Everyday Dance Fieldwork Diary: Interview with Gideon Obarzanek (May 20, 2014)

When I first started thinking about researching everyday dance for this dissertation, I remembered a dance show by Chunky Move that premiered in Melbourne in 2004. The show was called I Want to Dance Better at Parties. I was living in Melbourne at that time and attending public dance classes at Chunky Moves studios so I followed the orbit of what this company did. I remember reading press interviews with Gideon Obarzanek, Chunky Moves founder and then Artistic Director about his ideas for this show and how it emerged. For some stupid reason I didn't go to see the show which I regret.

Gideon Obarzanek
Courtesy of http://www.behindballet.com/

I regret it for even ten years later, I still am affected by the fact that this was the first dance show on my radar to draw upon the reality of 'everyman' (I use 'man' as the show was based upon the experiences of men) and his relationship with dance. It resonated with me at the time, as it still does now, for I have always been frustrated with the perceived and also real elitism within the dance sector. I liked the fact that this work seemed to emerge from how dance is actually experienced by the average person rather than the average person being told how they should experience dance.

Now working as a freelancer, Gideon has just premiered a new work called 'L'Chaim,' with the Sydney Dance Company as part of their Interplay dance triptych. In his own words, Gideon explains the work:

I still have a lot of questions about dance, and contemporary dance specifically. How do I relate to it? How do other people relate to it? So I devised a character who would literally ask the dancers these questions while they are trying to perform. This creates a challenge, or a difficulty, for the dancers in terms of achieving what they’re doing because they’re constantly trying to answer this person, who’s attempting to analyse what they’re doing on stage and what makes them interested in what they’re doing, and so forth. That struggle is what interests me, and that’s what happens in this piece. Then the dancers convince this person to come and join them on stage, which is when the work really takes off.
-Taken from an interview with Cult Magazine

The idea for L'Chaim is intriguing and brings dance back to the realm of the every person. Ultimately this curiosity to explore how dance and the community interact is why Gideon Obarzanek's name was on the top of my list of potential research interviewees.

Gideon describing his process for creating L'Chaim!
(taken from the Sydney Dance Company website)

Fortunately for me, Gideon kindly agreed to be interviewed by me as to his thoughts on everyday, spontaneous social dancing as well as his process for some of his past and present works.

Interview with Gideon Obarzanek
Dance Industry Professional

Tuesday May 20 - Wednesday May 21, 2014

11.30pm - 12.10am

Skype Interview

Questions for Gideon Obarzanek

Profession/Location
Primary dance training
When you were training in dance, would you also go out and dance socially? If so, what were the differences you felt when you danced in a class as opposed to an event?
Apart from the above dance, are you trained in any other art forms?
If you could be proficient in another art form, what would you choose and why?
What are the key characteristics that for you, define a dancer?
Do you dance at social dance events such as weddings, parties, clubs and so forth? Why? Why not?
If so, how would you describe the style in which you dance at these events? Are there certain moves that you always execute at these kind of dance events? What are they?
What kind of music makes you want to dance? Why?
Is your dance training useful or not useful for the way you dance at these events ?
Do you consider the type of dancing that happens at these events to be a proper dance style? Why? Why not?
What other factors affect the way you dance at these events?
In what dance form do you feel you are best able to express yourself?
What role do you think dance plays now in your society, if any?
In your research for your pieces such as I Want to Dance Better at Parties, Dance Like Your Old Man – pieces that draw more on the every person’s experience of dancing – did you find any commonalities in terms of how dance is perceived by people who don’t identify themselves as dancers? And also what motivated and inhibited them to dance socially?
Do you or have you been out dancing socially with dancers that you have worked with? If so, what are the differences you observe in terms of their dancing in a social, freestyle space as opposed to in a studio? Are you ever surprised by how a dancer dances socially? Why?
Do you have any questions or anything further to add?

Audio Interview with Gideon Obarzanek

Transcript of Interview with Gideon Obarzanek

Note:

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Gideon Obarzanek trained at the Australian Ballet School before going on to dance professionally for the Queensland Ballet and Sydney Dance Company. In 1995 he founded the contemporary dance company, Chunky Move, of which he was the Artistic Director until 2012. Now working as a freelancer, his latest work, L'Chaim is part of the Sydney Dance Company's Interplay triptych, also featuring works by choreographers, Rafael Bonachela and Jacopo Godani.

