Antony Hamilton, Keeping Time

Antony Hamilton is on the move. When he answers my Zoom call, the world-renowned choreographer is at the airport about to board a flight to London. This isn't a vacation, though: the Australian native, who is also the artistic director and co-CEO of Chunky Move, a Victoria-based contemporary dance company, is traveling with the troupe on their latest Europe and U.K. tour. Established in 1995, the company will be presenting “4/4,” Hamilton’s award-winning piece featuring a complex number counting system and street dance-inspired elements. In between announcements over the airport loudspeaker (“I think I’m leaving in twenty minutes!” Hamilton chuckles), I caught up with the choreographer about how he developed his movement practice, the distinct mathematical methodology he utilizes when choreographing, and the importance of exercising constraint in art. The UK premiere is at the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall on 8 - 9 November, with further shows in Brussels, Oslo, Heerlen, Porto, and Luxembourg.

Chunky Move in “4/4” by Antony Hamilton. Photograph by Gianna Rizzo

Why did you first become a dance maker?

I feel fortunate that I had a childhood in which I was able to experience a lot of play; I was allowed to imagine worlds and dream and spend a lot of time engaging in creativity. When I think about the journey that I've been on as a dance maker, I connect it to that sense of imaginative play that I experienced as a child. In many ways, I still feel like I'm lucky to be able to sort of tap that part of my experience and just enjoy the pleasure of experimentation. Dance is a very primary form of expression, so it always feels very connected to childhood for me. In terms of career trajectory, I studied dance as a kid and as a teenager, and then worked as a dancer for contemporary dance companies throughout Australia in the early 2000s. From there, it was a pretty natural progression for me to make works. Again, to go back to that sense of experimentation and play, I always knew that I wanted to be a maker of artistic works. I knew that’s what I wanted to do before I even knew that I wanted to be a dancer.

You are currently touring your work “4/4.” Can you tell us about the origins of the piece and what it entails?

This piece is a bit like a signature work in that it exemplifies a choreographic practice that's been the bedrock of a lot of my creations for the past fifteen years. It's really just a technical approach to choreography, which is this number counting system that I developed to apply numbers to durations of specific movements and then string those movements together to make distinct phrases. I usually make these lists of quite random numbers, but they do tend to have a little bit of intuitive rhythmic kind of quality to them in terms of the choice of which numbers go together. They are always between one and ten; there's way more volume of ones, twos, and threes than there are sevens, eights, and nines, because the shorter duration creates a much more dynamic rhythmic punctuation kind of effect, which I'm much more interested in.

This choreographic method has been utilized in many works that I've made, but it's rarely been the subject of the work; mostly, it’s been used to create material in a work that had some other larger thematic context or some other kind of dramaturgical anchor. Around 2015 or 2016, I did make a duet which was an exploration strictly of this choreographic method, but it was more like a demonstration to show how the method works. Like, “These are the steps and these are the complex arrangements you can come up with, etc.” With “4/4,” I sort of bounced off that. I wanted to expand the potential of the technical possibilities of the form by making two quartets, hence the title “4/4,” but I was still interested in how we perceive a duet. The work is essentially a duet of two quartets.

I think something interesting that happens in a lot of works with this more academic approach is that even if you start in a place of trying to extrapolate the choreographic potential of this very specific method, the human element will always shine through. The personality of the people involved in the creation of the work forces its way through and makes itself very present within the journey of the piece. The choreographic language is a quite restricted palette of possibility, but within that palette there’s this dramaturgical arc in which the dancers are pushing out beyond that limit and becoming a much more expressive force in the work.

Antony Hamilton in rehearsal. Photograph by Gianna Rizzo

That idea of a restricted palette reminds me of the advice that Balanchine gave to Jacques D’Amboise when he began to choreograph, which was to give himself limitations. For instance, make a ballet without any pirouettes.

