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

 

PP: Sure, yeah. I've done no prep for this which I thought was useful. I live in Nottingham. I'm an artist, sometimes a writer, sometimes a dramaturg, sometimes a researcher, sometimes a performer. The largest part of my efforts goes towards my collaboration with Rohanne Udall - currently under the name Salamèche. We make artworks, we make performances, we also facilitate and do curatorial projects and we've been working together for 10+ years. We work across dance, performance and visual arts and we're very curious about moving across disciplines and different cultures, different economies and different expectations. I don't think we necessarily cross pollinate in a very intentional way, it’s more like we're curious about different kinds of and different ways of working, with different expectations and different models of practice. Beyond that, I've just finished a PhD and that was my major source of income for the past four years. I'm now in a kind of crisis of like...Shit. I need to find some work. I used to write some dance criticism and I've performed for people in different disciplines. I find myself busy in different ways.

IA: What is your relationship to endings?

PP: I was really struck by something the performance artist and researcher Rajni Shah once said – and I've tried to track this down, where they said it, but I can't – “In theatre and performance, we talk about beginnings all the time, and the care people take towards starting a collaboration and all that. And then usually what happens is the project happens, the show happens, and then there's no follow up conversation. It just ends and people go their own way. I thought what would it be like if we took as much care towards the endings of things as we took towards the start?” I think maybe I heard them say that, or read them saying that 10 years ago and that's been my go to whenever I think about endings. I think about that quote and I think about them saying that. And it’s kind of a provocation to go: “What is it to take care towards endings, both within artistic projects, collaborations, but also other things in life?” My dad died two years ago and what is it to be in the aftermath of that. In terms of, logistically, administratively and tidying up – death is admin heavy – but also in relationships. My sense of endings is really a constant question of, what else could I do to be in relationship to this thing in its ending, or afterlife? If I think about it in that way, I am surrounded by a richness of endings. I don't need to start a new project to be busy for the next 10 years. There's so many things to attend to and tidy up.

IA: What do you mean by the richness of endings?

PP: There's all these different things that I am entangled with or am connected to in some way
that are ending, or have ended, or are happening now, but will end at some point. And to be busy with them. I can happily be very busy with them. You know, I'm not short of things to do. I don't need to come up with a new project because there's so much to be done.

IA: How do you end an artistic relationship?

 

PP: I like that question, because it feels like the “you” could be a, “how does one end” or “how does it end?” But this is how do you end it Paul? I think I'm usually, and it's the same for romantic relationships, I'm usually the person who advocates for many exit interviews, I want to chat about it, I want to hear how it's gone, how people are feeling about it. Ask what's the most dignified and pleasurable or interesting way we can put this thing down. That obviously requires the other person to be interested in that, and they don't always want to do that. Usually I find myself in the position of the person who's asking for more conversation, or proposing that. Whether or not it's met. That potentially can go on for quite a while. I think in one...I'm thinking about a collaboration I had, it was just for one project, maybe in 2019, and we met up again in 2023 to go for a walk. I was like, how do we feel about that project now? What's going on? What happened then? Why was there friction? How do we feel about that friction?

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IA: Was it a post mortem? You're interested in revisiting the end after a thing has ended?

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PP: Yeah. I want to understand what was going on, what we each understood to have been going on – which is usually different – and what it was about each other, how we were interacting or hurting each other, or trying to get something from that situation, to better understand that. Often I think about this image of the ground being littered with debris and bits of broken things and shards of glass or whatever. And there's an attempt to very gently clear some of that up, not to erase it, but this feeling of wanting to leave fewer painful things to step on. There's a desire to tidy up past harms, again not to erase them...or attend to past harms. Maybe that's a better way of putting it.

IA: Is there a relationship between past harms and endings?