Although I had prepared a set of questions to ask Gideon, I decided that I would also try and let the interview take its own course. Being a dance professional, I was sure that he would raise interesting points which I had not considered . Also I wanted the interview to be somewhat informal rather than a set Q & A.

The first few minutes of our interview failed to record. This part of the conversation was Gideon asking me if I was Australian as he had anticipated a British accent on the phone. The recorded dialogue picks up when I answer him:

LS:

I’m Australian that’s why.

GB:

I thought you were from England, being in England I just assumed you were…

LS:

No I’m an expat. I’m actually originally from Perth.

GB:

Right.

LS:

So if there’s anything I ask you that you prefer not to answer, just stay so. Just say pass or whatever.

GB:

Ok sure.

LS:

So I’m just going to ask you a few questions just about your own kind of experiences of social dance and then also bring in a bit about some of your shows a bit later on if that’s ok?

GB:

Yeah, for sure.

LS:

Ok, cool. Firstly what would you describe your profession as being?

GB:

Um, it’s changed a bit. Traditionally when I leave Australia I do an exit passport thing and I always put choreographer down. Yeah I would say choreographer.

LS:

And you’re based in Melbourne? Sydney?

GB:

Melbourne.

LS:

So can you tell me a little bit of what your dance training was when you were growing up?

GB:

Yep. I started doing dance lessons after school when I was around 15, 16 in high school. I went to the Australian Ballet School after I’d graduated from high school. I deferred university and went to the Australian Ballet School and then I went to Queensland Ballet and then Sydney Dance Company.

LS:

So was it mainly ballet training that you did when you were training as a teenager?

GB:

Yeah, actually it was jazz ballet when I started.

LS:

Oh really?

GB:

It wasn’t retro then, it was the real thing.

LS:

And what made you kind of go more towards the classical side then?

GB:

It was my dance teacher. She said to me, if you’re serious about becoming a dancer, and I think I was becoming serious about it; she said I should do ballet as well. Not instead of. And I started doing it. It was very challenging, I found it very difficult.

LS:

How old were you when started doing the classical ballet training?

GB:

I would have been about 16. I had a good teacher and I found it quite challenging and I found it interesting. Look I got into the Australian Ballet School. I don’t think I really understood what that school was completely and what that would mean in regards to studying such a purist type of dancing. I just sort of naively accepted it and started doing it so yeah, I had a very traditional ballet training I’d say.

LS:

And when did you start doing contemporary dance then?

GB:

Well, there was some Graham classes at the ballet school which wasn’t, well I wouldn’t call it contemporary dance but the teacher was certainly very progressive and she encouraged the students to make their own works at lunchtime. There was nothing in the course that allowed you time to make your own work so I did it after school and during lunchtime. So I started making my own work quite early as a choreographer. When I joined Queensland Ballet, there were some more contemporary choreographers who were guests and certainly with Sydney Dance later. And as an independent I tended to gravitate to more contemporary dance, contemporary ideas very quickly.

LS:

OK. So when you were training in dance, in jazz ballet and ballet and Graham, did you also go out dancing socially as a teenager?

GB:

I did yeah. That’s what made me interested in studying dance. I first started going out socially and I started dancing a lot. When I was about 15, I started going out. 15, 16 and dancing and that’s what got me interested in actually going and doing dance classes.

LS:

Oh ok. So that was the impetus was it?

GB:

Yeah.

LS:

When you used to go out dancing, what kinds of places would you go and what kind of dancing was it that you did there?

GB:

Well because I was under age, it was private parties but also just sneaking into clubs just under age as well

LS:

And can you remember particular music that you would dance to at that time or what were the trends going on then in the clubs that you would go to?

GB:

I’m just trying to remember when that was?

LS:

Was this in Melbourne?

GB:

Yeah Melbourne sort of early 80s so it was kind of like, end of disco and going into more house type music.

LS:

And so, did you continue going out dancing when you were doing your training? You know, when you were doing your dance training?

GB:

Yeah.

And did you find that your training affected the way you would dance at these social events?

Yeah I think it did for a while. I was more, I became very conscious of my dancing whereas I think prior to training I really wasn’t paying attention to the details of what I was doing.

So if you could give me a visual description of before and after, of how you might have danced at these kinds of events, before and after training that is, how would you describe yourself?

