‘The idea of a creature made of shreds of other people – well, that’s all of us, isn’t it? We’re all jigsaws of some kind, full of suggestions of other things.” Choreographer Mark Bruce is sitting in his rehearsal studio in the picturesque town of Frome, Somerset, trying to explain the enduring fascination of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the inspiration for his latest work of dance-theatre. As he speaks, it strikes me that he’s talking not only about the creature, nor even about the novel – an endlessly intriguing hybrid of gothic melodrama, alchemy, psychology, metaphysics and mythology – but about himself. What kind of jigsaw is he?
At first sight, it looks as if he was born into dance. His father is eminent choreographer Christopher Bruce and his mother, Marian Bruce, is a dancer turned visual artist and stage designer. Mark began dance relatively late, aged 17. More primordial for him as an artist is a lifelong sense that his ideas come not from himself, but visit him from elsewhere – “like in a dream” – and that he must then piece them together. Aptly for such a dreamer, he has been perennially attracted towards the fantastical, the mysterious, the archetypal and the unconscious.