Absolutely. The only way to develop anything with real depth is to put some boundaries on it so that you can stretch the form that you're working in and really unpack and uncover all the possibilities inherent within it. It happens in cinema; you know, there’s the Dogme 95, Lars von Trier kind of approach which foregrounds creating these very narrow conditions of making.

It's very difficult to create in a boundaryless environment where nothing is stipulated and there's no conditions. You have to be working with some sort of subject, and in the case of “4/4,” the subject is the limitations of the choreographic possibility. Like I said, the method is a departure point, but then the work will often extrapolate out because the form really can't contain people. People make their presence felt and their histories known just by sort of engaging with the conditions and the form. That is a part of the work that is largely out of my control and it's always a pleasure to invite and witness that and see the way a work starts to take its own course. You're almost just finding the best way to support the thing it wants to do.

“4/4” has been described as a “blueprint for physical endurance.” Is there an appeal to witnessing dancers perform something so obviously difficult?

It's inevitable that you're going to see that deep concentration that they have, because they can't really think about anything else while they're doing it. It's like reading music: it's this very single-pointed approach to performing a task. I mean, witnessing the effort is interesting, but it's only interesting because the material asks that of them. I'm not interested in just making something difficult for the sake of it, just so that we can see people struggling with something.

That struggle is just a natural condition of the work; there’s no sort of dramaturgical imperative to make it look like it's difficult.

Chunky Move in “4/4” by Antony Hamilton. Photograph by Gianna Rizzo

There is a mix of different genres of dance within the piece that reflect the performer's individual backgrounds. Why was this important to you and how did you go about incorporating these various elements into the piece?

I studied classical ballet for many years—from the time I was like eight to eighteen—but I was also a B boy and I was breaking in the street and in clubs and in parks with crews around Australia. Obviously, it's an imported cultural phenomenon originally from New York and LA and other parts of the United States, so we got it second hand in Australia through Hollywood movies and so on. Eventually, I met pioneers of hip hop in New York, connected with people who are engaged in the hip hop scene in Australia, and formed genuine connections with them across continents. It made me realize the importance of letting in other influences and how much that can enrich you. In “4/4,” the influences are not necessarily explicit. One of the dancers is a house dancer; another one is freestyle hip hop and krump dancer. The influence of their dancing is in the work, but it's not obvious—I’d say that it's more that they're bringing a certain energy to the choreography.

At times, I’ve had a bit of a tenuous relationship with street dance because even though I was very much drawn towards it, the career opportunities which were presented to me ended up being more in the contemporary dance space. I had to make decisions at different times in my life about where I was going to put my energy, but street dance has always been very important to me. When I started at Chunky Movers about five years ago as the artistic director, it really felt like one of the first times I was able to really platform some street dance artists as well and bring their language into the mix. “4/4” is a great example of a piece that contains elements of that language and develops them in a different way.

How do you view your responsibility as a dance maker? Is it to the audience, the dancers, the form?

There is always a responsibility to a huge number of people. There is the audience, the dancers, the administrative team, the back of house, the production team, the stakeholders, the donors and funders . . . it's quite a broad sweep of people who you have responsibilities to. That said, I'm quite confident in my work and I have always been quite confident that if I am genuinely interested in this thing, then probably someone else will be too. I often think that's a very good guide: your own deep interest and fascination in an idea. That’s been a pretty consistent point of reference for my entire choreographic career and that’s what makes me quite certain that audiences are going to connect.

I've been lucky to see that my work has been profound for many audiences; that’s really special and what I care most about at the end of the day. My biggest hope is that I am creating an experience like nothing anyone has ever experienced before. My choreographic method is something that has been developed in a quite contained environment, with not a lot of other influences coming into it—of course, besides the influence of some of the dancers and their histories and their practices—so I want audiences to sense that they have experienced something totally new. I mean, I just want people to feel exhilarated and like there's still things to be excited about in the world. We need that.

Phoebe Roberts

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