I would say there was very little, prior to training, there was very little awareness of what I might look like while dancing. It was something that was felt internally and sort worked its way out. I would say once I commenced, or once I was in training for quite a while, there was also a very strong external sense of what I was doing. I guess maybe because particularly in ballet training you use mirrors a lot in the studio so you have this sense of seeing yourself. In fact you’re encouraged to look at yourself in the mirror to see what you are actually doing so you develop a sense of what you actually physically look like when you’re dancing. I think prior to that I don’t think I would have ever looked into a mirror while dancing. Maybe when I was brushing my teeth! There was no real, there was no aesthetic sense of what that was.

Right. And did your relationship with music change as well in terms of how you danced to music? Before and after training?

Probably. It’s hard to say now. But I would say that I would have varied my dancing probably more while and after training, rather than doing something maybe repetitively over and over.

Ok. I completely went off script then so now I’m going to go back to the questions I meant to ask you.

I should preface that I did grow up doing Israeli folk dancing as a child.

Oh really?

Because of my cultural background but I never really thought of it was something particularly relevant to my professional, my dance career and I think more recently, I’ve kind of taken that more into account. So there’s certainly social dancing, on a cultural kind of level when I was younger for a period of time.

Was that something you would do quite regularly in a social environment with your family or community or whatever?

Yeah you know once a week or once a month.

So dancing was part of your childhood growing up even before you went out to clubs and started training or whatever?

Yeah there was a big gap I would say in between, before I went to clubs and after folk dancing. It wasn’t like a transitional…I would have stopped doing that probably around 11 or 12 and I didn’t go out until I was about 15 ,16. So yeah, there was a gap in between.

So you’ve just actually, just even from our short conversation, you’ve described a lot of dance forms that you’ve kind of trained and danced in. Of all the dance forms that you’ve experienced, is there one that you feel the most comfortable in terms of expressing yourself in? Even social dancing.

Well I would say now, it’s hard to say, it’s very hard to… I haven’t done professional on stage performance dance for quite a while, but I would say social dancing like going out and probably folk dancing if I think back to it.

Really? Ok. That’s interesting.

It’s something I really enjoyed doing.

Cool. Alright. Just out of curiosity, I wasn’t going to ask you this but does that folk dancing, does that feed into, cause I know you just premiered a new work, L’Chaim?

Yeah. It totally feeds into that and I’m talking about it partly because I’ve been thinking a lot about it the last couple of years I guess and I kind of brought it into my work now, and particularly with L’Chaim, it’s integral to that piece. But I haven’t really accessed it, I don’t think in earlier works….

Can I just ask you another question about that that’s just come into my head? Cause I read a little bit about the work and I know that it’s about the questions an audience may ask when watching the show and like how it kind of feeds into the dancers onstage and so forth. I’m just wondering the questions that the audience asks, are they actually questions that maybe, that you had yourself when you were growing up doing the dance, about the dance?

Absolutely. I’m always very interested in the audience’s sort of position or perspective of experience in watching dance performance and a lot of my works in various ways take that into account. I think with this one, I worked with an actor and writer, David Wood who is very experience in contemporary experimental theatre and so forth but doesn’t have a lot of background in dance and after I did quite a big work with the Australian Ballet a few years ago about Swan Lake, I was very curious to work with a contemporary dance and I guess the theme was about contemporary dance itself. So during the rehearsal period when we were creating some dance, he would ask all these somewhat naive questions about what they were doing and what does it mean and very often things I think many people may ask while watching dance, who are not necessarily a dance audience or as much. They were not stupid questions. I think they were intelligent questions forcing the dancers to discuss their answers whilst training. I would say I shared some of those questions with David but not all of them. Some of them were mine but most of them were his.

Well I really hope I get to see it at some point because it sounds really interesting.

Yeah, it went really well. But they have performed it in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne and they haven’t discussed it with me about doing it anywhere else so I don’t know if they will. I hope they do.

Fingers crossed. Um ok, apart from dance, are you trained in any other art form?

No, I’m not trained in anything…

So you put all your eggs into one basket.

Well, I didn’t mean to. It was just one thing after another. It wasn’t really a planned career path. To be honest, when I deferred university, I thought I would do that course and then, I don’t know, see how I go and then go back to university. But I never did and one job led to another and I kind of found myself where I’m at.

Yeah, it’s been a really, um… it was a good decision to defer university. So following on from that, if you know could choose an art from, or could have chosen an art form to learn in your life, what would it have been and why?

I think it’s changed over the years. I think when I was younger I was very interested in studying science. I‘m not interested in studying that anymore. If I went back to uni, I’d probably want to read history. I don’t know if that’s an art from but that’s something that would interest me.

