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Then there are such obvious places where transformation happens, like from studio to stage. I also hope it happens (which is probably why I’m still plugging away being a choreographer) in the audience. I’m trying to make it happen all the way through the process, but ultimately I’m trying to make it happen in the audience members themselves. I guess, in my wildest dreams, I hope people have moments of transformation when they are seeing the work. I suppose by that I mean some kind of change from when they walked in to when they walk out. That is the obvious one; some sort of change in their state whilst they are watching the work. I’m sure it doesn’t really happen very often, but I think it is what I’m aiming at.

When Errollyn and I were talking about this a few weeks ago, we talked about times when we had had transformative experiences ourselves as audience members. We tried to remember when the earliest moment was, when we experienced that sense of feeling altered by seeing or experiencing something. For me, my earliest memory was seeing a documentary about Tolstoy on the television, and all I can remember is that he seemed to live in a railway station! I don't know whether that is true or not, but somehow that seemed very important to me – that he was at this railway station with things passing. I feel that was a very transformative moment. I think I understood something about the passion he had as a writer, and maybe that is what fires me to make work; to repeat that process.

Rather than going into every bit of the process, which I’m sure we will do, I wanted to focus these five minutes on the best bit for me: when I am watching transformation in a dancer or participant. About three years ago, when we first started meeting together, Richard Povall (who doesn’t work with us now) was encouraging us to write. He asked us to write about transformation in our process. I happened to be working with some nine year olds in a school in Dagenham, off the A13, a very deprived area. I was working towards an installation project. I thought this would be a good opportunity to see whether some of the same things happen to me as a choreographer teaching and working with children, as when I'm in a professional studio with professional dancers. So I wrote a few things about what I saw there. I’m going to read about some of the children, who are now probably grown up (I hope it is ok with you to read you something):

“Yannie slowly moves his arms, standing straight and concentrated. He is on a mountain commanding the thunder and lightening, a Greek god, a Greek boy god next to the A13 at Marsh Green Primary School. I notice his shift into another world and praise him too noisily but it doesn’t shake his utter commitment to his imagining that I see in his entire body. He is transformed, I can see his experience outwardly, I can sense we know each other has recognised it. He from the inside and me seeing it from the outside. Some weeks later he tells me that his most memorable moment of the week was being a weather god.”

I’ve written about three children, they do happen to be three boys, which is quite interesting. I wish I had got one about a girl, but we’ll carry on:

"Jamie: ‘Miss, look at my arm, it’s growing, it’s growing!’ He shows me his arm and I see it stretching on and on. I call the class very excitedly and tell them to look at Jamie’s arm going up to the moon. I say, can they send their heads up to the sky like that? I’m excited, Jamie is excited, he has felt a transformation and I have seen it. ‘Miss, that’s the first time I’ve ever got something!’ Later he tells me his most memorable moment was his arm growing forever and ever."

“Dean, the quietest lad who works so hard, struggles at school. He has a beautiful containment in him and I am drawn to it. He tells of a silver fountain being his most memorable moment and as he talks I see the fountain and I tell the class that I can see it right there. He smiles and looks at me with a silent questioning.”

So that just reminds me of seeing children transformed, or being embodied by an imaginative task, and the same thing happens watching professional dancers as well. For me, seeing a state change, or seeing someone embodied by something, is the clearest moment of transformation in my process.

I just want to say one more thing, (I don’t know if I’m running out of time), but as a choreographer you’re looking for those moments that I’ve tried to describe. For me, it’s a yard stick of whether a piece is working or not. It’s when the piece goes from nuts and bolts to something whole, almost as if it’s something fluid. Some life force has gone through the nuts and bolts and suddenly become something other. I realised today, as I was preparing for tonight, that I’m only thinking of it going from nuts and bolts to something other but actually, if I’m honest, it can go the other way. You can see a piece get to this place and you think, "there, it’s ready to take off", and then the next day it’s back to it’s nuts and bolts and you can’t see it (and sometimes you never see it again). That’s the depressing side of it. But that is my yard stick for whether a piece is ready to let go of or not.

As a performer, if I’m in someone else’s work or my own, I realise that there is a very strong transformative moment when you feel that you no longer have to shape the piece, the piece shapes you. That feels very special and one hopes to get to that point, as a performer, where the piece has got a life and force of its own, and that you actually become subservient in a way.

That is all I’m going to say for the moment.

