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Morag Deyes OBE
 

Morag Deyes was artistic director and the creative force driving the expansion of Dance Base, Scotland's National Centre for Dance from 1994 - 2022. Since handing over that role she has been researching, mentoring, teaching, choreographing and creating opportunities for dance internationally. 

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In 2024 she researched Austronesian aboriginal dance and lifestyles within the context of elder ceremonies and will seek to create a new language of movement for older dancers. India - Investigating classical, tribal, folk and contemporary dances with a view to expanding a residency network. Mentor to Aditi Mangaldas / Drishtikon Dance Foundation in New Delhi for over two decades. Taiwan - Mentor and international networking support to award winning integrated group Resident Island Dance Theatre. 

 

She has been invited to chair and attend selection panels for choreographic awards including Premio Roma in Italy, The Stray Birds dance showcase in Taipei, Sunil Kothari Emerging dancer prize in Delhi, and Made in Scotland 2024/5.

IA: Can you introduce yourself and describe what it is that you do?
 

MD: OK. My name is Morag Deyes and what I do is imagine. What I did was be a dancer, a teacher, a founder of the National Centre for Dance in Scotland, mentor, (apparently – whatever that means, although Peter Boneham from Canada used to say it was monitoring, not mentoring that we do), cooking, mothering, complaining, laughing and plotting. That's what I do.

IA: What is your relationship to endings?

 

MD: You got me there because I don't believe in them. There are no ends. It depends whether you're applying lateral – not lateral – linear thinking or whether you're applying imaginative and philosophical thinking. Linear wise, I suppose some things stop and then some things start. That's easy to follow. But from a more interesting – as far as I'm concerned – perspective, there is no end. Even at the end, there's no end because that’s when disintegration starts happening. So there’s basically movement. Whether it's movement of the body or thoughts or whatever. So I'm quite ambivalent about the word ending because as is famously said in jazz circles as one door closes, another one slams in your face. You could say that the world or us or life is made up of lots of tiny endings, but therefore, also tiny beginnings. Long answer.

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IA: What influenced your thinking in that?

MD: What influenced me to think that was just being aware and awake. Maybe it’s also something to do with having given birth. The idea that having been around people and at my age, having witnessed people at death and very near death. Beginnings and endings are a little bit ambivalent in that sense. There’s also certain spiritual paths that I've wandered down, read about and sometimes practice. We go into that wheel of life situation where there is no ending, it's just the beginning. I'm not necessarily talking about reincarnation, just energy in general. Lots of things have fed into it and maybe layered on top of the esoteric stuff is common sense.

IA: What was 2024 like for you in terms of dance?

MD: Jesus Christ, the easy ones first? 2024. OK. A lot happened in 2024. The first thing that popped into my head in terms of dance was the journey that I took in September 2024, I snoogled around quite a lot looking at indigenous dance forms. I guess I started getting into, in terms of dance, I started getting into what is natural movement. What is something that can't be ignored in terms of the volition to move and what is non pretentious? And very, not basic exactly, but intrinsic to our bodies. I started getting into a lot of thinking about that, the kind of way that we inherently feel and move all the way from childhood through to the end. That's happening a lot in indigenous communities because they don't get “dance training.” I've spent so many years training myself, watching other people, all of that dance education, syllabuses, ballet, contemporary – all of it. Of course there are scores and rules to follow, there are ways that you have to make your body go into for somebody's idea of what that form is. I was just really fascinated as to what happens when you don't have that and you just let it happen. That happened a lot. What else happened? Dance wise? Not much.

IA: In terms of your MBE and OBE – did they mark some sort of ending?

MD: Yes, I just threw my moral compass out the window. Is that an ending? I don't know. No. I didn't think of them as an ending at all. It was just an intriguing thing that happened. Not only do I come from a very poor background, but I'm also Scottish. A lot of the times I think that India is one of my second homes. I've got so many friends there and I've worked deeply with Indian artists. I've learned a lot about colonialism, and looking into indigenous populations I also learned a lot about colonialism. The OBE...sorry, the MBE was different because I was hysterical and a bit like oh my god – I've got a gift, more bling and somebody loves me. Someone put me forward for this and isn't that delightful? And that was quite a naive way of...I considered for maybe 10 seconds whether to accept it or not. Whereas with the OBE it was different, maybe seven years later. And I did question it, but it didn't seem like marking the end or the beginning of anything. It was just an event.

