Is it going to serve the story? Maybe notĪs a child in Kingston, dance was seen as a hobby, she says, not a profession. ![]() Could you create something bigger, potentially more showy? Of course you can, always. Equus won her the 2019 Black British theatre award for best choreographer. Eventually her rehearsals with Ira Mandela Siobhan – bare-chested as Nugget, the horse with which teenager Alan Strang is sexually fixated – “felt really like interacting with the animal”. A lengthy casting process with performers from a contemporary dance background brought them “the cast who could deliver what we wanted to do”. They ditched the chestnut velvet tracksuits and equine masks that Shaffer advised, with Maxwell convinced “we can do it physically with people, without any paraphernalia”. With Ned Bennett’s astonishing revival of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2019, the puzzle was the play’s horses. But her expertise in risk assessment and probability analysis proved useful for “working out the jigsaw of sets, people moving, patterns and timings”. “Fling me in a space where I have to solve something!” Maxwell left a degree in actuarial science to pursue dance. Her contribution is a part of each production’s puzzle, she says. Photograph: Richard Davenport/The Other Richard No velvet tracksuits … Ira Mandela Siobhan as Nugget and Ethan Kai as Alan Strang in Equus. Maxwell then achieved a dynamic physical language to complement the seated battle of words. The opening set the tone, with a gradual thrum of activity among characters congregating, lost in discussions, capturing the zeitgeist. As with Bees, her work explored “tension and what that does to bodies – and the antithesis of that, in freedom, marching and protests”. Such as in James Graham’s Best of Enemies, set in the same era of US civil rights, charting the televised debates between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal. Actors will know their physicality, their potential and limits movement-wise, and we can then work with them to pull out something more.” While actors may have been trained in movement or stage fighting, “a team of people with specialties can bring something more to it. She draws a parallel with fight direction. In the past, “movement directors might come in for a session or consultation but wouldn’t be credited as part of that production”. Everyone appreciates the former, “from 5, 6, 7, 8 musical theatre and music videos”, but the latter is becoming better appreciated. “I like to stir emotions,” Maxwell says, whether through choreography or movement direction, which is a lesser-known art. A revolving stage adds momentum to these women’s spirited march to register for voting. ![]() Even an onstage cellist’s arms become part of her delicately spun sequences, which evoke honeyed romance, the way the southern heat leaves bodies languid, and the hope drawn from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. ![]() There is an essence, too, of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater where she once took classes. Maxwell’s choreography drew on rituals of South Carolina’s Gullah culture and various traditions of worship, including at Black churches where “there is huge permission given to the body to move in praise, so it’s bigger gestures, full-body swaying”. ![]() Creating a buzz … Danielle Fiamanya in The Secret Life of Bees.
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