Touchradio

"tic-tac-toe" was written for Gilbert Ratcliffe, who in 2017 was a final-year dance student at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire. For this performance, called "You Watching Me?", choreographed for a small group of dancers, Gil wrote: "My research was centred on the physical and mental manifestation of my journey with Tourettes Syndrome. I explored it through the collaborative process between choreographer and dancers to see if we could create a non-narrative, abstract dance work that was able to elicit an emotional, performative response." Gil knew what the broad structure needed to be, and the dancers had ideas about sounds that would resonate well with the subject but there was lots of freedom between those staging posts. I loved how the dancers only needed occassional markers, between which they related to the sounds but werent bound by them. No need for anything as prosaic as counting out beats. Gil's research involved talking to lots of people with TS, and reading through it I got keen on the simple idea