Ok and um for you, what are the key characteristic s that define a dancer? For you. If you were to define some as a dancer, what would be some of the key qualities that that person would have?

I think that they would have, that they could very easily, intuitively shift into a physical form… it’s a hard one. There’s a kind of, I don’t know how to say it, it sounds a bit weird but there’s a kind of physical intelligence. They’re able to kind of, almost with great ease, be able to move their bodies [connection crackly] What makes a dancer? I’ve certainly come across a lot. They seem to live in a much more physical world… I’ll have to get back to you on that

Ok sure. At the moment do you go out dancing at social events in your life?

I don’t. Well very rarely. Very rarely.

And why would that be? Is it something you used to do more?

I used to do it more. Look I think I’ve gone through a period as a professional dancer and then as a fairly well known choreographer, I became very self-conscious.

Yeah, I think I remember reading you saying something about that in some article somewhere.

I think I became very self-conscious. I’ve always been sort of a daggy dancer, social dancer.

Hang on, what do you mean by that? What’s a daggy dancer?

I don’t think I’m a, you know, a cool mover. I enjoy it, you know, but then because I have a reputation as a dancer and a choreographer, the idea that people would look at me and assess my dancing. I became very self-conscious, very uncomfortable about it. So there’s a long period of time where I didn’t go out social dancing. I think I’m more easy about it now but I’m also a lot older now so I guess I don’t make a huge effort. I get tired to be honest when it comes 1 o’clock at night. I’m not as interested as I used to be.

So say you’re at a wedding, a friend’s wedding, would you get up on the dance floor and dance?

Yeah, I would now. A few years ago I would have found it a lot harder. I definitely understood other people’s apprehension about social dancing, I know what they were feeling. And I still know what they were feeling.

So if you were to get up and dance now, would it still be the same kind of daggy dancing that you said you used to do before or has your style changed, social dance style, changed a bit since then.

A combination of both. I think I still am a bit of a daggy dancer but I…

I still don’t know what you mean by daggy dancer though? Can you describe it?

You know, you’re kind of like. You’re not the cool mover in a way. You’re just sort of gesticulating, bouncing around.

Are you in time? With the music?

I am in time. Yes I am definitely in time. But I’ve become a better dancer I think. I really don’t know. It’s very hard for me to understand what my dancing’s like.

So in terms of music, what kind of music makes you want to dance?

Oh, lots of music.

Is there some like songs that would definitely always get you out on the dance floor?

Yeah, look I am from particular era so things like kind of like 90s house and hip hop stuff is what I grew up with so I feel very, I connect with quite easily. Sort of dub stuff. Now I quite like dub because of the heavy kind of bass tunes. Sort of groove, heavy house kind of music I quite like.

So this dancing that we’ve just been talking about that happens on dance floors and weddings and everything, dancing that basically anyone can do, well most people, if they choose to. Do you consider it actually a style of dancing?

Look I think there is a style cause you can see it changing over the eras. It’s not something that’s constant in a way that people socially dance. If you look back at social dancing in the mid-1950s, in the mid-20^th century. It’s certainly different to what it was at the end of the 20^th century and it’s different again now in the early 21^st century. Yes there is a different style to it.

Do you think it’s a reflection of cultural trends or whatever’s going on in society at that point in time?

I think there is to a degree. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Moving onto some of your past work. I remember I was living in Melbourne in 2004 when you did I Want to Dance Better at Parties, the first one and I didn't get a chance to see it unfortunately but I remembered it when I was thinking about what to do for this dissertation. And that’s the original reason I got in contact with you because I remember being very interested in how you went about your research for that piece and what made you want to do a piece about guys who felt uncomfortable dancing, which I think is what the piece was, is about?

Well no, it’s partly about. In the end it’s about five different men. One of them is incredibly uncomfortable about dancing and he represents a whole lot of men I spoke to. But some people in the piece are comfortable about dancing so it’s kind of a cross section of men’s experience in regards to dance.

In terms of your research, where did you get your, who were the people you spoke to about the dancing and what kind of. I don’t know if you can remember, but what were some of the common things that came out in terms of how they viewed dancing?