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IA: With your time at Dance Base, especially as a programmer, I'm interested to hear your thoughts about the ends of the festival each time. You've seen so many ends of so many festivals during your time at Dance Base.

MD: From a linear point of view, there are a lot of endings to the festival, because some people would come for a week and another would come for three weeks. So the end of each individual show might happen at different times throughout August. The other way of looking at it is at the end of the festival program. I don't know about everybody else that was there on the front line, but certainly I always got sick. I always came down with some kind of flu or exhaustion, even though I was completely on a mega high by the end of August. It was always such a blast and we'd all have an amazing time with lots of stories and lots of successes and failures we didn't expect. There was all sorts going on, a huge adventure, but I would get sick and exhausted. Then there starts to come threads of little stories from the artists who were there during the festival. They would say, oh, during the festival I got seen by this person and that person and we've been invited to some festival or venue. There's those kind of threads that would drop down after the end and then there would be the mother of all parties on the last night and I would encourage people to misbehave as much as possible. And they did I'm glad to say. I don't know how it affected others because I would be at home nursing some kinda lurgy, so I would never really know whether the tech director or the producer or other members of staff were coming down with something. We'd all just go to ground for a couple of weeks at the end.

IA: Looking back at all of those festivals that you curated, what are the three most memorable moments from across those like nearly 30 years?

MD: That is of course an impossible question, and I know that you're good for an impossible question. You always gonna come up with at least one of them because I read your other interviews and you ask at least one impossible question. I should have been ready, but I wasn't ready for that though. I'm just gonna share the three that spring to mind and they won't be the three that were the most successful. One festival, I was looking out of the window and I saw a South African – sort of street dance – group busking. I went out and to watch and listen to them and they were great. I asked them what venue they were in and they said they didn't have a venue. I said you have now, but next year – we didn't have space in the program for the current year, but next year let's make it happen. They came over and they were amazing. There were queues around the block to see them and they were just fantastic. It was such a joyful thing that no matter what kind of level of knackered I was during August, if I went in to see their show, I'd come out smiling and energised. They were also a blast at the last night party. So that, plus their tech rehearsal. Everyone had an allocated four hour tech rehearsal and their four hours was ticking by and no one had turned up. Three hours and 45 minutes had gone by and the tech crew are sitting around going, where are they? Then two guys came in, they walked over and said, hi, we are from After Freedom. Great, you're three and three quarter hours late, do you wanna tech your show? They walked into the theatre, looked around and said, this'll be great. And then they left. That was their tech rehearsal. That whole adventure was something else and it reminded me how beautiful African dances are, what it does to you somatically when you're watching it. That was really something. God, there's so many.

There's a guy called Henry Montes who used to dance with - maybe he still does from time to time, I don't know – Siobhan Davies for a long time. Henry came to do a solo and I don't think he did it in many other places and it was just incredibly exquisite, it was like this little jewel that I wanted everyone to see. But not everyone saw the jewel, because it was a very lo-fi solo. The first five minutes at least of the solo was just forearms moving around on the ground, but it was done so exquisitely and I remember being really pleased that we'd brought something that thoughtful to the madness of the fringe.

 

Then I suppose almost anything by Pat Kinevane. Pat is an Irish solo theatre performer who uses his body a lot and he has the charisma to fill the Albert Hall, and yet he was here in our little venue, which at that time was seating just over 80 people. It was like standing in front of a blast furnace, watching one of his shows. He was wonderful, but, honestly, that was a really difficult question to answer. Next.

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IA: It's been 3 years since you've stepped down from your role at Dance Base. What do you think about that time now with that distance between you and that ending?

