Before Stan Won't Dance was formed, we had been experimenting with a combination of text and movement in performance. We were convinced that there was a gap in the performance arena that had not been fully explored — where text and dance were completely integrated in order to create a whole new dance/theatrical language with a foot in both worlds but not standing completely in either.

Stan Won't Dance's work is about the relationship between movement and text — how the two can work with and against each other. For example, in life we often say one thing while thinking another. In our productions, we can suggest this by a dancer saying one thing but their movement reflecting the opposite, like a subconscious thought. In that way we can show tensions between what is thought, hoped for or felt, and what is actually said.

We realised very early on that if collaboration between us and a writer was to succeed, we had to approach the rehearsal process without any preconceived notion of the director/writer relationship.

The usual situation is that a writer presents a first draft, which is discussed and then redrafted, and so on until a final draft is established, all before rehearsals begin. We realised, however, that to achieve complete integration, the choreography and text would have to be devised simultaneously — each language informing the development of the other. This breakthrough puts massive pressure on our rehearsal periods, since it means going into the first day of rehearsal with no semblance of a script.

Since we devise work from scratch, we need to work with a writer in the studio from the very beginning. This allows us to edit, crop and adapt the movement and the text together until they have the right synchronicity and together create the right tensions on stage.

With the writer being present throughout the devising process, it becomes a real collaborative process. We discuss ideas and story lines, and talk about whether certain elements of what we are trying to say are best done in text or movement.