Arts friends and colleagues yesterday paid tribute to one of the UK’s most important dancers and choreographers, North Wales-raised Nigel Charnock who died aged 52 on Wednesday. Charismatic Charnock’s latest work I'm Water I'm Weightless is being performed by National Theatre Wales as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Unlimited. The production runs at Wales Millennium Centre until this evening and is at London’s South Bank at the end of August. The show features a cast of deaf and disabled performers. John McGrath, artistic director of NTW, said, "All of us at National Theatre Wales, and particularly the cast and team of In Water I’m Weightless, are devastated at the news of Nigel Charnock’s death. Until his illness, Nigel had been working with us on this, our current production, and it was a joy to experience his unique creative vision and inspiring working process. He will be hugely missed in the worlds of dance and theatre – and his influence will be felt for many, many years to come." The maverick performer and choreographer rose to fame as a founder member of the dance company DV8 and then established a successful solo career working with a diverse range of companies including NDCWales. Artistic director Ann Sholem said, “It was a privilege for us to work with Nigel. He was such a unique, extraordinary character and talent. How tragic to die so young with so much unrealised potential. He was working up until just weeks ago as he would have wanted as dance was his life. It was so sudden.” Manchester-born Charnock’s family moved to Abergele, North Wales, where he was a pupil at Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan in Abergele and Llandrillo College, Llandudno. He was accepted at the age of 21 to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, where his tutors suggested he trained in dance despite the fact that he was already beyond the age that most dancers start training. His obvious ability led him to a year at the London Contemporary Dance School before he co-founded DV8 with Lloyd Newson in 1986. Charnock left DV8 in 1992 when the company was truly taking off. “I left because the shows were getting too big,” he told me when working with NDCWales in 2009. ““DV8 was really getting successful with massive sets, but I kept feeling smaller and smaller and part of a huge organisation.” Charnock went on to enjoy a run of highly-acclaimed shows and it was after a performance of his solo show Frank that he was invited to created his only full work with NDCWales called Lunatic that toured through 2009 and 2010, based on the ideas of warfare, madness, sleeplessness, dreams and the style of the 1950s. “The ‘50s fascinate me,” he says. “It was just after the war and, especially in Britain, people thought things would be better,” he said when I interviewed him when he was creating the new dance at the Dance House at Wales Millennium Centre. It was significant that Charnock’s Lunatic was the dance NDCWales took to Llandudno for their first performances at Venue Cymru and the company’s dancers led workshops in the area including at his old college based on the season’s repertory. Cardiff-based former NDCWales rehearsal director and now independent dancer and choreographer Jo Fong worked extensively with Nigel and danced in Lunatic. “It is difficult to think about the working with him, more about the man, though of course you think about all the surreal moments you shared with him. “I saw his collaboration with National Theatre Wales two nights ago and the piece had Nigel written all over it, right down to Hey, Big Spender. I wondered how much he had been able to see of this special performance.” Charnock's work ranged from solo works he often performed himself and other highly entertaining narrative works such as Lunatic with NDCWales. The works were frequently autobiographical, often witty but with underlying dark elements. In Lunatic, for example, audiences were intrigued by his use of the Welsh language but few probably realised that he was commenting on his own unhappy experiences of the language as an English schoolboy moving to North Wales. Nigel’s latest biography said, in characteristic style, “Nigel now realises that all this is quite meaningless and so he spends most of his time laughing at everything and everybody and talking to animals.” A statement on his website said Charnock died on Wednesday, 1 August at St Christopher's Hospice in South London. |
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Sunday, August 5, 2012 |
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