ResCen: Rosemary Lee


Passage was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, April 2001 and involved thirteen performers, aged from 9 to over 70, whom I met at the South Bank once a week for six months to create the work. I worked with three of my long term collaborators on Passage: Peter Anderson, film maker; Louise Belson, designer; and Chahine Yavroyan, lighting designer. During the performance expansive Norfolk landscapes were projected onto three large screens at the back of the stage changing periodically to huge close-up portraits of the performers. The music was a re-working of Earth and the Great Weather by John Luther Adams, an Alaskan-based composer. In this website, I delve into the layers of influences, methods and working processes that I was using knowingly and unknowingly. I am looking at how movement material is created, discovered, imagined, clung onto, adapted or lost. I have not attempted to give a comprehensive view of each stage in the making process but have rather concentrated on the idea of preparation. My aim here is to probe a tiny multi layered segment of a much larger complex process. The Notebook pages reveal images and atmospheres I mused upon well before and during the workshops The Workshop pages glimpse tasks given to the performers in workshops The Conversation pages explore how I prepared myself and the cast for the process that we were embarking on together. The Info and Credits page gives general information In making this website, I collaborated with Niki Pollard, research student, who observed the making of Passage first hand. Her task has been to help me unpick and reveal my process, sometimes adding a parallel, contextual thread of fragments that occurred to her whilst reading my notebooks, watching rehearsals and talking to me. These texts are a delightful affirmation for me of the area of imagery I was grappling with, and I have chosen to include some of them as footnotes to my notebook pages. The visual materials used throughout the site include rehearsal clips, photographs from performance, images resonant to me and photographs from early film site visits to my East Anglian childhood haunts. Rosemary Lee
Passage was commissioned by The Royal Festival Hall with support from ResCen and DanceEast Artist Residency Programme.

Passage was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, April 2001 and involved thirteen performers, aged from 9 to over 70, whom I met at the South Bank once a week for six months to create the work. I worked with three of my long term collaborators on Passage: Peter Anderson, film maker; Louise Belson, designer; and Chahine Yavroyan, lighting designer. During the performance expansive Norfolk landscapes were projected onto three large screens at the back of the stage changing periodically to huge close-up portraits of the performers. The music was a re-working of Earth and the Great Weather by John Luther Adams, an Alaskan-based composer.

In this website, I delve into the layers of influences, methods and working processes that I was using knowingly and unknowingly. I am looking at how movement material is created, discovered, imagined, clung onto, adapted or lost. I have not attempted to give a comprehensive view of each stage in the making process but have rather concentrated on the idea of preparation. My aim here is to probe a tiny multi layered segment of a much larger complex process.

The Notebook pages reveal images and atmospheres I mused upon well before and during the workshops
The Workshop pages glimpse tasks given to the performers in workshops
The Conversation pages explore how I prepared myself and the cast for the process that we were embarking on together.
The Info and Credits page gives general information

In making this website, I collaborated with Niki Pollard, research student, who observed the making of Passage first hand. Her task has been to help me unpick and reveal my process, sometimes adding a parallel, contextual thread of fragments that occurred to her whilst reading my notebooks, watching rehearsals and talking to me. These texts are a delightful affirmation for me of the area of imagery I was grappling with, and I have chosen to include some of them as footnotes to my notebook pages. The visual materials used throughout the site include rehearsal clips, photographs from performance, images resonant to me and photographs from early film site visits to my East Anglian childhood haunts.

Rosemary Lee

Passage was commissioned by The Royal Festival Hall with support from ResCen and DanceEast Artist Residency Programme.