Hello, my name is Miriam Slater, aka b.i.g.f.a.c.e, my pronouns are they/them, and I’m the movement director for Love & Faith (and something unholy).
How do you approach a movement piece from scratch? How does it move from an idea in your head, to the stage?
Well, it’s a little bit different to when I create work for myself as a solo artist. I like to think of it as a Venn diagram, in sections. So, there might be a track I’m really drawn to, then there’s a visual element, a kind of movement, a kind of lighting state that I know I want to explore, and usually an intention, or a storyline, or sometimes even a gag piece. Usually I will start off with one these circles in the Venn diagram, and over time I find the other sections that lock it all together.
With Love & Faith, the music has been one of the most immediate elements I have had access to. So a lot of it has begun just with headphones on, or in the car listening to tracks over and over until the gags or the visual elements start to stand out for me and I can start to piece it together. I love to work collaboratively, and I have been coming into the space with the movement pieces usually choreographed about 80%, so we have some room to play, and room for the actors to offer ideas about different sections and elements. So I am building up most of the framework and then going, how do we flesh the last 20% out as a team?
You also work as a drag performer. Are we going to see elements of drag performance in Love & Faith?
My drag persona, and queer club persona, is called Icky, who’s a kind of technicolour, crypted clown energy, who’s very, very camp and offers lots of joy, a lot of radical foolishness and a way of taking back queer spaces and celebrating our stories. So, yes! There’s definitely elements of drag in the work, especially in Galatea, which I have described in contrast to Measure for Measure as being ‘in the queer club’. That’s the act where you feel like you’re involved – you’ve got these big characters, you’ve got big dance numbers and you feel you’re really immersed in a queer space, amongst the queer community. And they have been really fun to choreograph and with the ensemble, because there’s a lot of joy and a lot of goofy and a lot of serious, and it’s been an absolute joy to be able to take an aspect of my performance practice and feed it back into a more traditional experience of theatre making.
Is there a movement piece in Love & Faith that you’re especially excited for audiences to experience?
Oh… but how do you choose between your babies?! It’s really hard. We have just been working on a piece set to Love Is A Battlefield, which is super fun. It’s high-camp energy which everyone was really committing to, and was really joyous. What I have found that’s been really enjoyable about this piece (as someone with diverse arts practices), is that it’s not just one tone. We’re exploring a few different thematic stylings and approaches to storytelling, and that’s really scratched an itch that I don’t usually feel. I think there’s a lot of love for all these different babies that are coming out of this show, it’s hard for me to choose a favourite!
Can you tell us how you got into movement direction as a creative practice?
I have always been interested in physical theatre, since I was a teenager. My first exploration in that space was through Butoh dance, which I have trained in for years, as well as Suzuki and Viewpoints. For me as an artist, I usually describe my practice as ‘body-centred practice’. Whatever concept I am exploring, it always seems to come back to the body in some way. Text isn’t usually at the forefront of what I do, it’s more of a question of ‘how does my body explore this? How does it feel in my body? How does my body want to express it?’
It's been interesting – I have an established physical practice that I’ve trained in over the years, and in some of my other work in drag and with experience in clowning – getting to bring elements of them all together in this setting has been really joyous. Sometimes I feel like it’s a weird fruit salad mix of approaches, but they all start talking to one another and informing each other. I guess I could say, as a physical theatre practitioner, it still aways comes back to the body. It makes the most sense to me. Sometimes words are harder for me to tackle, but intrinsically my body seems to understand things a little bit more, so it’s always my go-to when exploring something new.
Love & Faith (and something unholy) is a work by and for the queer community. As a member of the queer community and as a member of the trans community, what does it mean for you to be participating in and contributing to this work?
I think it’s very exciting to be able to be a part of this work because the queerness of the story we’re exploring doesn’t live only in the text – it’s in the actors, it’s in the spaces we’re working in, in the creative teams. Sometimes when we’re exploring queer stories on stage, it can feel like only a drop in the ocean, but it’s nice to be part of a production where everyone is bringing their experience of the queer community in to cook this new work. Everyone is adding their own flavour, and their own nuance. It’s been really beautiful as a trans person to be working with gender-diverse performers, and to see the incredible nuance they bring to characters that I’ve not seen before, and the complexities they’re bringing to their characters just by being their authentic selves as actors. It is really exciting. I think it brings something quite new and refreshing and enticing to classic text, to be like, ‘what if we spin it this way? What if we explore these ideas this way?’ It’s very refreshing, it’s very space-holding, and it’s very exciting. It’s just great to be a part of.
Why do members of the public need to drop what they’re doing and buy a ticket for Love & Faith (and something unholy) right now?
I think that so often, in theatre, when we are given queer stories, it can be very heavy. Often we are not talking about queer joy and queer survival. I think Love & Faith has this fantastic combination of the celebration and the joy, whist also holding the space of some of the relationships or dynamics, or the ways we move through the world, that are very complex and can be very difficult, and can sometimes make us very heavy in the heart. I think it’s so exciting to have a piece that does both – that gives you both of those experiences, and doesn’t leave you leaving the space lamenting, “oh my God, my HEART!” for a week. The whole team, especially Lucy, have been able to give you two sides of the same coin, with their experiences in these queer stories. We see the joy and the celebration, and also the element of grief around things that we go through. And I think that’s really f*cking cool, and we don’t always get that in theatre.
Everyone is going to get something out of this work. It is so diverse. It’s going to be exciting for anyone to come see this work, and feel like they’ve really stepped into this queer world, and these queer stories and characters, and they will leave the theatre and having taken something away from it. And that’s always something delicious to have whenever you go see theatre.