PP: Maybe. One thing I think about with that is going, would I be interested in doing this if no one got hurt? In relationships or collaborations. Where it was all really great, would I care about doing that? Then I'm like, have I had any relationships where it's all been totally swell and utopian and harmonious? I'm unsure. Do things end when they're all harmonious and great? The things I do have barely any funding. We're doing it just because, not because it’s funded. There was a collaboration, for two years, and I got the impression that the person leading the project wanted me to leave. I was very inconvenient in the questions I was asking, and they turned around and said to me at one point, “you have a high tolerance for discomfort.” I was like, yeah, I think it's very true. I'm willing to stick with something. I think that's partly a sense – in that instance – it was to do with, I don't know if I'm using this word in the right way, but vindictive. I was partly motivated by spite to be there, but I think it's also a thing that helps me bear the uncomfortable, to be in proximity after a relationship full of friction. I want to seek more dialogue and I think I have a high tolerance for discomfort.

IA: What is it like reaching the end of your PhD?

PP: Someone asked me recently...I finished at the end of March, and now it's late May. Do you wish you were back there? Do you wish it was still happening? I was like, good god no. No. The last six months was extremely intense and hardcore work. I basically chucked out everything I had written and started a new PhD. So the last six months were very intense and I have no desire to be in that again, at least for the minute. I've been...I was exhausted and I think I still am. Less physically exhausted now more mentally or intellectually exhausted. I've been quite busy with some artistic projects, but mostly I've just been doing quite a lot of DIY in this home that I've moved into last October, that I'd put off while I was finishing writing the PhD. Everything my system is telling me is, don't rush into any big new projects. Take as much time as possible to go slow, to rest, to not push yourself. When I look at my peers and friends who finished PhDs over the past two years, a lot of them have a kind of exhaustion. I'm in this strange limbo where I've submitted the PhD, but I've not yet had my viva. So it's not over, but generally I feel just a sense of OK, that was really intense, to get this thing out of my system, and now my system is telling me do as little as possible. I'm very happy to be listening to that. There's other things to say about the PhD in endings.

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IA: Go on...

PP: I think the PhD was about attending to the ending of something as well. The PhD I wrote, I was writing about...do you know Chris Goode, the theatre director? There's a theatre director with a legacy of harm. Many people who worked with him, or some people who worked with him, describe their experiences as being abusive, which is a very painful revelation. It’s one of a number of revelations that I think rocked a number of people in theatre and performance in the UK. He's a very influential voice. Some people who worked with him and organisations who worked with him erased the traces of him from their websites. I don't condemn that. I think actors who chose to not list their professional accreditation with him is, in many ways, very brave, considering they were some significant credits. Some organisations put a relatively short statement of, yes, we acknowledge that he harmed people...to various degrees of discomfort and they acknowledged it and left his digital trace up. My thesis was really trying to attend to the legacy of his thinking, writing and philosophising about making performance – particularly the ethics of director/performer relationships with the understanding or with the claim that he was a big influence on a number of generations of UK theatre makers. I was influenced by him deeply and that influence is not so easily excised or erased after the revelations of his harm. There's this quite uncomfortable sense that he influenced my practice, but I don't know what to do with that influence. My thesis is one of a number of attempts by a number of people to sort of deal with...or attend to that legacy and think about how to make sense of it. I think the argument that says he was a monster and an abuser, and everything he did and said was was monstrous and abusive, I'm not convinced by. I think lots of what he was arguing was common to many other theatre makers and theatre philosophers. So it's having a sense of, what was the risk, or the harm, or what's useful. What can we learn from the situation? The thesis is an attempt to deal with an ending in that sense. Tied to that is my feeling that, you know, let's say I go into the viva and they say, Paul, this is a brilliant thesis, and we pass you without corrections, you’re the best scholar ever. The project wouldn't be done for me. I feel a sense of responsibility or desire to somehow make the thesis available to the wider theatre community, who were and who I claim were influenced, and still are influenced by Goode and are not sure what to do with that influence. I don't yet know what that would that might look like, whether that's turning a version of it into a book, or doing some kind of project, or disseminating it in a different way, or inviting different people into conversation. I wouldn't be content if it just disappeared into a university archive. The first step is, do the viva, see how that goes, and then think about how it might circulate, or how it might land with and in different communities.