I spoke to quite a few different men about their experience of dance around Melbourne. Say probably over 30 that I interviewed in a fairly comprehensive manner. And I got to them through, basically friends of friends and acquaintance of acquaintances. I basically put it out there that I was interested to talk to different men about their experiences with dace. I think there were some, no I’m just trying to think if I advertised at all, I don’t think I did in the end because it wasn’t very difficult to actually get a lot of people and I think they fell in to various categories. In that group there were a number of men who felt very uncomfortable about social dancing and didn’t like being on the dance floor at all and I did in the end focus on one who was just a great interviewee because in the end what the piece is, is a portrait of five different men, covered in depth. And each one represents I guess a different experience in regards to dance.

Did you find any kind of common, I don’t know what kind of questions it was that you asked them when you interviewed them and it was a long time ago so appreciate you might not remember but...

I do remember the men who felt uncomfortable about dancing. I think they felt incredibly self-conscious and they were very frightened of looking like a fool I think or of not being themselves. Not representing themselves. It’s a weird thing. This guy I spoke to who I used in the end, Frank. He said I don’t feel, when I dance, I don’t feel like I am the person who I really am. I feel like I’m somebody else. I don’t want to be represented in the way that I dance because people look at someone dancing, well he says, they look at their style and they look at how they appear and they make certain assumptions or judgments. They sort of appraise that person from their dancing. He’s a funny, smart guy but when he dances he just feels like total awkward human being. He feels very uncomfortable about that.

Interesting.

He also spoke of a terrible childhood experience to do with a dance floor and that gave him this kind of phobia that kind of continues to haunt his adult life. So it’s a story that I go into in the piece. He discusses and I think, look his one was kind of extreme in a way. And I’ll digress for a minute. As a young child, he would have been 8 or 9, he was at a 21^st birthday. He was a country boy and it was a big party in a big barn on a farm and these teenage girls he guessed who would have been about 14 or 15 thought of him as very cute cause he was dressed up in a suit. And they kind of dragged him onto the dance floor and made him dance with them to Saturday Night Fever, Bee Gees, which was a big film at the time and he totally froze cause he was so shy of the girls and the whole experience. And these girls started to get annoyed with him because he wouldn't dance so they started yelling at him to dance. And the more they yelled at him, the more he froze so he had this kind of Hitchcock experience.

Oh goodness. I don’t blame him.

So he got this sense that people were cackling at him and yelling at him and he ran away and hid behind this parents. [so now] his wife will try to get him out to the dance floor.

And it’s just a re-enactment of that whole scenario.

Yeah well he says his body, not his mind, but his body will get the same kind of fight or flight experience that he had as a young child and so he feels very uncomfortable and doesn't want to do it. I mean I think there is an age, and this is one of the things about, one of the cultural things I've noticed about folk dancing when I was young and talking to [unclear] or Greeks or South Americans who kind of grow up with a stronger folk dance culture but they grow up as young children dancing regularly in social environments with both children, adults in their sort of sexual age and post sexual age all dance the same dances. And they seem to have, those men seem to have much less of an issue in regards to dancing. They feel like socially, they’re much less self-conscious about the idea of dancing and I think that a lot of the men I met who were wary of dancing were from more of an Anglo-Saxon background. This is in Australia of course where dancing was very much about mating in a way. Social dance sort of starts in your teens where unfortunately you’re at an age where you’re incredibly self-conscious about so many things. This is both men and women and dancing is so focused about the opposite sex and being sexual and about going out and so I think it’s a very loaded experience in that already very difficult area and I think that’s why dancing can become very hard, it can become quite stigmatised in a way for men who have that experience. I think the other thing is that men really want to be in control of how everyone perceives them. I mean think everyone does but it’s very important for men to feel that they’re putting out the image of what they see themselves as. And I think that with a lot of free dancing, this is social dancing, you kind of feel out of control. They feel as if they’re not, I think it’s a difficult area for a lot of men and they’d rather not do it. I don’t have any evidence for this. This is something I just got the impression of from speaking with different men.

It’s a very interesting thing. You've just raised a lot of questions in my mind just what you said about… I think there is a rite of passage element to social dancing in society and like you say, depending on the point of where they happens for you, I think is quite key in terms of how you go onto the view social dancing as an adult.

That’s right. I mean I think if you were a nervous teenager already having tensions about the way you conduct yourself, how you are with the opposite sex, how you are socially; dance is a huge part of that thing. It hasn't been around before and it’s all about that. That’s an incredible amount of pressure for young men and women out on the dance floor because it becomes this massive big deal. Where boys and girls in South American, I’m generalising, but from South American backgrounds, from Mediterranean backgrounds kind of see dancing in a non-sexual way, that’s that just a part of a lot of things.

