If you were spellbound by Black Watch at St. Ann's Warehouse or electrified by American Idiot on Broadway, you have Steven Hoggett to thank. The London-based choreographer and director is well-known for his ingenious, physically demanding staging, and, with his theater company Frantic Assembly, has worked hard to counteract the eye-rolling that can sometimes follow the potentially redundant phrase "physical theater." "We slag physical theatre off right, left and centre," Hoggett told Time Out London in 2006. "There’s a lot to be critical of." In Hoggett's hands, there's a lot to praise, and his latest opus—a collaboration between Frantic Assembly, the National Theatre of Scotland (Black Watch), playwright Bryony Lavery, and the electronic music group Underworld—may be his most visceral production yet.
Opening at St. Ann's Warehouse tomorrow night, Beautiful Burnout is set in a Glasgow boxing gym but was inspired by Hoggett's visit to Gleason's gym in Brooklyn. Reviewing the Edinburgh production, the Independent called it "the closest that dance-drama will ever come to the contact sport itself." This week we caught up with Hoggett to talk about how the show came together.
The show is called Beautiful Burnout. Where did the title come from? It's actually the name of an Underworld song, from their album, "Oblivion with Bells." We were trying to think of a term that would sum up the piece we were trying to make and Beautiful Burnout, which wasn't our original idea at the start of the process, but partway through we were picking tracks from the Underworld that we wanted to work with and Beautiful Burnout got written down on our list and we just looked at it and realized that actually that said everything we wanted to about the show.
What does that mean, "It said everything?" In terms of the lives of the people that were going to be in the piece that we wanted to make. That idea about aspiration and hope and obliteration and also the way that boxing is, like an explosive thing that in our minds and in our eyes is very beautiful, but the kind of physicality is very explosive. So all these kind of terms and feelings seem to be encapsulated by the term, "Beautiful Burnout."
Did you know from the beginning that you wanted their music as part of the show? Yes, we knew from the start. We wanted to, we've used their music for 16 years for the company, and we've never had a show where the physicality was big enough to match their sound, so it's been a long time coming.
Did they write any original material for the show? There was nothing they wrote specifically for the show but they gave us a lot of unreleased material for the show. The Underworld constantly record, and they actually released and acquired a relatively small amount of what they actually record, so we were able to get our hands on loads and loads of unreleased material—some of it old, some of it new. A whole range of stuff that we were able to put into the show.
The idea for the show originated in Brooklyn, right? The original idea came from a visit I made to Gleason's gym when I was here with Black Watch, which was performing a few years ago. The boys from the Black Watch company had to go to the gym to take a shower after the performances, and a friend of mine one night took me after the show and said, "I'm going to take you somewhere but I'm not going to tell you where I'm taking you, you just have to come with me and trust me." And they took me to Gleason's gym about 10:30 at night, middle of the week, the gym was absolutely packed. I had never been inside a boxing club before. It just seemed like one of the most incredible places I'd ever been and just very incredibly visceral, thrilling, frightening, and exciting, strange, and obvious, a very kind of amazing ten minutes, fifteen minutes. So I went home, back to the UK, and here the guy that I run Frantic with, we started talking about this experience and that was the start of the show, really.
The show incorporates a lot of movement. Did you do any other research into boxing when you were doing the choreography? Yes, we watched a lot of DVDs and YouTube boxing matches, hours and hours of it out there. We also had all the cast members, we auditioned them six months before we had to rehearse and we paid for all of them to go to boxing clubs and to learn boxing over six months before we even started the six week rehearsal. So by the time we all came together as a company, there was a lot of ideas and thoughts about what boxing is and the physical form of it, which helped create the physicality of the show.
Can you describe what the show is about, what people can expect? The story is about a boxing gym that is located in Glasgow, which is one of the major cities in Scotland. The show takes place over a couple of years and it's the lives of these five boxers, the desperations of these five young boxers from this club—four boys and one girl. The form of the show—is a script by Bryony Lavery who had a piece called Frozen, which was quite successful over here a few years ago. The text has a quite heavy reliance on physicality through the piece. It's very explosive, it's incredibly visceral. It's like bruising for the cast, they really do go through quite a lot. And the Underworld soundtrack means it's a very loud piece, as well. In every sense of the word?
Have you had older audience members that just can't take it? [Laughs] No, it's a very human piece so it doesn't look to just obliterate the audience. It makes a point of, you kind of get taken by the hand and dragged through the whole piece. It doesn't shock anyone into submission but it does kind of give you something to think about.
Would you say that you're exploring the juxtaposition between beauty and savageness? Yes, because I think for a lot of this, once you start examining the sport of boxing, it's very easy for it to start looking like choreography. There's something very elegant about it, and the fact that these people spend hours and hours practicing and developing their craft, because it is. I think once you start looking at boxing that way rather than just thinking about two men or women just trying to hit each other, then actually the minute you make that decision then you start to really reap the rewards of looking at it for what it is, which is an incredibly skilled sporting event between two people.
Like American Idiot, there's a similar theme; disaffected youth longing for escape. Are you drawn to these things for a reason or is it just random? Slightly random. I think it's an area that I'm interested in, in terms of looking at the way that we make choreograph work. I like to work on real physical, human emotions and feelings and predicaments rather than just some movement aesthetic for its own sake. So issues like this are very useful, because when you're creating material you can ask performers to think about scenarios and situations and how they might be emotionally as people and that's where the physicality comes from. So the end result then is an audience that's maybe not used to seeing physicality on stage and doesn't feel like they're being alienated because stuff is partly coming from an emotional truth rather than trying to create that pretty stage picture.
One review of this show says, "There's a world of possibilities opened up by its staging." What does that mean? There's a moment in the show where we take it beyond realism and naturalism and the show becomes quite heightened in a couple of sequences. You really get to understand the thinking mechanisms inside a boxer's mind when they're facing an opponent. I think that might be what he's referring to. So there's a few moments when it becomes quite heightened as a piece.
Did you actually do boxing yourself when you were preparing this? Yes, we had boxing trainers come in to the workshops when we were developing the piece and we also have that guy Tim to work with us for the whole of the rehearsal and every day is part of the rehearsal process over the six weeks. We all took it in turns, took a boxing warm up, we learned sparring techniques, so everybody got involved as part of that.
Did anything about that process surprise you? I think how difficult and precise it is. It's incredibly difficult, it's really hard, that's an obvious thing to say, but it's really, really hard work. And the precision that they have to employ means that they're super athletes and professional boxers. We're used to kind of hard, physical work, the nature of Frantic's work is that it's always quite a challenge physically for performers but this is definitely, by a long shot, the hardest piece we've ever made. And it's exhausting, we were doing just over an hour each day warming up and that was hard, it was really tough. But as a company it was exciting to all be facing that same challenge.
Have you ever been in a fight outside the ring? [Laughs] Yes, but not for a long time.
Do you want to tell us about that? I'm trying to think when me last one was, it was probably years ago in my early twenties. I haven't had a life of fighting much, to be honest luckily. But you never know.
Do you feel prepared now, having had this experience, do you feel like you're ready? I think I certainly know how to swing a left hook now. I might have just flailed before. I'm not quite sure how effective it would be but I certainly know what I was doing.
Do the guys at Gleason's know about this, are any of them going to come see the show? Yes, we've been getting in contact with Gleason's quite a lot. They're holding our opening night party. We're getting some workshops from some of their young boxers and they're bringing some of their kids to come see the show. Gleason's going to give a talk on a couple of nights that we're playing there. So it's a really healthy relationship and we're really pleased by that. It feels like a really legitimate relationship to the venue and ourselves and Gleason's, we're really excited about that.
