‘“In the 60s, choreographer Yvonne Rainer came out with this whole manifesto: ‘No to spectacle, no to virtuosity ... ’” says Kevin Finnan, artistic director of Motionhouse dance company. Rainer’s No Manifesto continues: No to transformations and magic and make-believe … No to moving or being moved. “And the thing is,” says Finnan, “I don’t agree with any of that. I’m really fascinated with spectacle.”
He’s in the right job, then. Finnan is a master of mass spectacle, huge outdoor performances featuring hundreds of dancers and acrobats, flying bicycles, skydivers, planes, boats and moving machinery. He’s created events for four different European Capital of Culture celebrations, built a giant ship in the middle of Birmingham for the Cultural Olympiad, and choreographed the Paralympics opening ceremony in London. His latest job is Wondrous Stories, which opens the Birmingham 2022 festival in the runup up to this year’s Commonwealth Games. The important thing is just that it’s not empty spectacle, says Finnan, “otherwise it’s a firework display”. He tries to “engage the audience with beauty and strength and virtuosity,” he says. “But there has to be a relationship with the simple and the human and what we’re trying to say.”
Even the flashiest pageants have to respond to their settings and tap into something personal for the viewers. In Timisoara in western Romania, for example, Finnan drew on people’s memories of their city under communism, with a scene showing people going out at night and turning their TV aerials around to the west under cover of darkness. For Birmingham 2022, where the show takes place in Centenary Square, surrounded by a library, theatre, concert hall and a war memorial, Finnan decided this was a place all about storytelling and invited the public to send in their own stories about life in the region to be woven into the show. “Everybody here is a story themselves, and they’re worth listening to,” says Finnan. “It strikes me we’re living in a world where everybody’s shouting and not very many people are listening.”
Around the heart of the show you can build the wow factor. Finnan’s learned a lot about what will capture the attention of hundreds of eyeballs. “Humans are interested in pattern,” he says, “and if you don’t see anything that strikes you as a pattern, you’re going to look away.” He gives the example of seeing a random collection of people on the street. But if you see one woman in a red coat, and then 30 seconds later you see someone else in a red coat, your brain hooks into that relationship.
He also likes to have fun with props, the bigger or more unexpected the better. In Finnan’s first large-scale show, on Watergate Bay in Cornwall back in 2004, he brought in JCBs as performers and he’s used them frequently ever since. “I wanted to use the JCBs as bodies,” he says. “I was watching the drivers doing their thing, and they’re so skilled, they can be so graceful. They can pick up an egg with those things. I thought, ‘I’m going to make those machines dance with us.’”
Imagination is only challenged by budget. “The thing you learn doing an Olympics is there’s never enough money,” laughs Finnan. “You might have £28m, you think, ‘Wow, that’s an enormous amount of money,’ but when you’ve got a sound system and crews building stages and 70,000 light-up electronic panels, suddenly you’re going, ‘I’m a bit short!’” That’s especially true right now. “What has happened to infrastructure costs since Covid and Brexit is just insane,” says Finnan. “It’s all 50% more. And all the technical staff have gone to telly.”
There is no shortage of performers, though. The Birmingham 2022 show (which Finnan is making with associate choreographers Jamaal Burkmar and Sonia Sabri) will have a community cast of more than 250 people, and marshalling them all in the right direction can be trickier than choreographing mechanical diggers. Although with something as big as the Paralympics, there’s tech support. “Everybody performing has in-ear piece and it’s like Heathrow control room, you have a whole load of people at desks with mics going ‘1, 2, 3, 4, in two bars were going to turn …’”
The impact for the participants in these giant shows can be even greater than the spectacle for everyone watching. That was especially true in the Paralympics. Finnan tells me about a severely disabled young man who took part in the opening with his mum. The choreography was devised around what the participants could do, and Finnan chokes up as he tells me that some months later the young man’s mother called him to say her son had died. “She said that the experience of doing it with him had been profound for her. She said it was the first time they had done anything together as equals. All of her group were going to get together and they wanted to do their dance at the funeral, because it was so meaningful to him, and to them. For me, the whole Olympics was worth it for that one moment.”
• Wondrous Stories opens the Birmingham 2022 festival, 17-20 March.