Of the culture.

I don’t think they don’t suffer as much from that.

Thanks for all that. That’s a lot of information there. I've got a question about the dancers that you've worked with. Past, present, whatever. Have you ever been out socially dancing with the dancers that you've worked with?

Yep.

And so when you have been out, what are the differences that you observe in these dancers when they’re out dancing socially as opposed to when you’re working with them in the studio? In terms of the way they dance?

They do vary a lot. There are some dancers I've worked with who are really fantastic professional dancers; they can do amazing things and they’re not comfortable in social dancing environments. I've worked with quite a few of those people but then they are dancers who are amazing professional dancers and they’re amazing social dancers as well.

So what do you think is the difference in say someone who, I mean obviously the dancers you’re working with are professional dancers so they’re going to be good in the studio. So what do you think is the difference in a professional dancer who is also a good social dancer as opposed to one that is not as comfortable dancing socially?

It’s hard to say. I’m careful of jumping to conclusions.

Of course. I’m just curious to see what you've found?

Look in my experience, I've worked with some dancers who've.They’ve been training from a young and they’re incredibly good professional dancers but they are very self-conscious and they’re very determined people. They’re very driven and they are very self-conscious and you can see that in their social dances. Because it’s what they do. It’s their instrument. So for them social dancing is never like social dancing on a person who is not a professional dancer because they cannot eliminate, they cannot take away that aspect of their identity and how they value themselves. About being a professional dancer. They are also dancers who do all of that who completely let that go and don’t have that kind of have an issue…. and I do find that… cause there’s this one dancer I worked with, Antony Hamilton who I’ll just use as an example and although he’s not very highly trained, I think he trained in Perth at WAAPA. He’s got a very strong hip-hop background as well so he had quite a strong background in that kind of social dancing and that kind of environment and he’s really comfortable dancing socially. And he’s an amazing dancer on the dance floor actually. Incredible. Very at ease and doesn't have an issue with that. And I think that because he’s got a bit of a beat boy background and the experience of public and social dancing – that’s what he comes from. Whereas Katherine Dunn who’s a person I worked with when I founded Chunky Moves, an amazing dancer and now she lives in New York. She’s come from the Royal Ballet and the [indecipherable] City Ballet, she’s an extraordinary dancer onstage but she’s not comfortable dancing socially and I think that her whole dancing experience has been really from a professional background. There’s been very little social experience in dancing and I think it’s very difficult for her to let that go in a social environment.

Cool – well you know what. That’s all the questions I have to ask you. Do you have any questions to ask me or anything else you’d like to add?

No not really, I’m just curious about what you’re studying in London?

Well it’s an MA in Dance Anthropology and this is for my dissertation and I've always been interested in... Well originally I wanted to do my dissertation in mature professional contemporary dancers but just lining up the field for that was just going to be too difficult in terms of my time limitations cause there’s not many of them around and even if they are around they might not be performing, rehearsing, touring or whatever in my dissertation time frame. So I decided that I would do this instead because it’s just something I've always been interested. It’s incredibly broad which makes it quite difficult but, I do dancing as well, I still do dancing but I just had a key moment when I was about 15, like we were talking about earlier about when you started going out dancing socially and everything. I’d had mainly ballet training up to that point, and we all went out one night, I think it was a party, and it just struck me that all my friends who were trained ballet dancers couldn't dance at this party. Like they just looked really awkward and uncomfortable, me included, and I just thought, this is weird. We’re trained dancers and we can’t dance and it always stuck in my head that kind of moment of realisation that just because you were trained in a form didn't actually mean you could get down. So that’s where it comes from this impetus to look into this area and dig a little bit deeper.

Yep. Oh good.

Are you happy for me? …What I’ll do is transcribe this interview.

I’m happy for you to use any part of it.

Are you sure? Do you want to see the transcription thought before it goes?…

Nah.

No? Ok.

You can email it to me but to be honest, I’ll read some if it but it’ll be fine.

Ok well in that case I’ll send it to you anyway. It’s due in September so when it’s all done I’ll send you the link and you can have a look at it, if you like.

Great, I’d love that.

Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time.

You’re welcome.

And best of luck with future work.

Cheers you too.

Bye.

Everyday Dance Fieldwork Diary

Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Interview with Gideon Obarzanek (May 20, 2014)

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