MD: I thought the last question was the most difficult, but they get more difficult. It's a similar feeling, I'm gonna take the sadness out of it, because there is a sadness and a grief and I could go down that road and we'd be greetin’ by the end of it. Let's not go there. Let's think about the wonder of the thing. When I was there, fairly consistently, I would be gobsmacked at what a privilege it was – and I know privilege is a loaded word now – but an honour or what a miracle it was for me to be in that position and to have a great deal of the time and freedom to make choices on behalf of a dance community that I loved. The thing started out by giving a platform and showcase to Scottish dance artists and I was just so pleased, thrilled, and grateful to have that opportunity and it was an opportunity which continued for a long time. So when I look back on it now, I still think, yeah, wow. That was an incredible thing to be in a position to bring other people on board and to get the venue in the Grass Market up and going and to be able to stand up in front of a lottery committee or some press, to be able to stand up and talk about how incredible dance is and what it does to you on an individual and on a collective basis. The power of it. It was just amazing and an absolute a gift. When I look back on it, that's what I feel.

 

There's an element...I'd be joking, not joking, but lying, if I said that I wasn't proud, 'cause I am. There’s a huge amount of other people...it takes a village, as they say and a huge amount of other people who were putting up with me because I think I'm probably quite infuriating to work with. I think because I’m a bit focused and a bit overzealous sometimes and because I think if you're in an organisation you assume that everybody else is as bonkers as you, but they're not. Maybe I was a bit infuriating when I look back on it. Oh God, really, did I push it that far? But hey, no regrets.

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IA: One of the legacies that you created was Prime. A group for people over 60 which started with Golden classes and then Gold Plated. Can you talk about how you think and feel about Prime?

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MD: They're incredible. Golden started out...I'd got to 58 or 59 years old myself, the people that I was seeing around my age and older were going into ballet class to do what they did when they were probably six, which is great, it's great, ballet's great, but I could see on their faces as they were going up to ballet class, they would be becoming pupils or they would go to tap class 'cause they'd seen it in the movies and that's lovely too. I remember thinking, but that's not the kind of grown-up I am or I'm going to be. I wanna be doing something a bit more adult – in a non-creepy sense – so I thought, OK, let's get people into the room, have a kick about class that’s not particularly this, that, or anything and see what happens. See if my fantasy of older people from a particular generation, having a sense of humour and being sassy and adventurous, maybe that's just me making shit up. Maybe they're not there at all. So, I started to write the job description for the class teacher, because another thing I remembered was when I used to answer the phone at Dance Base and people would say, I'd like to come to this class, is it taught by a young person? And I would be like yeah, and I thought for Prime part of the job description was that it should be taught by someone of advanced years and someone with a sense of humour who could jump between different genres in the class and read the room. Someone who could really get a sense of community going and anyway, I'm looking at the job description and I realised it was me. I thought I've gotta do this. If it's me, I don't need to be paid as I'm already artistic director and I'll take an hour out and we'll see what happens. It was a free class for everyone and anybody can go. So we did it, it was a riot and we had such a good time. I was so bloody nervous before I went into the studio the first time, and then I couldn't wait to get back in every week. It was very clear that there was a group there with lots of subgroups. There was definitely a subgroup that wanted to be on stage and wanted to push themselves. So I thought, OK, let's make a company and if we're gonna make a company, it's not gonna be a community group. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I would like to try another experiment – like Golden was an experiment – and run it as close to a professional dance company as possible. Giving the people in that company a sense of responsibility and ownership, getting into class as often as possible and staying in shape and focusing – all of those things that professional dancers do. So we did that and that was Prime. It's their 10th anniversary this year and they're making a book of some sort. Then Prime just grew. At first there was lots of whisperings in the corner of the studio, “I don't really want to show off” well you're in the wrong place darling. Either you stay and show off 'cause that's what you're gonna be doing. And not just showing off in the sort of ta-da sense, but really digging inside and bringing out their personalities. That was the thing that I wanted to avoid with Golden and Prime, I wanted to get away from the infantilising of elders and celebrating the magnificence that we're all still standing. Of course, I started Golden when I was 58, 59, so that I would be the youngest person in the room for once. No, that's facetious, that's not why I started it, obviously.

 

IA: How do you end relationships?

 

MD: Usually I find poison or taking out a contract on someone, that's very hands off. The line can't be traced back to me. Victimization is quite good. Stalking. Lots of ways of doing it really? What kind of a fucking question is that? There's so many different endings which are not endings of course, as we know. But are you talking professional or personal?

