Saturday was odd. I spent most of the day working with a contemporary dancer. His project is to interview 28 different people, none of whom have a connection to dance, and use these interviews as the inspiration for the final piece. I agreed to be one of the 28. This meant that I spent the day in a dance studio, suggesting movement in response to specific questions. This was terrifying at first, but, after the initial moment of ‘what the hell does he want me to say?!’, actually became rather good fun, and not as difficult as you might think. And I was good and did it properly, and didn’t suggest anything that looked like the Brian Rogers Connection – which is a bit of a pity, but maybe he could work on something like that for his next project. He performs the finished piece around the end of March, so maybe there’ll be something to report about my choreographic debut then. Hold tight, dance fans!
After that, I headed across town to a reunion of the drama group I was a member of in my late teens. I’ve never been to a reunion before; the only other place likely to hold one would be my secondary school, and it took me five long years to escape from there. It would be a bitterly cold day on a very wild horse before I went back within a sporty boy’s stone throw of it.
It was quite fun to see people again, though there was an air of ambivalent melancholy about the whole thing; very strange to be in a room you haven’t been in for 15 years, with people who you haven’t seen for the same length of time, and if your memories are fond, which mine are, there’s something bittersweet about seeing that those people have put on the same kind of weight and lost the same amount of hair as yourself (I’m excluding the girls, here). Mind you, at the age of 19, my waist was so negligible that you could practically get a paper cut from it. I’ve made up for that since.
I felt none of the stereotypical feelings of one-upmanship that you’re meant to feel at these things; mainly, I think, because we’d all chosen to be part of the group, and shared similar interests, so all got on very well – unlike school, where you’re thrown together with whoever happens to be the same age as you, many of whom turn out to be, as in the case of my school, morons. I’m pleased that everyone I spoke to seemed to be happy and doing well, regardless of whether they’d gone into ‘the biz’ or not. But I think that’s probably the one and only reunion I’ll ever attend.
Sunday, I cooked dinner and watched Antiques Roadshow, so business as usual.
IN SUMMARY: I’m not a teenager any more. Though still a mean dancer.
