Joan Clevillé: Why Scottish Dance Theatre Belongs in Dundee

“The history of the company is not one of those, ‘Oh, hey, we’re going to create this national flagship company overnight.’ It literally grew. It takes so many steps, hard work, people, and relationships, that it’s even more special to know, wow, look at what’s happened.”

Joan Clevillé sits in Dundee to discuss 40 years of Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT). He took over as Artistic Director in April 2019. The company he leads today has come a very long way since its founding.

Forty years ago, it was a local community project. Royston Maldoom stepped in to cover a cancelled adult dance class at a Dundee arts centre in the late 1970s. The results prompted a regional residency in 1981 across Fife and Tayside. Dundee Repertory Theatre opened its Tay Square venue in 1982, providing a physical base. By 1986, Maldoom launched the Dundee Rep Dance Company with four dancers. They mixed mainstage shows with community classes.

“There’s something about the journey of the company,” Clevillé said. “That sort of sense of grassroots projects with Royston and the dancers he assembled, basically. All the groundwork that he had been doing in Tayside and Fife.”

“I think the ambition was to be able to create somewhere for those emerging dancers,” he added. “I think at some point you realise, hang on, all these young people that we’re getting into dance, we’re getting them training, but then they don’t necessarily have somewhere to go and practice their craft professionally. So, what a vision to create a platform for dancers, but also to engage communities. I think there was a lot of that aspect, which is still very much part of the DNA of the company.”

Shifting Structures

Successive directors expanded the group. Tamara McLorg took charge in 1988. Neville Campbell arrived in 1995, and the ensemble formally adopted the Scottish Dance Theatre name.

“The history of the company is not one of those, ‘Oh, hey, we’re going to create this national flagship company overnight.’ It literally grew.”

Janet Smith spent 14 years from 1997, revolutionising the group’s infrastructure. She secured a £1 million studio extension, switched to a repertory model, and integrated disabled dancers into the core touring cast. Fleur Darkin followed in 2012, dismantling the stylistic barriers between classical ballet and contemporary movement.

Clevillé grew up in Barcelona. He found dance at 16, ignored conservatoire training, and read literature and philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University instead. He auditioned for SDT while dancing for a neo-classical ballet company at an Austrian opera house.

The shift to Scotland, it seems, was abrupt.

“In my first year, I was a bit in shock because the culture was so different between Austria and Scotland—incredibly different,” he said.

The Scottish working environment demanded more than technical ability.

“Janet Smith was the director at the time, Caroline Bowditch was the Dance Agent for Change, and Marc Brew was the Associate Director,” Clevillé recalled. “I hadn’t been exposed to inclusive practice, I hadn’t been exposed to so many things, like the way the company connected to the community. I had been working for four years in an opera house, and there was never even a discussion about getting out of the opera house to go anywhere.”

He left SDT in 2013 to choreograph independently, but remained in Dundee.

“I realised I wanted to choreograph and freelance, but why would I go to London?” he said. “I’m just going to struggle to pay rent; I’m going to be drowned in this huge scene. Actually, here I had the support that I needed in the city, but also more widely in Scotland. I decided to put down roots, I suppose. So then when the opportunity came in 2019 to come back to the company, it was definitely one of, ‘Wow, this is full circle.'”

The Dundee Anchor

Operating outside the central belt, it appears, dictates the company’s identity to a significant degree.

“100%,” he said when asked if the location matters. “If you had asked me that question when I was a dancer in the company 15 years ago, I probably would have said nah, I would rather be in Glasgow or Edinburgh and be in the thick of it where the art scene is. Now, all these years later, I realise how important it is that the company is based not in Edinburgh or Glasgow or anywhere else.”

“If we were in a busy city with lots of other events, artists, and things happening, it’s much easier to get distracted, feel self-conscious, and care about things you shouldn’t be caring so much about, like, ‘Is this on trend? Is this cool? Will this bubble of connoisseurs approve?'” Clevillé said. “None of that exists in the same way here. It feels like a much more focused and grounded way of working and developing your artistic practice.”

Curating the Anniversary

SDT marks its 40th anniversary with a double bill of world premieres at Dundee Rep on 19 and 20 June. A UK tour follows in the autumn, stopping in London, Angus, Inverness, Manchester, and Leeds.

Programming required strict calculation, and the results reflect something of a dual mandate.

“I think we want to find an opportunity to celebrate our roots, our connection with Scotland, and then also, at the same time—it’s like the same coin—we need to find a space to celebrate that more outward-looking ambition and identity,” he said.

“We commissioned Tess Letham at the beginning of the year, who is based in Edinburgh, and we restaged two pieces, Moving Cloud and O Chiadain An Lo, that have Scottish folk music,” he said. The company took these works to rural community spaces and Highland village halls.

The ‘roots’ suitably tended, SDT turned their gaze outwards, resulting in international choreographers Emilie Leriche and Edouard Hue making their way to Dundee.