IA: It could be professional or personal.

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MD: Are you talking about closure?

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IA: For some people there is no such thing as endings, you could be 10 years down the line, but something still hasn’t ended.

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MD: They're a reflection of what the relationship was in the first place and no two relationships are the same. You're asking me that question, how do I end relationships? But relationships are ipso facto usually with at least one other person. It's up to them also how the relationship will end, doesn't it? There are some relationships professionally and personally that have fizzled away into the distance and they're still there, it's still vaguely there and you could excavate it possibly and find it again. There's others that have been almost like ghosting, just an end from one side. It's very unusual unless you're incredibly woke. I don't know, I haven't tried this one yet, but apparently you can have a really mindful...what was it that Gwyneth and your man Chris called it Conscious Uncoupling. Apparently you can have those where there's no animosity and the are children happy. It's really a reflection of the relationship itself.

IA: How do you consider your archive and what do you think your legacy will be?

MD: I have not considered an archive, I don't know if I've got one and I'm not really sure what it means, so I'll go to the next part of the question.

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IA: What do you think your legacy will be?

 

MD: Legacy? Definitely being part of the...I suppose I led the fight for the National Center for Dance in Scotland. I remember somebody saying to me during the process of trying to raise the money for the building in the Grass Market – because we were tenants of the council before then – that it was just not respectful to dance. We made two and a half lottery applications and I remember one of the assessors from the lottery, I said to her, “I'm looking at the assessment, fascinated by the assessment because as I previously stated, I can't understand why...I'm looking at it thinking, it's good to have this assessment in bullet points and we'll try and fix that for the next application.” But then I started taking it personally, so I said to this woman, “Tell me the truth, is it something I'm doing or saying which is putting a negative slant on things? Am I being too mouthy, is there anything that I can do to make this fly?” And she said, “Absolutely not.” You are, I remember she used the word champion, she said, you're championing the cause and it made me feel very Boadicea, very warrior queenish. My legacy would be that there was a time and a place where being a warrior or being pushy or being extreme in your enthusiasm – there’s a place for that – and I think I fitted into that right place, right time and with the right energy. My legacy might be that that's a message when there are times where that sort of energy is necessary. The bricks and mortar legacy is in the Grass Market. That's with Dance Base. I did do other things before that, but if we're talking about Dance Base, that would be a legacy. Legacy wise, thinking about the arc of what I did before, it's always been to do with some kind of kick-ass energy. I think that if I have left a trail of infuriated people behind me, I may also have left a trail of inspired people behind me for the same reasons that I was infuriating.

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IA: There was your whole work at in Bath, your work in Portugal, dancing vaudeville, the work with Lindsay Kemp. There's different parts to your past. You're not just Morag from Dance Base.

 

MD: That's right. But, I've been Morag in all of them and so if it's a Morag legacy rather than a Dance Base, the Morag legacy would be about energy and about being fearless and awkward sometimes. I'm a bit of a tangential thinker. I'm also a bit of a...no, I was gonna go down the Star Trek road and call myself an empath, which is insane, but that's the kinda day I'm having, but there is definitely something about sensing a zeitgeist or a vibe that I've always managed to bring to bear. I don't know how that happens and I'm sure other things are falling by the wayside so that can happen. But that's a thing that I've done in the past as well, I've read the room, the room being my environment.

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IA: Your research into indigenous practices. How are you documenting or absorbing those, and what is the output or future thinking around that?