Where was I going? I was going to Australia as a facilitator for a workshop called Time/Space/Place, which involved twenty artists from all over Australia. There were artists from all different disciplines; dance, theatre, different visual art forms, and music. I was one of five facilitators.

As I was filling out this log, day after day, I thought “what is happening to me? I’m a facilitator; what am I doing? What is my process as a facilitator? Is it the same as when I’m an artist, when I’m thinking or making?”. It wasn’t quite the same. During the time I was away, I was also working on a performance that I would perform in Perth after about three weeks. One early morning when I was still jetlagged, I had this one flash (I don’t know if you get these ) and I thought “I want to make two pieces with two of the artists, which I might use in Perth for the performance” I had this flash and then I was in a different mode; I was in the mode of a maker. Also it was an intuitive flash. I had these two pictures: one was about making a video sequence on a bridge in Wagga Wagga, which was where we were, (it is really a place), and another was that I wanted to work with one of the audio artists called Rosie Denis, who did vocal improvisations. I would do a vocal improvisation with her and maybe I’d record it and use it.

I did both of these things, and then I moved to Perth – I was also running workshops in Perth. One of these workshops happened immediately and it dealt with this business of relating to people. I wondered “what happens to people when I’m the sole facilitator instead of one of five? What happens to a group of people if I feel I’m working well (if I feel I’m being as good a facilitator as I can be)?” What happened is that they transformed over the three days of the workshop. They were different after three days. We had a very profound experience together and I feel they made some very interesting work.

Then I had to switch back to being the maker again because I went back to working on my piece, which I wasn’t very happy with (but I stuck with it in the end). It’s called Eleanor’s Falcon. I was deliberately putting myself under pressure not to decide what it was going to be until quite late on in this time period. What was happening to me now? Was it different? Was I a different person?

I think I was a different person actually. One of the connections was that the woman who I did the improvisation with, Rosie Denis, was able to come out to Perth, because I wasn’t very happy with the recording. She was able to get funding to come out to join me and she performed with me live in Perth, just a five minute sequence.

So at this point I go back to keeping the log. Meanwhile I get a sense that there is something about Rosie that reminds me of Tania. Something about the way I relate to her, something about the way she is (although she is Australian and Tania is British). They were similar, so I thought maybe I’d ask Rosie to be Tania in the performance. I mentioned it in an email, but I thought I’d wait until we were face to face to talk about it properly. However, Tania gets wind of this and we end up, (Richard and Tania), having a bit of a ding-dong on the log: “How are you going to get Rosie to be me Richard? What’s this about, she can’t be me really”. That was very interesting, having an argument with someone I’d invented, especially since she had a point. One of her points was that she didn’t want to come out of this badly and that the only way she would agree to Rosie being Tania was if I publicised her exhibition in Düsseldorf in the flyer programme – which I did. So what was going on here?

I could not hear Rosie during the interaction! I was on a mic and I couldn’t hear her and I felt I’d really failed. Then somebody told me, three days later, that they thought it was the most beautiful moment in the performance. What’s that about, your response to the audience response? That’s a very charged area too.

Maybe that’s enough to say at the minute, except that for me there were questions about “what happened, and what do I do with this; how did it work; what comes next”? It all happened remarkably quickly, and within two days I was working on the next piece using elements from that piece. I’m aware of it because it’s a long journey and I was away for all this time, and I was in these different roles and lots of things happened, and then I come back to England. It feels like a whole series of shifts I suppose.

OK, thank you.

I see transformation as a sort of visualisation, in a way, but also at the heart of composing for me is the idea of making a moment exist in time. All my pieces arrive in a flash, so often I’ll get a vision or picture. There is a piece that I wrote for a brass band where all I could see, (and it made no sense to me), was a huge car moving across a film screen. Another piece was just about the sensation of being very cold. These things mean nothing to anyone else, but for me the stronger that feeling is, the more I feel I’ve got something to hang onto when I’m generating ideas: I feel that there is a strong thread. I believe anybody can put music together if they think about it: anybody can make a piece of music lasting five minutes or even half an hour. However, I’m interested in music that has to exist. It's about making ideas feel as if they have to exist. Take a piece like Les Noces by Stravinksy, where you listen to this music and you think “wow, it must have always existed”. I feel that the way he has achieved that is through a single gesture which he is trying to convey in sound. It sounds sort of crass to talk about, but for me, writing music is all about one particular feeling.

