Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The two figures on the stage at Sadler’s Wells’ new outpost in east London cut very different silhouettes. The artistic director and co-chief executive, Sir Alistair Spalding, channels boardroom casual in an open-collar blue shirt, dark cotton trousers and brown Oxford shoes; the dancer and choreographer Jules Cunningham wears Dr Martens boots and drainpipe trousers, hair clipped short at the sides and top, long at the back. One stands slightly stiffly, hands in pockets; the other – who was once described as “half Giacometti’s Walking Man, half rubber band” – stretches and flexes as if ready to perform. Two uniforms, one mission.When we meet, the opening of the theatre on the edge of the Olympic Park is just weeks away. Cunningham – among the first of the company’s newly appointed associate artists – will be one of the first artists to perform there with a double bill entitled CROW/Pigeons. Spalding’s demeanour belies an iconoclastic spirit. In his two decades at the helm he has transformed Sadler’s Wells. His first move on becoming artistic director in 2004 was to turn a theatre that staged both ballet and opera, alongside popular performance groups such as Stomp, into an out-and-out contemporary dance venue that created its own work. “I looked back at when Sadler’s Wells was really successful, and it was mostly in the Lilian Baylis era, because work was being created – artists were in the building. It was a creators’ space.” In 2005, he appointed a new tranche of associate artists, including Akram Khan, Jonzi D, Matthew Bourne, BalletBoyz and Wayne McGregor. In the years since, he has added more names to that roster – Sharon Eyal, Hofesh Shechter and Crystal Pite among them. Ahead of the new theatre’s opening, last year he brought on seven more, including Cunningham. “You need to keep thinking about what’s happening now – what a new generation is saying – and to continue on that path,” says Spalding.Jules Cunningham had a working-class upbringing in Liverpool and trained at the Rambert School in London before going on to work with Merce Cunningham (no relation) Dance Company and Michael Clark Company. In 2017, Cunningham branched out on their own with Julie Cunningham & Company and a piece at the Barbican called To Be Me, in which Cunningham danced to the poetry of Kae Tempest. In an interview that year, Cunningham spoke about a frustration with dance: “[When I first joined a company] for six months I danced Sleeping Beauty in a tutu, with my hair in a bun. I was a fairy, and I didn’t feel like myself at all […] I’m gay, and my experience of the world is not represented on the dance stage.” Today, they say, “I suppose the life of being a dancer is like taking on somebody else’s vision and physicality. I was just at a point in myself where I was like, ‘I don’t want to be doing someone else’s movement.’ And in Kae’s poem there was the line ‘Time to be me now’, which was like, ‘OK, it’s time to start the next chapter.’”At that time Spalding was looking to commission three works to mark 20 years of the Sadler’s Wells building in Islington, and asked Cunningham to create one of them. Cunningham’s piece, m/y, took its inspiration from Monique Wittig’s novel The Lesbian Body, described in Wittig’s New York Times obituary as a story where “lesbian lovers literally invade each other’s bodies as an act of love”. For Cunningham, the piece was another big personal step: “Obviously I’ve been a queer person my whole life, but having that be present in what I was doing did feel like a really massive thing for me. It [also grew out of] my feeling of watching dance over the years where every relationship that’s portrayed is very straight. Even if it doesn’t mean to. I wanted to really shift that.”Their next work for Spalding, how did we get here? (2023), saw them dancing with fellow Merseysider Mel C. Some hardcore Spice Girls fans turned up to every show. “There were people who would never usually come to dance,” says Cunningham, “so many people came because of their music interests. And I think that’s such a nice thing, the crossover audiences and experiencing new things. Those were good times.”The new theatre – which would not exist without the legacy of the 2012 Olympics – is all about finding new audiences for contemporary dance in an area of London and the UK not traditionally well served by arts venues. “Sadler’s Wells has, as well as an international and national audience, a very local audience too,” says Spalding. “Obviously there are lots of people from Hackney coming to our [Islington] theatre at the moment but we want people from the other side of the Olympic Park coming here as well. We’ve designed the programming so that there are places where people who have never seen contemporary dance [can come].” National and international companies will visit and the theatre will also be home to the new Rose Choreographic School and the hip-hop training centre Academy Breakin’ Convention. Whichever side of the theatre you approach from, you’ll be dazzled by giant neon signs reading “You Are Welcome”. The stage is the same size as the one in Islington, meaning shows can transfer between the two; but the auditorium at the new theatre is significantly smaller (550 seats as against 1,500), creating a more intimate atmosphere better suited to smaller-scale productions. The seating can be retracted and the space can be used in different configurations or as an immersive venue. The opening season will see Sharon Eyal transform it into a club dance floor and Mette Ingvartsen recreate a skate park. For Cunningham’s CROW/Pigeons, danced by Cunningham, Harry Alexander, Matthias Sperling, Nafisah Baba and Yu-Chien Cheng, the staging will be end-on. The double bill is connected by the queer American musicians and performers Julius Eastman (1940-1990), a minimalist composer and contemporary of John Cage who died homeless, and Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), an accordionist and central figure in post-second world war electronic music. Both artists were outspoken about sexuality, race and marginalised groups. In the mid-’70s, Eastman performed in a work by Oliveros. Cunningham reimagines that moment in CROW, while Pigeons is danced to Eastman’s composition “Gay Guerilla”. I’ve seen rehearsal clips of Pigeons and the moves are, well, very pigeon-y, I suggest to Cunningham, for want of a better adjective. The idea for it occurred to them during lockdown: “I was walking in the one hour you were allowed out, and the streets were really quiet, but I was noticing pigeons and thinking, ‘Oh, they’ll have a little bit of an easier life now that there’s fewer cars and fewer people.’ And it made me think about groups of people who are viewed as a nuisance: people who are homeless, but you sort of get to ignore them in a way. Because it’s just there and uncomfortable. So that was the beginning of Pigeons.” About CROW, Cunningham is more enigmatic, other than to agree that in terms of bird impressions it’s less “crow-y”: “[Symbolically] crows are generally quite dark, you know,” Cunningham says. “There’s so much that’s happening in the world that’s unbearable to comprehend. So we’ve been thinking about how to hold all the things that are going on for us.” There are worse places to start than Spalding’s new ark. CROW/Pigeons by Jules Cunningham and Julie Cunningham & Company is at Sadler’s Wells East on 27 and 28 March, as part of Dance Reflections By Van Cleef & Arpels. how did we get here? is available free on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage from 10 to 31 March, sadlerswells.com