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MD: With great difficulty. As before, in my life in general, I may have stepped into different situations, including Dance Base with an air of naivety because – I’m thinking of the tarot card of the fool, who is gazing up at the sky just about to fall – there's an element of that in me as a person. I went into the studying, or studying is very lofty word for it at the moment, but I went into the discovery of indigenous dancers in a very naive way. Now I realise that there are a lot of other elements that are brought to bear on indigenous people and their dancing is part of life. You can't go in and be part of that life in a shallow way if you're doing it properly. I can't just go and watch some dances and then come back with a few steps, I can't do that. Yet I thought at the beginning I thought I could. I thought I’m gonna just go and hang with a tribe for a few days and it'll be nice. What? Really? One of the sadder parts of leaving Dance Base is that I've lost my tribe and I think that is one of the reasons that I was very drawn to indigenous dancers. As well as the authenticity and the nature of the movement that's so incredible, I was also looking for a tribe, literally and metaphorically. Where it'll go, I'm not sure, but in the first research that I did, I discovered that I have no right to assume that I can culturally appropriate any movements and that I have to ask permission in order to be able to do that. And so there's a completely different focus now on how I'm approaching it. What I would love to do is, I would love to be given and gifted different and small movements. I have a few already that I was given by a couple of tribes in Taiwan and one from the Maori tradition in New Zealand. I would love to fuse them together somehow, not literally, but use them as inspiration to make a new dance vocabulary that fits into a body that isn't young anymore. I think that there's something there. I really believe that there's something there, there's a new form and a new score that can happen which is very joyful. It isn't ballet, it isn't contemporary, it isn't jazz dance and it's not folk dancing. It's new for old. New for old. Ringing the bell. I'm not sure where it's going. Who's gonna give money to a 72-year-old Scottish lady to go and hang out with some tribal elders? Not many people. So it's been a bit tough just trying to find support. It's assumed that when you get to my age, and if you've done something like Dance Base for a long time, that you now have a healthy pension and all of the...I'm on a state pension and I have no money to speak of. I need to raise the funds to do it. That's another element that hadn't crossed my mind because after all these years with Dance Base where I had an organisation behind me and I had that support so I could apply for money for lots of different things and it would work, but it's not the same. It's a different world I'm inhabiting now, but I still believe in it and I want to keep going with it.

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IA: Is there anything that you've not spoken about in terms of dance or endings that you would like to speak about?

MD: I'm reminded of something that William Forsyth said when somebody asked him about the choreographic process. He said you can start anywhere and if you can start anywhere then you can stop anywhere as well. That's just me going off on a tangent, that's not answering your question. If you can start anywhere and you can stop anywhere, the stopping immediately triggers a start. That's just the way it is. Thinking about endings, no, you've asked some doozies in terms of questions, I have to say. I'd be intrigued to know what you think about endings.

 

IA: Is there anything about the vaudeville days, Portugal or the stuff with Lindsay?

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MD: It's not a venn diagram when a circle conflates into another circle? The loop happens. It wasn't vaudeville, although I adore the idea of it being vaudeville. Vaudeville being very much an English thing or maybe Italian. But what I did in Portugal were very full on shows. They were about three hours long and there were set up and they were called Revista. It looked a bit like vaudeville, but it was much more punchy than vaudeville. There were a lot of sketches in it as well as dance numbers and other things. Almost all the sketches were political satire and I know this because I started to learn to speak Portuguese, so I understood it. I also know it because I was there on vinte e cinco de Abril which was the big socialist revolution. It was a huge lesson to me when I realised that none of these satires or sketches had any power in them anymore because the revolution had happened and censorship was lifted in Portugal – and in Lisbon in particular – for about a fortnight. You could buy anything, anywhere. In the newspaper stalls that you would have around the centre of the city, you could buy pornography for a couple of...so censorship was lifted. There were two things that I remember being really fascinated about and one was the end of a particular kind of structure and the beginning of a new one. That no man's land in the middle was where no rules applied. I remember thinking, 'cause I was a hippie, maybe rules are good. Maybe there is a place for some kind of structure. Whereas before I'd thought, let’s go wild and let's go crazy man. Going crazy might not be a great idea. That's a tangent that I didn't expect to go off on. Working with Lindsay was wildness personified really. He was a genius. The thing about Lindsay is he was always on. You know people who are over the top and you think, yeah, so let's see you at breakfast. No, he was always like that because his life was a performance. Everything. It was amazing. I love him dearly. Loved. Can you still love someone after they've died?

 

IA: We're in the end times. It's literally the end of the world.

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MD: What are we playing now? Are we playing little role play?

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IA: If you could have a last dance with two people, who would they be and why are you choosing them?

MD: Living or dead?

IA: Your choice. It's your last two dances in the world. Who do you want 'em to be with?

