‘Is this a bit unprofessional if I hug you now?’ I have just walked into Solène Weinachter’s debut solo show, After All. Weinachter is standing at the edge of the performance space, greeting her audience, and handing out red plastic roses. Her presence is an easy one, inviting you into a space to think about those things we maybe don’t like to think about: death and funerals.
If you have been watching dance theatre in Scotland (and indeed the whole of the UK) over the past decade you’ll have likely seen Weinachter perform. Born in France, she trained at London Contemporary Dance School and went on to perform with Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT). A founding member of Collective Endeavours (an improvisation collective focused on the interaction between music and dance), she has also has worked extensively with Joan Clevillé (Plan B for Utopia, The North and Antigone, Interrupted) and Ben Duke/Lost Dog, notably winning a National Dance Award for her performance in Lost Dog’s Juliet & Romeo. She has a magnetic stage energy, that ably takes on movement, voice and acting. After All marks her first foray into conceiving, directing, and performing in her own work.
Jumping back to the piece’s beginning (or ‘before all’, laughs Weinachter), the first seed for After All came while she was performing in Clevillé’s Plan B for Utopia. Time passed, however, people moved (Clevillé is now director of SDT), and the idea lay dormant. But then a surreal personal experience brought the idea back into Weinachter’s mind – an experience that is alluded to in the show so I won’t spoil it here – and in its swirling emotions of grief, duty and celebration, the spark for a show centred around funerals was ignited once again.
And then, as for many things, the Covid pandemic erupted across the globe and put things into new perspectives. For Weinachter, there was ‘a succession of awful conversations about death – just fear and statistics. It magnified how bad we are at processing this and highlighted these rules and rites of passages around death. I wanted to look at why a patriarchal society invisibilises death.’ Death is uncertain, she continues, ‘and it doesn’t sell. Fighting death sells.’
The show brings together these many threads, the personal and social, with humour and sincerity. There’s an exposing of some of the ‘absurdity of it all’, as well as looking to traditions close to home. In researching for the show, Weinachter spoke to leaders from different faiths, to undertakers and doulas, and to different community groups composed of young and older people. While travelling up in the north of Scotland, she was particularly struck by the process of ‘keening’ and learning more about this Celtic ritual that goes beyond the act of crying, of finding ways to be with death.
Weinachter is clear, however, in not wanting to appropriate traditions beyond her own experience. Moreover, these stories and conversations sit in the piece but they do not define it. They pass through Weinachter, who enjoys playing with notions of autobiography and leaving her audience slightly unsure about what is fact and what is fiction: ‘what does it mean to fictionalise real events, to use those as an inspiration, and make your character not really what they are?’
After All, then, is a series of stories, conjurings (of her own funeral) and musings woven together with and ‘supported by dance.’ It doesn’t ‘dramaturgically reinvent the wheel’, she states (and, she continues, ‘I’m not sure if I’m that interested in that anyway’). While it’s her first solo directed work, she doesn’t necessarily see it as a creatively huge change from how she’s worked with collaborators before, who likewise layered voice and movement; voice for Weinachter, is part of that dancing body. It’s the administrative side that she’s found tough to balance with having to also be a performer (‘I should be training, or be in the pool right now…’, she gestures outwardly.)
In the middle of these ruminations on purpose and celebration in life is Weinachter herself, at the mid-point of her career. ‘Dance can make you feel like a second-class citizen,’ she declares. She has been living out of her suitcase, which she loves, and the scale of her travels has expanded from across the UK to across the entire world. One of her favourite things to do when arriving in a country is to immediately seek out its folk dance.
But hers and others’ dedication to the craft of dance comes at a cost: ‘I’m tired from the scrambling life an artist has. I know we all manage to find money from other things. I’m just feeling a bit sad that it doesn’t get recognised, that I am not really allowed to contribute… I have questions around that – am I going do this forever, is it going be dance and nothing else?’
Weinachter states this is not a complaint, that this dedication was how she felt she had to approach dance to commit to it fully. Dance, for her, is the ‘poetry of weight, of gravity, of flow, of time and space.’ As a form, it requires maintenance: dance is something you ‘do over time, that transforms the body, transforms something deep in your perception and constitution… you have to commit to it to test all its different aspects.’ I ask if she can ever see herself not performing? There were points when making the show where she wondered: ‘am I making a funeral for this girl? I’m so in love with dance. Dance has been my best pal for so long and it’s about how do we carry on together. I’m not sure in what capacity.’