I remember a programme where Howard Hodgkin was talking about what are considered his abstract works, but I was very struck by how he described, in all his paintings, trying to convey one single feeling. In a way writing music for me is crystallising something, and then making it exist in a time frame, so it’s like unpacking something and exploding. I have this thing, but it’s got to work, maybe in five minutes, or in an hour, or half an hour.

In composing you are also literally transforming time. I’ve just finished a twenty minute opera, which is really short, but I’ve made it sound like a really long short piece! In twenty minutes I want us to feel as though we’re living in two hours. In other pieces time should stop. I’m consciously thinking about all these techniques, as well as extending ideas. I’m drawing experiences into my own domain, which is the domain of time, and making time work in different ways depending what I’m trying to say. It sounds a bit abstract but it’s that simple, and I realise it’s been that simple for me since being a child. If you can really know what it is you’re saying, even if it’s something you can’t put into words, or see, or feel, that’s always the beginning.

Then the process of composing from that state to the performance is a whole other thing. This is this piece [holding up the score] I’ve just written, and it always makes me laugh, to see that it is like proper music! Actually the notation has got nothing to do with the reasons for writing, and nothing to do with the piece. This is just simply a map so people can find their way through. I depend so much on notation because I’m managing time in a particular way; I’m timing events. For example, there is a sequence which I want to sound very improvised, but I have to write out that improvisation. I literally have to write it so that every time it’s the same, but it feels spontaneous. Rosie touched on this: the essence, the feeling, the initial impulse for creating will still be in the work. It might be transformed but somehow it’s got to be this central core that survives through all the stuff.

Composing is so slow I can’t tell you – it’s like watching paint dry. I have this feeling, but then it can take months to finish a work depending on what the instrumentation is for. In that process I’m entirely alone and solitary; nobody can help me in a way. I invent the rules and then I have to follow them, but then towards the end I have to consider the practical nature of performing. For instance, in this opera, there are a lot of percussion parts. I have to think about really practical things like "will the percussionist have enough time to put his sticks down from the base drum to go over to the rattle?". The practicalities in a way become part of the whole creative process, so you are always working on these very different levels. You are always in another world but always in a very practical world, and notation is highly practical. Whatever you write down has to be as clear as possible because in rehearsal there is so little time. All this stuff can get in the way of your initial idea and of what you want to be a totally transformative experience at the end.

The reason I like going to rehearsals so much is that you see a piece totally reduced. For example, by the time I’ve finished writing this opera I know everything about it: the shape, the atmosphere, all the characters. Then in rehearsal it gets reduced to nothing. I sit and watch the singers learning, and the musicians getting things wrong, and it’s very humbling in a way because people are stumbling through notes. At that stage, you can glimpse most clearly whether the piece will work, in that ‘mistakey’ phase. If, in that first run through, however badly played, you can still feel the shape you envisaged at the beginning, then you know it is going to work.

After rehearsals (which involves working with lots of different people including the conductor), gradually the piece moves further away from me, and that is how it should be. I find it very difficult to hand in the score sometimes. That is partly because I get very attached to the sound world that I’m in, but that’s a crucial part of music making if you’re a composer. I talked about the single impressional feeling; that is all very well, but for a piece to live, return to the air from where it came, it has to move far away from you. When you watch performers starting to make your music their own, there is a point where they actually start suggesting corrections you could make, in order that your vision maybe more accurately conveyed. That is always fascinating, and something that is not talked about very much in composing; the importance of that performer/composer relationship. It's a totally transforming experience, beginning to see the piece you have written and lived with for so long in a totally new light. It is removed and it becomes a totally different thing. By the time it is performed I feel as if I don’t know this world anymore, as if it has nothing to do with me. You start the process not knowing, then you go through this whole period of being a total expert and very much dealing in details, and then when it’s performed the truth is that you don’t know anything about that world anymore. That is how is should be.

Using the same idea, I became very interested in the idea of weather. We live under weather and we live under real time. In particular, for a period of my life I would often make performance pieces that would involve a two year incubation period; a two month run up; a two month process. This would lead to something that would finally telescope down to ninety minutes. A whole chunk of my life was lived in this kind of time-scale, and this compacting process became a calendar.

