What's the background to the Welcome To project?

My work with Nina Pope has always tried to collaborate with 'non-specialist' creative communities in new ways - we don't keep to one medium but instead our projects develop closely alongside our collaborators and in the past have included anything from sewing to web broadcasting - but usually we work to commission with specific contexts and to be honest I was making enough work elsewhere to stay busy in the few years since I moved here to the Lake District.
Then in August 2002 I worked with the Satterthwaite & Rusland Women's Institute on a Jubilee cake with Grizedale Arts, and on the back of that I got much more interested in working here in Cumbria - with the creative people I found here - and so it started to seem more feasible to do a project here with local people. Also, as a newcomer to a place maybe you see things in a more polarised way, and I guess the Lake District, as a tourist attraction since the very early 19th century, is constantly perceived through its reputation: I was no exception to that and the project has in many ways been about me getting to know the place better and making a film that's both an insiders and an outsiders view....

I realised that initiating a new project here from scratch was going to be challenging as I would need to make or find a network to support it, as a relative newcomer and as someone with not many connections to the artforms I was drawn to (i.e dance) - but that's always interested me with all my work, as I'm committed to 'embedding' art in society. However, Cumbria is huge and you can't underestimate how many logistical problems getting something off the ground brings, so in the end it took several years for Welcome To to happen.

I was also lucky enough to locate a team of people like Zoe Uffindell the choreographer and Tim Olden the composer, who shared my interest in trying to so something different with the genre of the musical, and who were really interested in the area and its people.

Most people will experience the project as a short, 5 minute dance film, maybe seeing it in a cinema locally, but you don't see it as just this, do you?

You could describe it as a short film about some visitors to the Lake District who keep meeting dancing locals! But no, to me it's definately an 'engaged' project which encompasses dance, visual art and film. Though I wanted to produce a professional, single-screen film as an end-product, the process of generating and implementing the project is just as important for me.
Undoubtedly the momentum of the project was generated by its participants - before the auditions (3 months before the shoot) we really had no idea whether the idea would catch on (it was the summer and traditionally round here that's a hard time to do stuff), and even its structure developed organically around how many dancers we had in a particular place, what they were experienced in and how they could rehearse the steps that our choreographer Zoe planned.
Also, the number of people working in the project voluntarily meant that I was always really keen to communicate and motivate participants - it wasn't a case of just paying some people to turn up and dance - for example, we had a great group of salsa dancers, so that made a salsa scene really possible and had a major input into the storyline. We always stayed open to that kind of whimsy as the film could be as playful as it wanted to be and still work.
I deliberately wanted the participants to influence the project's content and structure as this reflects my thinking on both what the project's about and much broader ideas around cultural production.

So, can you describe some of the ideas you're trying to get across in Welcome To?

Having fairly recently moved to the Lake District I was struck by the influence of tourism on all walks of life here...Within the National Park itself many local people are pushed to the periphery or outside due to the high cost of living 'inside' and arguably one can see the actual park as a kind of theme park, a microcosmic English rural utopia inhabited by many 'incomers' who in turn service the needs of the tourist via B & B's etc etc. So it's a complex, interesting mix of communities and cultures.

So, in a sense I wanted to develop a project with addressed both the aspirations and realities of local people and how these were perceived from the outside. The film also satirises tourism to an extent - the storyline is basically 6 tourists arrive in the Lake District and find locals dancing round every corner! I guess I am poking fun at what tourists expect from the place.

I was also interested in finding out more about local people - before living here I worked on some collaborative projects with Grizedale Arts, directly looking at the hopes and realities of locals. I hope that doesn't make the work sound patronising, as I genuinely hope that that work, and this project, really do manage to say something about ordinariness.

I was also very influenced by the language of advertising - the big, happy groups that dominate many current TV ads are a clear reference to 50's musicals and by extension nostalgia for a more 'community' led time maybe. Also, for me the caricatures of social types used in advertising relate to the caricatures of rural living I experience here being both a local now whilst feeling like an outsider a lot of the time. And of course, being the age I am, the pop video was a huge influence on me: Coming from a 'non-arty' background these were one of my biggest cultural / visual experiences as a kid - their aspiration, glamour and escapism really struck a chord then, and now living again (after a decade in London) somewhere not seen, or that sees itself, as a 'player' in culture, I felt this project was a chance to reference those influences as the outsider feeling had returned to me a bit, and I perceived it in the young people around me too.

What influenced the form of the project - why, for example is it a film and not a live dance performance?

Well, from the start I liked the idea of a short film that could be shown very easily locally to the very people in the film - almost a kind of 'closed' advert just for Cumbrians about Cumbria! Cumbria has a lot of independent cinemas making it possible to programme this way.
But primarily I wanted to harness the power of cinema and the power that seeing yourself on the big screen will have - this also relates to articulating the social exclusion experienced by many people here. Whilst I've nothing against live dance, as a visual artist I saw the project though a lens, making the scenes and dances 'hyper real' , as I am much more interested in the genre of traditional musical screen dance than in contemporary dance per se. It was vital that the choreography Zoe and I developed referenced this genre so as to make the link with nostalgia: Luckily, Zoe really saw eye to eye with me on the kind of feel I was looking for, as did Tim Olden the choreographere, who also is a huge fan of traditional musicals.

Nina Pope and I are also working on another cinema project -for Cinema City in Norwich, directing lots of locally-made cinema trailers, so I'm very interested in the inherent power and fantasy of the cinema experience even now in a very high-tech age.

More pragmatically, as a rural artist I wanted the project to have a legacy and visibility beyond a one off, and I think it does stand up as a short film regardless of what you know of how it's come about.

What were the best moments in the project for you?

Well, just seeing all these local dancers who I really admire getting something out of the project was great - they were all really professional and the interaction between the participants whether professional or amateur was really productive and I'm sure will influence a lot of people, especially the youngsters.
I also really enjoyed the rehearsal where a couple of our volunteer salsa dancers - Stan and Mags - actually taught the professional lead dancers how to salsa!
Whilst the shoot was incredibly stressful due to the tight schedule, I loved directing for the first time too. Generating ideas with Zoe Uffindell the choreographer and Tim Olden the composer was something I could have devoted much much longer to as it was great fun and again, a new thing for me.