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Dancer/writer Nicole Bain speaks with Oniel Pryce, Jamaican choreographer. (Dance photos courtesy of Danceworks, photographer: Albert Blackwood.)
Dancer, choreographer and Edna Manley College lecturer Oniel Pryce mounted two works in Danceworks’ 2011 season, ‘Transcendance’ Danceworks is the performing corps of the School of Dance, Edna Manley College. Cultural Jamaica sat down with him to discuss his work and his journey in the world of dance.


NB: First of all, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I wanted to find out from you how you got started in dance. Can you tell me a little bit about your journey as a dancer?

OP: I became a dancer by accident really. It was just after high school (Wolmer’s High). I really wanted to be an accountant or a doctor, but towards the end of my final year in school I found myself becoming a little bit bored with regular academics and was searching for a different avenue to express myself, because at that time I was also very introverted, and I didn’t like to talk much. I wanted a different way to talk basically, so I started to search and the Edna Manley College School of Dance sparked my interest and I just decided to apply. Accidentally I got in...

NB (interrupts): Accidentally?

OP (laughing): Yeah, well I say that because I had absolutely no experience. So I applied and I came and was like, “I don’t know what I’m getting myself into!” But that was where the real dance journey started in terms of training.
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Choreographer, Oniel Pryce
NB: What was it like?

OP: Well, the first year was very rough because I was coming in as an inexperienced person and at that time they didn’t have a PQ (Preliminary Qualifying year), so I went straight into first year. And most of the people that I came in with had lots of experience! So it was very difficult for the first year and a lot of people were very negative about me being here and didn’t give me enough encouragement. So, after the first year I decided to prove to myself that I could do it, kind of take it as a challenge to myself. And I improved over the three years - I was doing a Diploma in Education at that time. In my final year, I think it was, I did a show with Neila Ebanks and two other persons. At the time we called ourselves "Four Poor Dancers", and our show was entitled Destination Self, and Professor Nettleford came to the show and asked who I was, and he invited me to work with the NDTC. Before that, I had done a stint with L’Acadco. So I went on to work with the NDTC around 2001, and around 2003 I became interested in doing an exchange programme at Brockport and I was shortlisted and got the opportunity to go and do it for a year and transfer my credits to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance.

NB: What made you choose the education track at EMC and how did that segue into a love of choreography?

OP: To be honest, I cannot recall exactly why I chose education, but in terms of the segue into choreography - again because I was introverted - I wanted a kind of expression that was not me. I wanted to put my ideas onto other bodies. I’ve always considered my dancers the canvas on which I am creating a kind of artwork. To be honest,  I do not know exactly when the actual choreographic spark started, I don’t know which piece it started with really, because I’m sure the first few pieces I did were absolute rubbish, but as Jerome Robbins says, in order to make one good piece of choreography you probably have to make 10 bad ones (laughs). It was trial and error in terms of figuring out what kind of process I wanted to engage in and what kind of work I wanted to make. And even now it’s still a difficult process for me because I’m constantly being asked what kind of choreographer I am. But I cannot define myself as a particular kind of choreographer. I prefer to be known as someone who choreographs, because if I say that I’m a certain kind of choreographer it’s as though I’ve set a limit on myself. I do however like to work with physical theatre, post-modern, experimental dance which I don’t think necessarily fits into a Contemporary box. I’m also interested in fusion and I think the kind of work that I make is also influenced by the space that I’m in.
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Dancer Kerry-Ann Lawrence
NB: You recently came back from studying at Trinity Laban in London. How has that influenced you as a choreographer?

OP: Since doing my Masters at Laban I have different roads in terms of where I’m going, in terms of pulling all my different experiences together, but I constantly find myself making more experimental stuff, stuff that doesn’t quite fit into the Jamaican landscape. Jamaicans like stories, I don’t like that. I don’t like narratives, I like things that make you think, that kind of shock you, that make you not know what it is initially so you have to go home and think about it. So I try not to have people scream or clap during my work. I want them to think about it. Because sometimes you scream and clap but then I don’t know if you’ve internalised what is happening and what it’s about.

NB: What is your work process like?


OP: I kind of work in what I call the process of the present, basically trying not to pre-plan. So everything that happens happens fresh within the space. And every time a piece has been done, like Stained Soul which has been done five times, it has never been repeated the same way. Even though the text may be the same and some of the movement vocabulary may be the same, it never quite comes out the same. It is influenced by what it was but I’m interested in fresh possibilities. Although eventually it will just become one thing. Right now I’m trying not to make fifty million pieces, but to explore all the possibilities within a piece, remount it over and over and over, and then eventually I get to the point, not of perfection, but where I’ve really exhausted this piece, and I’m ready to move on to another kind of experience and experiment. I think its important to find all the possibilities within the work because that working process is very time-consuming. You put so much of yourself in it, so why not continue? When you are in it the first time you’re so immersed you cannot see what it is that you want. You’re just trying to make and create and you’re so involved in it. But once you’ve given it over to the bodies you can kind of look at it with an outside eye and say, okay this can go there, or I can eliminate that. So you become more objective to the work. So I think the first make for me now is to try and release whatever it is that I’m trying to say and then the second make is releasing the last bit of it and if I do it a third time it's from the perspective of having gotten over this but I can use it on a different level now and the work can now exist as art as opposed to being personal.


