piece of yours, that shows your fascinating quality of movement and your ability to act on stage. What interests you about being a choreographer?

“The line of my company Trodden Dreams is “doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways”. My interest is mostly the human being, I am interested in people. I love human bodies, relationships, the complexity of all those things. So I want to look at the everyday experience of the human being, and it is interesting to find ways to look at that with physicality, but in a way that is not ordinary, but unique, special, virtuosic.

For me is a process, a conversation. The process is about playing with things, trying things out, seeing if it is going in the right direction. I also love to take the individual personality in the body and in the experience, what story that tells, and adding details, going further, changing things.

I believe the body is really good at talking about intimacy, love, relationships, the perception of others, the body is really good at that. If you are in a restaurant, and you see a couple, you don’t need to listen to their voices in order to understand their story. The words are not relevant in that conversation, they are just water the conversation is floating on. The actual conversation is happening in and with the body. So it is extraordinary how the body is a medium to tell a story.”

-What are you searching for in other dancers?

“It could be different. Someone sometimes is able to take my attention for reasons that I would have never thought about. So there are plenty of exceptions. When you see the research and knowledge in someone else’s body when someone is really investing in what they are doing. When it is visible that someone digested knowledge in his body and is able to really be himself in what he is doing. At the same time, sometimes I don’t understand why I found someone interesting, they just fascinate me. Sometimes it is not something really impressive, but the way and the presence of the dancer make him beautiful and special and it catches my attention.”

-You are also a teacher, and I still remember the energy in the studio during a class with you. What do you want to transmit to your students?

“I think the idea of independence, of not being dependent on a teacher, but to choose your personal way to work and grow as an artist. For me it is really important to explain the technique and background of how certain things works: I’m not teaching how to do specifically some movement, but to build up the bigger understanding on how that work, so that people can use it for their own research: if you know the principle, you don’t need someone that explains every part of a movement. I like to help students to grow independently and allow them to have courage and bravery. People should be courageous about their bodies and their ideas, and brave to try things that can also be scared. I want to create a safe and nice environment, in a way that encourages people.”

-Can you give some advice to young dancers?

“It is really important to also have a sense of independence, of choosing the path that you want to go along, choosing what interests me and going for that. For me, self-learning is always really important, so whatever the teacher is providing you, it is still your responsibility to learn. The teacher has the responsibility to teach, but your responsibility is to learn, and you should also decide what you want to learn. If a teacher gives you a correction, it is good, and maybe you need to work on that, but if you want to put your attention to something else because you want to focus and are interested in other things, go for that. It is always your responsibility to absorb the things that are going to help you and reject what is not going to help you.

The future of dance is with the younger people and even if I have more experience, this doesn’t make me always right: we are talking about contemporary dance.

I also find it important to do some “independent digesting”. That means going to the studio alone or with your friends, dancing, improvising, playing without having someone tell you what to do and for me, this is really important. This is a natural way to digest the material and it is important while you are at school. Even if in your education you have a lot of hours of classes, at the top of that you find some space for yourself, just to play around, see what it is working for you and for your body, what interests you. In this way, all the information is digested and becomes your personal material, not of anyone else. And digesting you are able to reject all the information that you think is not working for you or that is not interesting, to define who you are. Take time for yourself to digest.”

Thank you so much, Jos! It was an honor to have the opportunity to interview you.