IA: What is the end of your PhD? What are the readers left with?

PP: What do I leave the readers with? At its core, I'm talking about Chris's writing and philosophising. I'm talking about a very particular thing within that, and that's an ethical question of, what does it mean to subject yourself in Chris's work. It's the performer, the performer on a stage, before an audience, but I'm thinking about not just an artistic practice, but in all kinds of contexts. What does it mean to subject yourself to encounters which are really uncomfortable and stretch you and push you. And then secondly, what is it to subject another person to those kinds of experiences? I think there's a link to a post #MeToo climate. There's a well intentioned, but not so useful, ethical consensus which has emerged that things are always better if everyone is comfortable and that if everyone consents to everything...maybe enthusiastically consents to everything. I argue across the thesis that actually there are many important experiences and practices which involve deliberately entering discomfort and pushing yourself in situations which are not enthusiastically consensual, maybe you're doubtfully consenting to something, and maybe you don't even know exactly what it is that you're consenting to. More uncomfortably, I claim that there are valuable practices in pushing other people into those spaces. For example, therapists. If a therapeutic process only ever affirms and the person feels comfortable and supported, I think there's important work that's not being done. The challenge and being stretched, all these things. And in the case of Chris Goode's work, he was asking younger men to take their clothes off and do sexually explicit material. So it looks much more abusive. There's various sexual gratification and power dynamics there that are problematic. But I think even if everyone keeps their clothes on in a rehearsal process, very often directors might be pushing actors or challenging them to enter states that are uncomfortable or stretch them. I have certainly and I find those ethics complex. It's an attempt to think through them. What I hope to leave people with is a sense that, grey areas of discomfort and power will persist. We can't wish them away and just say no, everything should always be comfortable and consensual. They will persist and we need to have a way to think about them and deal with them. I propose some tools. People might disagree and that's totally fine. Some people might be like, “OK, I personally just don't...I don't go anywhere near them, and I only want to be comfortable, and I never want to make anyone else comfortable.” I'm totally fine with that. That's you, but you still acknowledge that that'll happen for other people, or they'll come up. That's what I hope they're left with. They might be left with many other things. No one's read...maybe my supervisors haven't even read the whole thing yet. There's parts of it that were written very late. What else might they be left with? The thesis is deeply personal as well. I worked with Chris. I had first hand experience of these practices and I have to deal with that in the thesis, and my positioning in relation to it. I don't know what a reader might think about me, or the act of me writing about this thing.

IA: We're almost at the midpoint of 2025…

PP: How exciting...

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

PP: I went to Homobloc and it sucked. Homobloc is a big queer dance party in Manchester in a massive warehouse and I was extremely disappointed by the dancing culture there. Another way of saying it is I'm craving spaces for social dancing. Queer dance floors that I am not accessing in Nottingham, where I live, or Homobloc in Manchester. There used to some great dance parties in Nottingham...there was an art space called One Thoresby Street and in the last year of its existence – I think it closed in 2021 – they just threw the best dance parties. There's a lack of good clubby dancing in Nottingham and in my life. I was dancing a fair bit. I've been doing a performance that happens in people's homes called We Move in Close Circles, with three collaborators, Rohanne, Orley Quick and Sam Pardes and there's a scene in it where we do a dance. It's a dance choreographed by a guy called Elliott Minogue-Stone and we asked him to make us a dance and a lot of the references we gave were quite cringey. I can't remember the TV show or where it's from, but there's...oh it's so embarrassing. It's an American TV show, and it's in a high school and there's a school shooting. A kid has brought a gun to school, and I think they have already shot people. People are in the cafeteria and they're hiding underneath the tables, and this kid enters the cafeteria and he's going to shoot more people, but then some teenagers bravely stand up and start doing a dance routine and the power of dance stops the school shooting. It's awful and it's so earnest. This is one of the references. So there's this embarrassing dance and we perform the piece in homes, so the dance always happens in incredibly close quarters. It's a kind of misplaced dance which is either a hell of a lot of fun to do or it's completely embarrassing and it doesn't work. You have to totally commit either way.