One of my observations was that the work tended to become almost a scrapbook of the process: the structure of the work itself reflected the process of putting it together. There were the first ideas, then the discovery of a dynamic, then a conflict of two things. At the beginning it’s more one thing, and by the end it’s more another. I have some sort of sense of where it can go. To pick up on what Errollyn and Rosie were saying, there are very specific states which you can smell and recognise with absolutely accuracy. I'm interested in this business about holding onto things that later in the process will be recognisable, hopefully, in the moment. There is this unifying force in time, of the moment whereby performers' time, director's time and especially audience time are absolutely synchronised. They are indivisible moments, if they are communicating: my observation was that they were strange, reflecting microcosms. If a piece of work is a sort of temporal scrapbook of the time it took to arrive there, paradoxically it is also happening in time.

In particular for me, there is a very poignant moment at the end of any performance, because performances happen in time and they are ritual, unrepeatable events. This is true even of The Mousetrap, in its fortieth year at the moment of the curtain call. I don’t know if it’s still going? The moment that show stopped, or did the last show for the last time, the moment you say “it’s over”, is poignant. In particular we’re looking at processes in the performing arts, and I think that last moment immediately starts to take on life in time. There is a sort of synchronised moment at the end of the last moment of performance, maybe at the end of the tour, where something will never be enacted again. Somehow you are enacting time itself, you are enacting the recognition of the passing of time.

I want to go back to the idea, or model, of weather as a dynamic system. Weather is slightly predicable; it’s part of an earth system that is dynamic. I became involved in a kind of theory for myself, a private theory actually, not one that I wanted to expound, that I put together work in the way that after organic farming the next thing is bio-dynamic farming. You are planting things in certain seasons and you’re putting things into the same timeframe as the decisions you make about producing food.

Transformation became the goal, the theme, of a lot of things I do. The very natural idea that one thing can shift into another, or move from one state to another, and the ability for you to follow with some kind of mental state, seems to be a goal in itself. This notion of natural law is not very post-modern really, but it does embrace ideas that are current in science about chaos and transformation, and about things being in a necessary sequence of states.

Just relating it back to whether you’re an artist or facilitator, I’ve almost entirely gone across to being a maker or a facilitator.

I’ll just say a little bit about alchemy, which was something I stumbled into through looking at images. A lot of the codes of medieval alchemy happens in symbolic form. It’s encoded partly through sequences of secrecy, but it’s also symbolic because it’s seems to exist in it’s most eloquent form as a symbolic medium. It involves processes which are about corruption, distillation and evaporation, refinement, crystallisation, sublimation, separation, and conjunction. Also, there is a sort of sexual or animal quality to transformation.

One of the qualities that alchemy has, is that it always happens in a contained space. That space could be a chunk in time or literally contained in space, like a theatre or a stage. These processes tend to happen in a particular order, and are facilitated by the application of heat. Heat is the key ingredient and as a facilitator you’ve got to be ready somehow to turn up the gas. There’s something important about the level of energy with transformation. Just as the sun is key to the earth's dynamic system of weather (it won’t happen without the sun), so energy is what creates the sequence of transformation.

That brings one back, uncomfortably, to the very religious assumptions underlying what we are talking about, which are also psychometric assumptions. They also constantly interfere with very practical assumptions: for instance, how you get this woman over to Perth and then can't hear her, so you end up not knowing what you’ve done. In a sense you’re waiting for something, which you won’t know has happened until you’re waiting for something else to happen! Or for someone to tell you that something has happened, even if it wasn’t what you were waiting for. Sorry to get very complicated and wrapped up like that, but I want to come back to this question of watching being very complicated. I wonder if you could say a little more about it, any of you?

I remember working with Graeme; we always had to have a period of waiting and sleeping. The last five minutes of rehearsal would always be when the heat got turned on, but you couldn’t turn the heat on early [to Graeme], you had to have a sleep and then I decided I had to have a sleep too. We’d both have a sleep and in the end I trusted it. He was directing and I was performing. At first I thought I’d better work on something while Graeme was sleeping, and then I thought "sod it, I’ll go for a sleep as well"! Then we were both in the same sort of state, and it would only be for five minutes but that would be when something would happen. It’s taken years to learn not to beat myself up about going to a studio, paying for it, and going to sleep in a corner.