 

MD: It really does depend. Again, I can't be giving you a straight answer. That would just be not true to form, but it does depend whether, when you say dancing, if we're talking about something up close like a tango or whether we're talking bouncing around the room. Bouncing around the room would be with Trisha Brown and Isadora Duncan. That would be a bouncing around the room situation for sure. I'm completely obsessed with Trisha Brown at the moment. I've always adored her work, but there's something about it now that I'm just loving. I would love to play. What you would do if you were in the room with her, you would be playing all the time and vibing. It would just make me happy. Something a little bit closer or more intense. Germaine Acogny because I did dance with her fairly recently and it's a wonder to be dancing close to her because she has an incredible energy. A lot of what she does, or a lot of what she would do in this scenario would be going into something deep and rooted in the indigenous situation. I'm realising we're all women, so I have to find a man that I'm gonna dance up close to. I remember very much enjoying a dance with Colin Poole because he's very funny, but he's also a fucking outrageously beautiful dancer. I hope he's still dancing. I don't know. I haven't heard from Colin for a long time. He came and performed at Dance Base a few times, and we would have those kinds of conversations that were almost one word sentences, just perfect vibing. One fringe festival I was walking down the street, very close by to where I live and I don't know...I still don't know why, but I stopped, turned around and I looked up at the top floor of a building across the road and there was Colin standing there. We've definitely got this thing going on and to dance with someone that you're that close to would be amazing. It would be something vaguely quite pointy, but also a little bit sensuous. There would be a kind of tango’y, Latino salsa’y type thing. We'd make it up as we went along. They're the ones I can think of right now. I remember I gave up smoking when I was at the Assembly Rooms, that was 1995 or something and I remember I was doing really well, 10 days, and Laurie Booth came to teach a workshop. He was performing at the festival theatre and I'd talked him into teaching and he came down to teach and it was great. And then I said, let me show you around. I used to love showing people around the Assembly Rooms like it was my gaff, chandeliers of god knows what. Anyway, we ended up in the huge ballroom in the Assembly Rooms, which was completely empty except for a chandelier or five. And then he said, in a very intense Laurie Booth kind of way. “Do you tango?” And I said – I became about 16 – fine. So he came in with the tango position. We did a tango. I think I stood on his feet a few times, but it generally, it was fantastic. Heart thumping, hilarious. It was so sexy. Then he went off and I went downstairs into the office and started smoking again immediately. So it's his fault. But that intensity is so beautiful, especially if it's a dancer who believes in their dance because it comes at you. With tango they say it’s heart to heart. You’re pressing the chest bones. It's beautiful.

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IA: What is the best ending in dance that you've ever experienced?

MD: There's some shows that didn't end nearly soon enough. Best ending in dance. Like a finale or the best death scene?

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IA: It could be the ending of a production on stage, it could you finishing a class.

 

MD: Stop it. Honestly. We're not that shallow...that we can just skim across the top and go I think. The best ending in dance technically, like formally is at the end of a narrative where somebody dies. There are some productions of the ballet, Giselle, where at the end she goes back into the grave. If it's done properly, because the music is fantastic, if it's done properly and the whole of act two, it's only a two act ballet, if the whole of act two has been done right, then it can be devastating, even though, she's in pointe shoes. The endings of works that I've seen. I honestly can't think of...there's so many. No. I can't think of any. There's too many. Giselle is a good one. The death. That's a very literal ending. Finales are final. There's so many, it's not called a finale for nothing. Usually people bring everything they've got into the last three minutes of a show.

IA: Is there anything else that you'd like to say or speak about?

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MD: No, I just hope that this has worked for you and that you've enjoyed it and that I didn't go off on too many tangents. It's been useful to think about, prior to this and reading the interviews you've already done, they were really fascinating and just to be reminded about endings because right now is massive. But like with a lot of relationships, they say it takes a month for every year or something that you have in our relationship.

IA: I think that's generous. I would say it's more.

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MD: It can be more for some things and not for others. Some things you're like, hey, I'm over it after six months. But with Dance Base, for me, there was so many different tentacles. So it wasn't just Prime, it wasn't just the fringe. There were the community classes and Parkinson's and blah, blah blah. So there were so many endings. It was interesting to think about that and to be reminded...to keep stepping back and therefore forwards. I'm very honoured that you should ask me. Thank you.

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