NB: Going back to London, what was it like in terms of the differences in culture, and the dance culture in particular?

OP: The first thing is that it is a completely different culture when you go there, in terms of the number of races, the kinds of houses, et cetera. In terms of dance, what I found with Laban is that their process is more cerebral in terms of how they approach work. You are always expected to be in the studio working but you’re never expected to present your work physically, it is more about the processes you’ve been engaging in. So it was difficult coming out of this culture where sometimes we put everything out there physically and don’t necessarily think about it and know what it is that you’re trying to say. So during the nine months I was there, I was only allowed to choreograph once. Most of the time was spent in research and development and thesis writing, and at the end was the final product. The process was good but limiting in the sense that most of the time people who leave the institution go out to create work and other people are not really interested in their process. One plus though is that being process-oriented gives you lots of time to find the different possibilities within a work. When you have a short span of time you tend to work with what you already know, whereas if you have a long span of time you have more time to explore, as opposed to just throwing everything in, including the kitchen sink. So that lengthy process is important. Also, one of the biggest things was, which doesn’t happen a lot in our culture, they believe the choreographer is a director. They believe in giving the dancers all these tasks, so they do all the work and then the choreographer assembles it and that becomes theirs. So you’ll notice that my Danceworks piece says “...in collaboration with the dancers”. And dancers will largely perform a work better if they are engaged not just physically but emotionally and mentally in the process of creating it.
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Dancers In Regarding the Pain of Others. From left Paul Newman, Jessica Lynch, Sophia McKain, Renee Harris, (back) Kerry-Ann Lawrence
NB: Talk a little about the pieces you created - Regarding the Pain of Others, and Traces.

OP: The title Regarding the Pain of Others is not an original one. It comes from a book of the same name by an author called Susan Sontag. And in it she has a lot of still images of war and she explores how we can become numb to the suffering around us. I wanted to take it a step further and explore the possibility, or impossibility, of trying to live in somebody else’s pain. And really the only way you can live in it is based on the kind of emotion that it triggers in you. So for the dance, instead of starting from the movement, we started from the place of the emotion which then translated into movement. And it gives the movement a different feel, it becomes more meaningful. As I mentioned I’ve been collaborating with the dancers here since I got back. In Traces of Home, which is now called Traces and which I actually brought back from London, they got tonnes of tasks like retrograding (reversing) the movement, transposing the arm movements to the legs or the legs to the arms, performing a standing movement on the floor or a floor movement standing, just trying to find and explore all these “impossible” ideas. In a way it takes the movement to something else, cause it’s the same movement but out of one movement concept you can get several layers of stuff and then the possibilities become endless.

NB: You’ve said you don’t like stories and imposing characters on your dancers and in Traces you can get away with it because, while you’re exploring the idea of what home is, the dance is abstract. But you do have loose characters in Regarding the Pain, for example you have soldiers...

OP: Yeah. For Regarding it is an abstract work in four movements but working with literal things which were the inspiration. But it’s not a logical story where you can say “Movement One is about this and Movement Two is about this” and so on. There’s a lot of overlap and blurring of ideas that happens.

NB: The piece is a very emotive one and the inspiration for it is pretty obvious, with the help of the projected images of the Haiti earthquake. Some people might wonder why you are choosing to tackle it at this time, a year later. How has it managed to stay fresh in your mind?

OP: Well the earthquake is only one of the inspirations. In the beginning of the piece there are some other images projected. Those are actually from Iraq, in terms of what happens to the civilians and the soldiers. And other references exist in the body of the work, such as the transnational criminal gang, MS-13,  that are not projected. The Haiti video became most dominant because it is closest to home. I actually did a piece when I was in London on the subject but it was nothing like this one. It’s not a matter of whether you explore something now, or a year or ten years later, it’s when the time is right. And I think that coming back here and teaching the course gave me the ability and time to explore in a way that would not have happened in a regular rehearsal process. So this was the best place and time for it to be made really...


NB: Who would you say are your sources of inspiration - those persons who have helped you on your artistic journey - whether they know it or not?

OP: Without being specific, I think everyone that I have trained with, and those who I create on all have directly or indirectly inspired me. One of my greatest sources of inspiration has been my personal stories or the stories of the world.



NB: As you said earlier, your work is always evolving. What is it then that you would want to leave of yourself for generations to come?


OP: I would like to leave of myself the notion that the possibilities within a single artistic output, choreographic work, are endless and it’s important to explore and exhaust all those possibilities to get the best out of the work. I have come to realise that the first time may not always be the best version of a work, so it’s important to look at it again with new eyes.
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Dancer Renee Harris
 


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