Those transformations are things which are one off, but whose memory then haunts and articulates endless occult annunciation; endless things we say and think for thousands of years afterwards. We are part of those transformations, which if you read the Ovid takes place in a few lines, there’s not much to them. It’s similar with St Paul; he falls off the horse on the journey to Damascus and then he goes back to doing what we were saying: tinkering around. You go back to the nuts and bolts: building a church. You suffer; you build a bit more of the church. You suffer a bit more. But the world if full of these paintings of him falling off the horse and having the miracle, the conversion.

It’s these overlapping series of moments, which we memorise and then enable us to articulate our own. In the Raphael’s Stanze in the Vatican, there are these battles, and horny old soldiers lying around dying. Then you look at Raphael’s drawing and see horny young soldiers lying around in voluptuous positions. Somehow he’s given them big white beards and shields. You can see why that transformation has taken place: if you don’t do it the Pope’s going to say “God, we’ve got another fag decorating those rooms”, so you put all the beards on and all the classical references and everything else. That’s the kind of transformation I would love to be turned back; for Raphael to have done the rooms as he fantasised them. But he’s haunted too by these figures from the past, what a soldier is…

There is that moment in all your work of being very practical. But is that causing the transformation to gain something or lose something? If it wasn’t losing something would it be worth doing? Would you just be gluttons, that is what I want to ask; would we just be fat and useless people if we actually gained something from it and it wasn’t lost?

Once at my school, at a science demonstration, a man came along with a flask of liquid nitrogen and he poured it into a frying pan, cracked an egg into the frying pan and it fried. Then as it warmed up it un-fried. This idea that you can’t un-fry an egg was proven to be untrue. But he couldn’t get it back into its original shell.

It is something to resist, but there also seems to be this application of transformation within this alchemical process which is an organic means to an end. The resistance surely has to be beyond looking at loss, beyond looking at where transformation is mapped out, into a series of role models (like the soldiers). Transformation doesn’t end at those points. There is a question for me about what Graeme said: that in visual arts you take an object, and through its transformation or putting that object into a different perspective, there is an immediate shift or streamline, so you are forced to look at that object in a different way. I’m wondering about some of the language that you are enabled to use as a choreographer; as someone engaged in the performing arts in that transformation process. It is also streamlining, which is to do with a colouring or shading of events; the kind of perspective that you engage in. You speak through the colour of that performance.

I suppose my question is: what is it about that colouring that produces one piece? Is it a shade that increases in the next piece, or is it a completely different colour? Because it seems that Tania would have a very particular colour. Is she creating a colour for the next project that happens? That seems sort of contractual. Maybe a muse is the wrong word…

So I don’t think that the colour thing… I don’t know what to say. I think it is different for everybody, but maybe we do all make the same piece of work in a way. Maybe we don’t. Maybe adopting a different persona, who is me and is not me, has affected me profoundly. I don’t really know. I think the comment about risk is absolutely right. Maybe we are stubborn as well as risk-takers. I think we probably have to be in order to do anything creative, because it’s scary actually. You need a bit of structure and then you want to knock it down again. So I think it’s all true in a way.

Maybe it is to do with letting something be: when to try to force something beyond itself, and when to leave it to be what it is. Maybe it also relates to perception, and how you perceive what you’re making, or how you hope that someone might perceive your work. I talked earlier about the process, how it is nuts and bolts, and then it transforms and you think you’ve done it. When I say transforms, it hasn’t changed exactly, but suddenly I’m seeing it flowing and it feels whole. Then the next day it doesn’t. What is happening? Is it me, or is it the piece, or is it how I see it, or is it because I refuse to see the flow because I’m having some problem with self-doubt? Or is it that I’m kidding myself when I see that flow: am I so desperate to see it transformed that I’ll go “Yes!” and try to believe it? Then I don’t let myself believe it anymore, so I’ll keep testing it by saying “hang on, it doesn’t look like that…”.

It gets very complicated, but in terms of stubbornness I think I get confused with whether I’m imagining the transformation or whether it is really there, coming from the people. That is why I keep making work I suppose, because I keep wanting to test whether it’s just me or whether it is in the piece itself.

I worry that having done this whole evening on transformation, it might be a red herring actually! Maybe the important thing is what happens when you find something. There is a lovely phrase French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau: “What happens when you’re given to see something?” And the “given to see” is not the same as transformation, although it may drive you mad, or turn you into a good or bad person. But that moment, where there is no loss nor gain, but where there is a new ‘given’, seems to me something that you have all been talking about. It comes out with what you are both saying: it is to do with waiting and being given something.

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