Tom Dale Company’s bold group piece SUB:VERSION has just wrapped a year-long tour, after heading to venues around the UK since back in March 2023. To celebrate this unique piece, we sat down with Tom to reflect on the evolution of electronic music in dance, explore his creative process, and discuss the experience of touring SUB:VERSION.
A journey into pure expression: SUB:VERSION’s inception
As a dancer and choreographer, Tom has found electronic music and rave culture to be profound influences on his creative process. Electronic music, a staple in social gatherings and creative environments, has revolutionised dance with its ability to evoke pure unfiltered expression.
“You’ve got to think: why do we dance and move like we do now in 2024, what are the influencing factors on that? One of the huge ones is the emergence of electronic music, and the kind of democratisation of the music-making process that brought that about. People didn’t have to go to expensive studios anymore, they could just make it in their bedrooms – which meant that there was a creative explosion in music making and loads of sub genres of music.
All these sub genres brought about different kinds of expression: different ways of moving, different ways of being. I wanted to put that into a piece of work.”
When Tom first heard WEN’s album EPHEM:ERA he knew this was what he had been subconsciously looking for. It served as the perfect muse for SUB:VERSION, offering complex tracks that still held space for movement.
“It’s all of these elegant sketches of music, with enough space in it for me to add sophisticated layers of dance and movement. That’s where the idea came from: honouring music’s influence on dance, movement, expression and art over the last 30 years.”
Tom set out to create an informal piece that could be performed in a theatre, a nightclub or a music festival, enjoyed and appreciated on different levels and in different settings.
Crafting the choreography: Embracing speed and adaptability
For Tom, choreography is a dynamic process, heavily influenced by the dancers he’s working with. When working on SUB:VERSION in the studio, he opted for a fast-paced iterative style to maintain the authentic connection to the music, and ensure the process felt spontaneous. This method helped to avoid overthinking, helping the performances to consistently feel alive and immediate.
“When we’re touring and we’ve had to recast the piece, rather than make that new cast learn a section from the other dancers, we re-choreographed various bits in super fast time. There were certain parts that you could definitely learn – but there were certain parts that were structurally too complicated for a new dancer to just come in and learn. So you might as well just make it afresh with new dancers, and then those dancers have real ownership, it just brings a reality to the work that you can’t fake. And it keeps them on their toes, as well.”
Lighting and costume: Creating the perfect atmosphere
Lighting is crucial in shaping the atmosphere of Tom’s choreographic work, enhancing the connection between dance and music.
“With other pieces like SURGE, it’s all about creating the right digital environment for each section of the piece. With SUB:VERSION it was simpler because it was more about the dance and music, but the lighting was still a big part.
About two weeks into the creation, I got the lighting designer to spend a week with us in the studio to try out some ideas, to see what visually connected in relation to the music and the type of movement. He really simplified the lights, and he only used eight moving lights for the whole piece. He even had an influence on the structure of some of the pieces by making particular spatial lighting decisions.”
Costuming also significantly impacts both the performers and the audience. For SUB:VERSION, achieving the right look was a challenge, driven by a desire for a relaxed, cool and comfortable aesthetic. The costumes needed to feel casual yet sophisticated to ensure the dancers could move freely, enhancing their connection to the music.
“The choreography wanted to look like it was improvised in a way, so there’s a sense that we didn’t want to over-stylize or overthink. Something like SURGE is really tight and super stylized, whereas these costumes lean more towards social life. We wanted the dancers to be incredibly comfortable, able to really explore and enjoy their bodies in relation to the music, without the costume being any kind of hindrance.”
Taking SUB:VERSION on tour
SUB:VERSION toured as part of a double bill with SURGE – which brought about both unique challenges and benefits. From an audience perspective, being able to see two contrasting performances in one evening enabled them to appreciate and understand each piece on a deeper level.
“Both pieces are born from a similar environment: the world of electronic music. They both give a nod to that, but that’s where they go on their own routes. SURGE is very theatrical, stylised and highly designed to an almost cyberpunk aesthetic, and SUB:VERSION is much more closely related to how electronic music has influenced social experiences.”
Wrapping up a year-long tour, Tom reminisces and looks back on some of his favourite aspects of SUB:VERSION.
“I’m really glad to have done it: it was an itch that I needed to scratch. I love the fact that we used more than one cast and quite a lot of people got to experience it. The audience reaction was really positive, it was brilliant.
I get to see it grow throughout the whole tour, getting better and better as the dancers take more ownership of it. They get more confident and they take more liberties with it. I loved the wholeheartedness of the dancers’ performance: the fact that they didn’t hold back, they did go all the way and there was no being shy. They really understood that it was about pure expression, the relationship of humans to music and to the social experience of it. They had full creative and artistic licence to be as expressive as they wanted within those structures that we created together. And I just love the fact that they did it with an open heart.”