“It’s a dance company in Scotland that has the privilege and the capacity to be able to bring the world in, and I think that’s super important for our audiences here in Scotland, in the UK also, especially in this day and age, to keep connected with what’s happening elsewhere and to be able to bring it home,” Clevillé noted.

**O Chiadain An Lo_photo Brian Hartley**

“I have this massive spreadsheet, basically, and I keep populating it with loads of wish lists,” he added. “It’s a ginormous wish list of people that I’d love to collaborate with, and I’m always keeping my ears and my eyes open.”

Leriche’s piece, Rotten Work, looks at care and collective survival.

“With Emily’s work, I think there’s almost a lyrical quality to it,” he said. “It’s poignant, it’s haunting, it’s really beautiful. I don’t think we have anything else comparable in the repertoire.”

The movement is deceptively demanding.

“Her work is beautiful because, on one side, there’s a very stripped-back physicality, very pedestrian, that is not trying hard or is not showy. But then at the same time, the craft that she then weaves is mind-blowing,” he explained. “It’s very complex; there are a lot of sore bodies, but sore brains upstairs because everyone’s trying to keep hold of this massive system that is super complex. So it’s like an organism somehow; it’s really beautiful.”

Hue’s piece, The Game of Life, relies on awkward, idiosyncratic gestures.

“He’s got a very different physicality himself; you know, he’s this big tall man, a bit like me,” Clevillé said. “And there’s a goofiness and quirkiness about the way he moves, and he’s been more like teaching material to the dancers. So there’s been a lot of practicing this way of moving. It’s going to be really interesting to see the contrast between these two voices, the more lyrical quality of Emily and then this rough and raw quality of Eduard’s movement.”

Maldoom’s community focus also features in the anniversary schedule. RECollect, created by dance artist Bridie Gane, stages 45 local participants, aged 8 to over 55, in late June.

Commercial Realities

Balancing artistic risk against ticket sales is a hard metric by anyone’s standards. Clevillé curates a deliberate audience strategy to manage this.

“My approach is to make sure there’s a variety and a range in the work that we do,” he said. “From work that is closer to something that feels more commercial, that feels like it has a wider appeal, where you don’t need to speak the insider language to be able to understand it.”

Getting the public over the threshold remains the primary hurdle. Once they sit down, the resistance seems to vanish.

“Ninety or 95% of the time people tell me, ‘I didn’t think this was going to be for me, but I loved it,'” he noted. “The hardest bit is getting people through the door.”

Shut Up and Dance is Dead

The physical reality of a repertory dancer requires intense, considerate maintenance. Days at SDT begin with 30 minutes of warm-up. A 90-minute class follows, spanning techniques from classical ballet to contact improvisation. Then comes five and a half hours of rehearsal.

Yet Clevillé places equal weight on talking. The culture of the contemporary dance studio has shifted.

“We try to cultivate a working culture where the dancers have a voice and are empowered to speak, because historically, dancers have been told a lot to just shut up and dance, don’t think about it,” Clevillé said. “Not every week, but every few weeks, we have dancers’ meetings, which are just the ensemble themselves talking.”

“It’s complex; it’s a very intensive working environment where you need a lot of trust,” he said. “You’re working with the strength of the body but also with vulnerability; you’re working with feelings, and that requires a lot of work. Working together as an ensemble, understanding each other, understanding the right way to communicate—all of that takes time, practice, and investment.”

Talk of investment inevitably conjures thoughts of the UK’s present, and rather hostile climate when it comes to the arts. Audiences have never been more important when it comes to keeping the lights on. Cllevillé understands that public investment is required to keep the company liquid.

“You have to keep connecting to the joy of it, to the hope, and to the quiet defiance,” he said. “The pandemic was obviously a really challenging time for everyone… but it was also an opportunity to practice our resilience and to question what matters truly, and what’s at the core of what we do. It’s still a privilege that the Scottish people feel they want to invest some of their tax money in paying someone to roll on the floor. That is an absolute privilege and something that is not taken for granted.”

“Ninety or 95% of the time people tell me, ‘I didn’t think this was going to be for me, but I loved it,'” he noted. “The hardest bit is getting people through the door.”

When asked why he continues to move, his answer strips away the institutional pressures entirely.

“I find out about myself when I dance,” he said. “There are parts of me that are hard to put into words, make sense of, or think through. Dance allows me to get to know myself in an embodied way, and that feels very true. It’s hard to lie to yourself when you’re listening to your body; the body very often has the answer right, and I love that.”

In the end, though, Joan Clevillé is a dance maestro whose instincts are inherently communal. Artistic Directors come in all different shapes, sizes and philosophies, but if we went back 40 years to the first days of this now venerable dance company, I rather think Royston Maldoom and his bold band of ‘can-do’ dancers would find Joan very much to their liking.

“Maybe the other thing I would say, which is a bit contradictory, but in a way feels like the other side of the coin, is that I love connecting with people through dance,” he concluded. “Dance is a way of relating to myself, to the world, and to other people. I think that’s why I do it.”

Featured Image: Joan Clevillé