IA: Was there a great or terrible dance performance from We Move in Close Circles that happened last year that sticks in the mind?

PP: Maybe...yeah. The thing that comes up for me is, at this point in the show, I'm wearing these silver, LA style, short shorts – they’re gay disco shorts. And in the dance, I shake my ass and I'm really bad at it. There’s certain performances where I really struggled to make it work, but I think gradually over the years I've found a way to do it in a way that works. It’s just series of experiments, of really trying to not work, but show off my very bony ass. That's what comes to mind.

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IA: How do you consider your archive?

PP: About four years ago, Rohanne and I were approaching the 10th anniversary of our working together and we wanted to more actively, diligently, address our archive or form an archive. I'm a bit cynical about the rhetoric and popularity of archive as a concept. Everything becomes an archive. The body is an archive, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, is it an archive or is it just a collection of memories and experiences? We wanted to have an archive and that happened in many different ways. We sorted out all of our digital architecture, we went through everything – which is a big project – and we made a permanent website. Whereas before then we've been changing our website each year as we changed our name. One thing we really enjoyed about doing that was...we've done many different projects together, but we decided to list just 15 to 20 projects on our website. But then we wanted a page called off cuts that had all the things that didn't make the cut. We wanted to share it in a briefer way. The other thing to do with that process was we started writing a book called Better Out Than In and it was simultaneous...as we were cleaning up all of our digital stuff, making this much slicker and cleaner website, we wanted to make this anti-archive book with all the off cuts, all the mistakes, all the things that didn't make the archive, all the things that embarrass us and all the failures. And we want to make it as public as possible. After 10 years of practice we've always held that...let's make all of our worst work at the start and get it out of our system. What we can really share is a whole bunch of mistakes – some that we can laugh about and some that really make us a squirm. Like, there's an artist who we basically copied their work without really realising it, semi-realising it and semi not. And they called us out on it, appropriately, and we were totally ashamed. We understand why it happened, blah, blah, blah, but we can barely look this person in the face. I think they're fine. I don't think they hold a grudge. So there's some stuff...this book has everything in it. It's been on hold with me doing the PhD, but we're hoping that over the next couple of years we'll be able to finish it.

IA: What do you think your legacy will be? You as Paul, not in collaboration.

PP: I don't really know what legacy means. Is legacy how people talk about you when you're no longer in the room?

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IA: It maybe once you're dead...or maybe, impact is a better word. What is your impact?

 

PP: I doubt I'll have much institutional impact or legacy. The things that I work towards or try to promote or instigate, my feeling is they don't usually get taken on often. They're not quite wanted. My perception on institutional practices and institutional contexts is that some artists and practitioners will feel like I helped give them a feeling of permission. Hmm. I have this feeling that the people and artists who I tend to be drawn towards supporting or hanging out with, whose work I vibe with, they tend not to be the ones who have big institutional careers. Often it's the people who end up dropping out or quitting practice. Jacob Wren, the Canadian choreographer and writer, says somewhere that the artists I like are the ones who are constantly quitting or about to quit practice. I think that that's true for me as well. I notice in my answer to this I've spoken about my lack of institutional legacy, let's say, and then a lack of legacy with artists with institutional success, or both. Clearly, there's an anxiety or desire towards institutional recognition and it hurts me...or troubles me somehow that I don't have that. I definitely feel some shame around that, a feeling of simultaneously wanting and scorning institutional reward, visibility, recognition or celebration. I wish that I could be totally be free of that, as much as I'm often advocating for grass roots practice or dispensing with those institutional recognitions or celebrations as motivators. To some degree, I still want it, and I wish that I didn't. But at the same time, I think that tension between wanting and resisting is probably very productive. It becomes part of the flavour and the richness of what I bring. I'm obsessed with institutions, even though I'm very critical of them. What is my legacy? What am I missing? I'm thinking about art practice, arts professional life, that's the world I'm thinking of...not really thinking about my personal life. I met up with a guy who I was hooking up with last summer, very recently, and he said that his memory of being with me is...how he put it was very flattering, because I think he was trying to get me into bed again, so I'm taking that with a pinch of salt...but it made him feel less stressed, and that the future is...there's a broader horizon and things could be slower, I can't remember the exact phrasing. If I think of legacy, it's probably in terms of a quality of being with others that felt generative or pleasant in some way. I think some of my best work is on Instagram stories, and they disappear after 24 hours. They're delicious and I'm not going to deny it.
 

