‘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.
“At school I was told I suffer from an overactive imagination,” he remembers. As a teenager he was always writing and drawing and he dreamed of becoming a graphic novelist. Some of the stories he wrote at the time resurfaced in his 2010 short story collection, Blackout Zones (he has just finished writing another collection, Fury Parades). Another enduring obsession has been music. A guitarist and sometimes vocalist, songwriter and composer, Bruce played in a band for many years, and he continues to record with the Mute Song label as well as sometimes scoring music for his own choreography.
Dance, though, has been his main creative outlet since he founded his company in 1991, and a glance through his back catalogue shows some recurring patterns: musical montages, often tapping a grunge-rock energy, collaged narratives, the look and feel of American gothic (Lynchian dystopias, brooding badlands), stories and scenarios that mix the mythic with the modern. He’s attracted many top-notch contemporary dancers over the years, and typically choreographs in “old-school” style by concocting steps and phrases himself (“he makes the steps,” says longtime dancer Eleanor Duval, “then I make them mine”) rather than creating conditions for dancers to generate “movement material”, as is more widespread today. Indeed, Bruce has never swum in any current of common practice: there’s no one else in dance quite like him, nor does he – or rather, his jigsaw self – look quite like anyone else.
Which brings us to Frankenstein, a story that Shelley herself said had come to her in a dream. The idea of adapting the story had been put to Bruce several times after his award-winning Dracula from 2013, “but I always said no, because the idea of how to do it hadn’t come to me”. It was while grappling with a different project that was failing to spark into life (a treatment of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as it happens) that he decided to reread Shelley’s book. Result: “Suddenly I could see this creature, this presence in which something is not quite right, and I thought: oh, this is how you do it. Then the structure of the piece made itself quite quickly.”
Bruce’s Frankenstein is not an adaptation of Shelley’s book, but rather a pared-down sequence of elemental scenes – no twisty subplots or secondary characters – stitched together, montage-style (or monster-style). He has also taken licence from the book’s subtitle – “The Modern Prometheus” – and allowed himself to introduce figures from Greek myth where they seemed to incarnate the story’s spirit. “I wanted just enough for people to imagine what the story is saying to them,” says Bruce. “I like work that suggests things subconsciously, that transcends words.”
Frankenstein will tour alongside a shorter piece called Liberation Day, a suite of dances to a playlist of songs Bruce has been writing. Created concurrently, Liberation Day, Fury Parades and Frankenstein in fact turned out to circle similar themes. “If Frankenstein is really a theatrical work, stripped to its elements,” says Bruce, “Liberation Day is very much a dance work, studies in choreographic material, while Fury Parades is a set of 12 separate but interconnected stories. Different approaches, similar subjects.”
Among his own different approaches – creating dances, composing music, writing stories – Bruce himself seems to circle recurring subjects: myth, dreamscapes, the psyche. “As you get older,” says Bruce, “you realise: oh, this happened before, and it’s happening again. We think we’re breaking out of loops, then find ourselves repeating them. I do that as a creator as well, but I’m always also trying to both identify loops and push beyond them by risking something new.”
The new and the old, creating and repeating, dreaming and realising – these are key to the fascination of Shelley’s Frankenstein, and perhaps why not only Bruce but we too keep remaking, revisiting and reimagining it. “It’s such a strange and flawed novel, and it doesn’t quite piece together,” says Bruce “But we keep coming back to it.”
• Frankenstein: A Double Bill is at Frome Memorial theatre, 15-16 March; DanceEast, Ipswich, 22-23 March; and The Place, London, 26-28 March. A film version is also in the making.
