David Bellan meets the Oxford dancer and choreographer Joe Lott

Joe Lott is very much a woman of Oxford. It’s where she first started to dance.

“I started ballet class when I was about three years old,” she says. “I did class every week, and then, when I was 13, I started doing other kinds of dance as well, like tap dance, and contemporary dance, and break-dancing. In particular I loved contemporary dance; you can fuse it with so many other dance styles, you can take it in so many different directions”

Lots of people dance, but creating dances is much rarer gift, and I asked Joe how she began doing choreography.

“I’ve really always done choreography, and there was always a chance to do it as part of my classes, particularly at The Pegasus Theatre. We’d learn technique, and we’d learn other people’s sequences, but we also got to make our own movement material, and that would be incorporated into the work we were doing. I’m grateful to The Pegasus, as it’s really quite rare to have the opportunity to do your own choreography from quite a young age. It seemed very natural to me, and I really loved making up movement. Then, when I got to the London School of Contemporary Dance, I really enjoyed the composition classes, and it went from there.”

Joe founded her own company in order to have a base from which to show her work, and things have gone very well for her. This latest triple bill concerns different aspects of space. EVA, in space-exploration speak, stands for extra-vehicular activity, which means space walking.

“The starting point for this work was my concern that we are spending vast sums of money trying to escape the earth’s gravity. At the same time we are slowly destroying our planet, our only home. I’m trying to express something about the importance of staying connected to one another, and to our planet Earth. Modern technologies allow us to escape, but there’s no home out there for us, this planet is it. I was interested in was what the body might look like when it moves without any gravity. I became very interested in the Apollo missions of the sixties, because that was an interesting time historically, and there was a great deal of hope and optimism.

I knew there was a theme around what it’s like to be floating, which led me into thinking how you make a piece about that, and build it into something more interesting. The piece has two characters who wonder what it would be like to journey through space and see the moon close up. But in reality their lives are not that exciting; they are not connecting any more. They have very big dreams, but on a day-to- day basis, they struggle to connect with each other.”

EVA is set to an eclectic soundtrack combining archive news reports, radio recordings of mission control communications, driving high-energy beats, and unearthly moments of celestial sounds.

Also in the progamme is piece by Joe, which takes us on a journey into inner space, and Detox by Urja Desai Thakore, which is rooted in Indian classical dance.

“I was over the moon when Urja agreed to join us for the Oxford performance,” she says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the complex rhythms and stories of Indian classical dance, and I’m excited to see these developed through a contemporary dance style.”

Where and when
Joe Lott’s EVA is at The Pegasus Theatre, Magdalen Road, tomorrow at 7.30pm