IA: Can you talk about Letters of Resignation, your postal choreography course?

 

PP: That was a project that happened at Siobhan Davies Studios. I think it was still called Siobhan Davies Dance at that point as it was the tail end of Sue Davies directorship with Lauren Wright as programme director. They were usually running two choreography courses each year, and during COVID they asked us to run one and the other one was run by Sue herself. Sorry, it was not during COVID, it was during one of the COVID lockdowns. I think they said they asked us because they thought of us as being funny, the funny guys. And because everything was really depressing then with COVID, they wanted to have someone do something fun. And then we proposed a very depressing topic...which is people being fucking miserable in the arts and trying to approach the question of, what would it mean to quit? What would it mean to quit when you don't hold any formal position to quit from? Many of us are entangled in a field of practice and deeply invested in particular organisations and groups where we don't have any formal role. So what does it mean to resign from these places? It was very popular, many people applied to take part and we selected it by lottery. I think there were 16 participants and we asked five practitioners who we believed were experts in resignation, quitting or untethering to each compose a letter to send to the participants. Some of them are artists, some of them used to be artists, some of them are activists and some would describe themselves these days as carers or union workers more than cultural workers. We didn't make much demand of the participants. I think we said, here's all the addresses for all the other participants, if you want to send them stuff in the post, you're very welcome. There were three Zoom calls across the project to say hi and check in with people. I found it really beautiful and some of the participants found it a generative space to think about what is it to persist as an artist, or to keep claiming that, or to have the hope towards an arts career. What are the pressures and pleasures of that? What would it mean to drop out? I was talking with an artist friend earlier, a younger artist, we were talking about...she was talking about people she really admired, who were in art school with her and who had stopped practicing, and how she was sad about that. I was saying there's many art worlds, and there's many ways of practicing. If you stop functioning, you stop putting on exhibitions, but maybe you just screen print. Maybe you screen print t-shirts for friends, and that's the fucking perfect artistic practice. You find your context and what you're willing to compromise on or not compromise on. I think all of us are dropping out of various things all the time. There's not one singular quitting art. Some of the participants of Letters of Resignation really hated it. Some just stopped engaging...which is totally fair. We were very much, it's the middle of a fucking pandemic, we're not pressuring people to try to do more and commit to this thing. Some people just weren't that interested and one participant got really upset with us. I think they sort of dropped out, forgot about it and then they continued to receive these five artist letters. And one of the later artist letters was, in my mind – incredible, but they were very upset by it and got very angry with us. It's unwise for me to go into detail of what happened. I'm not going to claim it was this rosy and perfect project, and we were amazing facilitators and did everything right. You'll have to read the book of failures to to get the full low down. We made a zine at the end to share some of the materials we had been working with with the wider public and were really conscious that a lot of people had applied to take part of this course, and if they looked at the zine they might have thought, I don't get much from this documentation and it seems like you guys had a couple of fun days playing around with a scanner. I was like, that's a really accurate interpretation of what happened and the flavour of what the course was. It was giving some space and encouraging people to play around, do what was pleasurable and not overthink. That's generally the kind of way that Rohanne and I navigate or survive our continued participation in the institutional systems that we find frustrating or that we contemplate quitting. How to forget about them enough so you can play it out, have some fun and maybe some projects end up taking place in these systems. Rather than always working with those institutional systems as the first thing you're thinking about, or trying to come up with a project that will be good. You can kind of quit from them, you can resign from them while still participating. Maybe this is a bit loosey goosey, but you don't have to draw a strict line of ending. I'm never going to walk in there again. I'm never going to deal with these people again. You can simply lower them on your hierarchy of attention and value and choose to promote other publics or contacts or processes or values to orient yourself towards.
 

