Wolfgang Stange, the founder and Artistic Director of Amici Dance Theatre Company, is no stranger to difficulty. In its early days of existence, the London-based ensemble of able-bodied and disabled performance artists called London’s Roof Top Theatre home. ‘We had to carry the wheelchairs up the stairs,’ Stange recollects.
In the years since, the company has survived funding difficulties and the general challenges brought by bringing people from a diversity of backgrounds, needs and abilities together on a weekly basis. However, Stange takes a philosophical approach to the challenges, embraces the successes and expects the company to continue to develop in an organic manner: ‘We have been worried for 23 years, and we are still here,’ he says, ‘and I think that counts for something.’
Certainly, the popular success of Amici Dance Theatre Company was never a part of the Artistic Director’s ‘grand plan’. Rather, he says, the company unfurled naturally from its beginnings in Stange’s work at the Normansfield Hospital. ‘I worked in an institution for people with severe disabilities,’ he says of his job conducting movement sessions for people with learning disabilities. ‘And even before anybody had talked about integration, I had integrated my evening classes… I had a blind group [of people] and a sighted group, and I just had this idea in 1980 to bring them all together and see how it would work. They all got on and they loved each other, and so we carried on.’
Amici ‘carried on’ to a point where, 23 years later, the company boasts 30 permanent members, as well as a large membership of past members and associates who meet weekly for exercises, improvisation and creative dance classes at the Sands End Community Centre in Fulham. Celebrated for its work in integrating able-bodied and disabled artists and performers, the company also runs workshops, residencies and student placements and has toured nationally and internationally to Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain and Italy. Stange, however, is careful to differentiate Amici from the pigeon-hole of ‘disability arts’.
‘The philosophy [of the company] has always been to respect the individual and [to] try to foster what is rather unique about the individual and bring it out, not to push it away [into] the background, but to find something positive [there] and work on it,’ he explains. ‘It is not a disability company, it is a company of people who come together who want to express themselves in the creative arts – and, in particular, in the performing arts. So it is not based on disability, it’s based on ability within individuality.’
As a company focused on individuality, Amici presents a diverse range of personalities, abilities, ages and backgrounds. While the company’s youngest member is seven, the oldest, Marjorie Crawford (stage name Paddie Dare), is 82. Crawford’s life story – which includes her involvement with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) during World War II, performances with war-time entertainer George Formby, and a presence at the liberation of Paris – is told in the company’s latest piece, Timestep, which opens at the Lyric Hammersmith this week as part of a company triple bill.
Themed around the premise of Cinderella’s magic slipper, Timestep explores ideas of loss and discovery through flashbacks, dream sequences, narration and music. Stange says the theme is representative of Crawford (and other company members’) relationship with the company. ‘Amici is a company where people are allowed to express themselves freely and where individuality is very much stressed and [where] you “find” yourself,’ he says. After joining the company eighteen months ago, Stange continues, ‘[Crawford] said to me: “I have found something that I have been searching for all my life… You’ve helped me to be myself at last, and I have found myself totally.” And I thought: “Ah, it’s almost like Cinderella finding her slipper…”’
But while Cinderella’s magic slipper transforms the poor step-daughter from rags into something near-perfect, Stange insists that conventional ‘perfection’ is not something for which his company strives. ‘I always said we were workers, never people who pushed ourselves to make headlines. We just loved working,’ he says.
As a result, Stange admits, the company has often privileged artistic endeavour over fiscal considerations – a fact which has forced Amici to bring in administrators, Turtle Key Arts. ‘I think we’ve never been very good at filling out the forms properly,’ he says. ‘Even for this production, again, we didn’t get any financial support… [Usually] what happens is suddenly people hear about us, and that we are in desperate need, and then they are inclined to come along and support us… and the new administrators were quite horrified.’
And while Stange is clearly happy that the administrators will help take the company’s financial worries away, he is adamant also that the company will continue to develop as it has done for 23 years, and continue to define perfection in its own way. ‘The only way one can maybe think in terms of perfection is to find a way that people are more accepted, and try to find perfection in that,’ he says.
‘It makes me proud in one way that there are so many different companies now of people with disability by themselves or mixed abilities together… and that is the whole idea. We had hoped to inspire people, to take the lead and say, “This is possible”… and, from that respect, we have hopefully inspired a lot of practitioners to set out for themselves and find their own niche.’
The Amici triple bill which features ‘Timestep’, ‘Breaking Out’ and ‘Untitled’, will run June 27-28 at the Lyric Hammersmith. For more information, call 08700 500 511 or visit the Lyric Hammersmith site.