IA: Which dance organisations would you like to end?

PP: Sadler’s Wells. Sadler's Wells limits and confines the ambitions of experimental contemporary dance artists in the UK. For many artists, their long term ambition was to get a commission to show some work on the Lillian Baylis stage and I would see artists working towards a project like that for five years. They do it, it happens for two nights with an audience of maybe 300 people, and then it's over. And that work would never tour, it would never show again. I was thinking, think of all the other shit you could have been doing for those five years. If you want to talk about purely a numbers game, if you toured something in people's homes for five years, you would reach a wider audience. Sadler’s Wells hampers the imagination, ambition and creativity of dance artists. It's a big organisation with many different staff, but some of the staff were and I presume still are, being ground down by that institution. To be honest, any cultural organisation with more than 10 members of salaried staff should end. Tanztheater Wuppertal or Nederlands Dans Theater operate at a certain scale of spectacle and practice which are great, but I don't need that. I can live a life, and have a healthy cultural life without those kinds of practices because of the way they bleed money and the way they lose touch and lose capacity for sensitivity with the local ecologies of practice. It is not worth it. Let's say there's a ACE National Portfolio Organisation that's being funded, my feeling is that it is being funded as a strategic way to resource an ecology of practice and so the people who receive a salary by working there must always think of oneself as working for the benefit of that wider ecology. It's a really complex ethics and I have a high demand of people who accept those roles and when it gets too big, those people are unable to sustain those ethics. Ideally, no organisation should be bigger than five people. 10 is a stretch, and anything above that is unsalvageable.

IA: Is there anything that you want to talk about in relationship to endings or dance that you've not spoken about so far?

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PP: I was trying to think about what's the best ending to a dance performance I've seen? I don't know what that is. I just think about my favourite work and I can't even remember how it ends.

IA: What's your favourite work?

PP: It was a piece by Simone, Simone and Eros who are two drag queens and it was at a festival, a DIY performance art festival called Low Stakes in 2014/15 in North London. These two drag queens, and I don't think there's any digital record of this, slowly assembled a line of cardboard boxes in a very confused manner, maybe they were high or didn't know what was happening. It was very slow, and they just started doing this in the middle of this festival. Then they started setting the cardboard alight, which again took a great amount of time, because they just were very confused and it was a damp warehouse. We were in this very packed warehouse with all this stuff on fire, which was really dangerous, and I think they ended up stamping out the things on fire, and we were all reeking of smoke. It was incredible. It was so good and so unjustifiable. Endings and dance...we had a little chat before you started recording about how we hadn't seen each other for a while, and that maybe the way that we had seen each other before was through a certain infrastructure of professional dance where there was enough on, festivals were happening and people would go. People had the resources to go and they would see each other, and many friendships were enacted through that. That particular scene has ended and I don't see a bunch of people I used to see. I don't think that's just happened to me, but that's happened to a few people, a few friends of mine, and I find it quite interesting, because how do I organise how I see these people? First I had to figure out why is this happening? Am I being a bad friend and not seeing them? No, we used to see each other at things and those things don't exist anymore. So I had to decide which of them I would try to maintain and which I let wither. I have a sense that that was actually quite traumatic for many people, a sense that a social world and a sense of identity and belonging crumbled and it left a lot of people adrift. I'm very interested in that sense of...maybe that's also to do with Letters of Resignation. What does it mean to quit these fields when so much of your sense of self, your friendship groups and your way of affirming yourself in the world is tied up with these industries and economies? What does it really take to be able to extract yourself from that and to potentially risk such a profound loss of identity? To what degree is that a choice? And then, when these fields collapse...when I see artists or arts professionals persist in a certain mode of practice that I associate or understand as belong to a previous era, I understand that as a sense of psychological need to hold on to that sense of self, and I interpret that as being driven by or being unwilling to enter into a new mode of being. I think I've been lucky in the sense...I talked about Rohanne, and I move across lots of different disciplines, so I think I've been lucky in the sense that things can collapse. I've got my fingers in other pies and I've got feet in other spaces. I don't actually spend much time in dance, and that's OK for me.

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IA: In terms of Rohanne and your 12 year relationship / partnership. Have you spoken about the end of it?
 

PP: Sometimes we speak about what would happen if one of us gets hit by a bus tomorrow as a generative question. What are we really attached to, and what are we not? What do we want to see through? What do we not care about? How do we feel about our respective sense of ownership or identification with our work? My absolute favourite artists in the world were General Idea, this Canadian conceptual art trio – two of whom died quite young from HIV/AIDS and the third, AA Bronson is still alive and who does many things these days. He doesn't work as General Idea, but he is the steward of the archive and the continued exhibition of their work. I don't expect both of us to live till we’re 80. About three or four years ago, we really made an effort to do what we could...to support each other, so that if we decided to stop working together, for whatever reason, that we would both be in as best position as possible to take forward our solo practices and that our relationship to making art work wasn’t dependent on the collaboration. Part of that was ensuring that we were staying together in the practice because we wanted to, not because we couldn’t risk the idea of being alone or solo and that felt really good to do. I think something that happened...when we started working, the context in which we were working was around the tail end of Forest Fringe, which was a constellation of experimental quote, unquote, theatre practitioners in the UK, and that's where we were hanging out. That's where we were seeing work that would be our model, maybe we would want to be like these people, or make work like these people. I don't think we're so attached to that field now and haven't been for a while. Early on we were saying, this is where we're at at the minute, but maybe in five years, we're working in a totally different way. Maybe in five years time, we'd just be making artist books or making books about other people's practices. We've always had a sense that we've got the projects that we've got at the minute, and we love them, and we're really interested in them, but there's no desire or need from us to continue our current model of working into the future. Which, in some ways, is like going, this could end. In our bio on the website we say Salamèche is an arts collective currently composed of Rohanne and Paul, there's a kind of playful implication that that won't always be the case. One of us might leave, or someone might die, or other people might join. We don't know. So there's a sense that it could radically transform and I guess with that sense of radical transformation, an ending is less likely because if it can become anything, it's more likely to survive in weird way. When I tell people about the practice, I say we've worked together for more than a decade, which is notable and meaningful, but I also stress that that length of time, the duration of the relationship hasn't happened because we set out to have a long term collaboration together. We just kept hanging out and making stuff because it was fun, and we kept having fun ideas. If it got to a point where we weren't having fun, we would stop, and there would be no shame about that. We keep coming back to the work because we want to keep coming back to the work.

IA: We're in the end times, it’s literally end of the world...

PP: Oh my god, how exciting, what a relief…

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IA: It's your last dance with two people, who are you dancing with and why?

PP: Do I have to dance? Can I just watch people dance?

IA: You have to dance.

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PP: I have to dance [long pause]. I hate partner dancing and couple dancing. I find it just awful. My model of...there's this French writer called Guillaume Dustan who is very influential and died of HIV AIDS... he wrote in the 90s, and evoked a gay male world in France in the 90s. He evokes the modern night club as it was proliferating in France, the use of ecstasy and what it means to be a solo dancer in a wider collective of dancers, but you're not locked into this partner dance thing, you're constantly turning and constantly, there's a room full of people. That's the way I love to dance. I just remembered some people I want on that floor. I'm imagining...the floor doesn't really work if there's only two other people, but it can kind of work. I'm imagining Rohanne there, she loves to dance, she's great on the dance floor. I'm imagining my friend Sara Ruddock there, she's just a super incredible dancer and a playful person. Some of the queers in Nottingham are just fabulous, fabulous people who’re less connected with dance or performance. My friend Charlie and my friend Paul - luscious, luscious dance floor people. If I could just sit there and watch people dance…

IA: You meet death and you're just watching dance?

PP: Well, yes. I would want to have another glimpse of one of my favourite dances that I've ever seen...I was lucky enough to be able to visit the rehearsal process of Carareretetatakakekerers by Nic Conibere when it when it happened a few years ago. It was performed by Ming, Helka Kaski and Annie Hanauer. In rehearsals that day Ming wasn't there, so it was just Helka and Annie who are just incredibly skilled dancers. Quite established, quite senior in their practice and I have a tremendous amount of respect for them, and I mostly associate them with a sort of somatic practice. They were rehearsing a scene in which they were effectively performing a commercial dance routine...they didn't have the finished music for the work, so they were using a track by that really bratty, ratty gay music maker, I'm going to find out the name is because it was the perfect track – Attention by Todrick Hall – which is such a bratty song and so garishly commercial. And they performed this dance, these two incredibly serious dancers who I have so much respect for, this ridiculous dance routine. They danced it immaculately and they have the skills, but they just don't usually get asked to dance this kind of material. I felt so lucky to be able to glimpse that and I would love to watch the two of them dance that dance again. And if I have to dance, I'll sort of sit there and dance a little bit in my chair, but really I'm watching them dance. I'm very happy to be an audience member and I'm happy to watch. I love it. [pause] At the end of...there's that cliche in dance works at the minute where it ends with...there's the performers, then there's the audience and it ends with a collective disco. I fucking hate it. I find it coercive. I find it disappointing and it’s overly simplistic. It’s keeps coming back this gesture, and it can fuck off. I was happy to be a voyeur...but in sex, I’m not. I've never been a voyeur in sex. I love sitting there and watching performance because it's a very powerful and interesting position to be in.

IA: Is there anything else that you want to say on these topics?

 

PP: I don't think so. I find the asymmetry of this conversation so peculiar, because usually I'm the person asking lots of questions and listening lots and it's a delight to sit with the asymmetry on this side as well. So thanks for letting me be with that. I think this is something you do that's really great. You traverse different dance scenes and that's actually quite rare. Most people really stick in just one context, or a couple, but you're really good at traversing them and appreciating stuff in different scenes. It's a great skill.

IA: Part of this goes back to my love of specialist museums, museums about one thing. I love that somebody is so passionate about one thing, and then I just fall in love with that passion too.

PP: Yes. There's a project that Tim Etchells did with Vlatka Horvat at Sheffield Museums a few years ago, and it was to do with the archive at Sheffield Museums which is five different museums with very different remits. They were doing a contemporary art exhibition at the Millennium Gallery, but Tim and Vlatka had found these drawings and recordings that someone had made of the wind speed across different days sometime in the 19th century and they were all hand drawn graphs measuring the wind across the day. I loved the text – and it really stuck with me – that Tim and Vlatka had written to accompany this and they described it as the deeply human practice or activity of paying attention. This person was paying attention to the wind and I was reminded of that as you talked about the pleasure of a museum dedicated to one person's obsession and how peculiar and perversely human that is to have this kind of obsession. We become seduced into that obsession or we don't, sometimes we say no, this person's a fucking weirdo.

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