Elixir Festival takes over Sadler’s Wells for two weeks in April 2024 with a series of performances, films, and talks that challenge perceptions around dance and ageing. With works from iconic international artists alongside performances from dancers drawn from local communities in north and east London, the Festival asks how do we express our changing bodies and minds as we grow and age?

Taking place across Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the Lilian Baylis Studio, and in the public spaces, Elixir Festival includes the London premiere of Sadler’s Wells co-production common ground[s] – a duet featuring the ‘mother of contemporary African dance’, Germaine Acogny and longtime Pina Bausch collaborator Malou Airaudo. The Festival will also present the World premiere of a new work by Ben Duke, commissioned by Sadler’s Wells. The Festival also sees an exchange between Sadler’s Wells Company of Elders and ZooNation Youth Company, a recreation of Merce Cunningham’s iconic work Story, an intergenerational performance by a mother and son, an exploration of queer desire later in life, and a double bill by Susan Kempster and Charlotta Öfverholm, co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells. Further programming will be announced in 2024.

Audiences are able to take part in workshops to experience new dance styles and learn from inspirational artists.

Christopher Matthews is performing as part of Elixir Festival taking over some front of house spaces in Sadler’s Wells on Wednesday 10 and Thursday 11 April with his piece Act 3.

Act 3 is the final instalment in a trilogy of works by choreographer, performer and visual artist Christopher Matthews. Continuing his studies of intimacy between two figures, Act 3 is an exploration of queer desire in later life, and considers queer masculinity in dance, desire, body image and working-class dance histories.

Working with a cast of collaborators aged 60 and above – whose desire was forbidden in their youth – Act 3 considers what it means for these feelings to be hidden. Referencing Kenneth Macmillan’s Bedroom Pas de deux from Romeo and Juliet, the performance unfolds on a mattress, combining surreal visuals with an everyday setting to blur the lines between fantasy and reality.

Act 3 is inspired by queer modernism and the work of photography collective PaJaMa. This collective created scenes of magical realism, featuring New York’s young bisexual or gay artists, dancers, and writers in the 1930s and 1940s.

How did you come up with the concept of this performance?

Firstly, to answer this question, I have to remind you that I am ADHD and there is no quick and direct trajectory in answering this.  My work is often over researched and involves a lot of source material.  It’s just how my brain works. So feel free to take notes, have a flow chart, or cut it up in pieces and arrange it in categories. Another apologies before reading, please don’t judge me but my computer is totally having an identity crisis between American and British spellings! Please enjoy the fluidity of Z, C and Ou… plural!

This installation is the final work in the trilogy that I’ve been developing since 2016, which is looking at queering dance history and desire at different life stages. Also, how desire is embedded in dance history like the muse, the collaborator who’s also your lover, the patron, etc.  One of the concepts of the whole trilogy is that it follows loosely the Saturn returns cycle.  Saturn returns is that every 28 years Saturn returns to the area of the sky when you were born.  In the astrological calendar, these are the life cycles.  You are in childhood until you’re 28, and then you enter into adulthood, and then at 56 you enter into maturity.  Now this is how I understand it, there may be someone more astrologically aware than I am.  The pieces are focused on that and this is the final work.  I have previously made LADS and My Body’s No 1 which I also showed at Sadler’s in 2021 as part of a bigger exhibition of works looking at spectatorship and how you experience performance.  This piece I had planned to start back in 2020 and had already set up workshops with dancers but with the pandemic I had to put this on hold. Now that I’ve had some more time to sit with it, and have done a few other pieces in between, I think some of the research has gotten a bit more substance and more avenues of research have opened up.  Each of the pieces start from how I’ve related to certain dance historical pieces. 

I made a ballet back in 2005 that I brought to the Edinburgh fringe and a review mentioned that it reminded him of MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet Act 3 Scene 1 bedroom duet.  I wanted to think about this duet in the sense that love, passion and desire is always related more to youth. Fast forward to 2016, I was working in Paris for another artist and during that piece we would have conversations with the visitors at the museum. I remember talking to someone about love and how I felt about love at that point in my life and a desire for love.  This person recommended that I read Symposium by Plato. So, I did, but what I found quite interesting was that in Symposium they talk about love as someone/ something being youthful.  I started thinking about Symposium and went back to it a bit more. I wanted to try to show that actually love and desire doesn’t end at a certain time and it’s ageist to think that it’s only a youthful concept. This became the last piece in the trilogy titled Act 3. The title is a reference to Romeo and Juliet’s bedroom scene as well as the relationship to Saturn’s return; it’s the third phase in the cycle. I went away and started doing research around this.  Simultaneously I was working on another show in Leeds. I started to reference queer cultures in New York City that sort of paved the way for me. I got really into queer modernism. I came across this photograph collective called PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French) and was interested in their interaction between professional and personal relationships that were being cultivated in Fire Island.  The people within their photographs are from the New York City arts scene; visual, performing and literary arts.  The performers were in the prime of their youth and exploring love and desire and they would be the same age today as the performers in my piece. I have been reading less academic books for this piece and I got more into recapping the saucy love affairs that led to the Fire Island artistic creation.  I even found an article in the 1965 August issue of Playboy written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein (yup the child author). My source materials would make some blush and others not bat an eye.  All the works in the trilogy utilize actual postures and gestures from different sculptural or visual artworks as well as iconic dance pieces. With this piece, I reproduce the photos of PaJaMa as a starting place for the movement material.  Because of my ADHD I go a bit crazy with research, finding many references. Then the choreographic dilemma is to try and bring all those references in. It’s about honoring them and how they have affected me.  Some things disappear but in some way they are always there in presence.  Like the MacMillan ballet, it is here but I think it’s probably buried under some more relevant resources or references that I’ve been using.  

Again for me, it’s really hard to think about how one piece really comes to fruition because when I’m thinking about works I want to make, I’m completely open to learning new things. I get curious.  I’m very curious about everything.  And especially with ADHD as my superpower for researching. I think about something and then I go down a deep deep hole and learn as much as I can about that one thing. And then maybe tomorrow I’m totally interested in something else and go down that hole. And that all comes out in the wash and influences the work (or works).  But I am holding true to the original concept. When I started thinking about the whole trilogy, I knew that I wanted a work that honored or tried to bring visibility to a group of people over a certain age who in society does not necessarily equate desire.  And when they do they are fetishized or come with critique. I always remember this video work by Bill Viola; Man searching for mortality/ Woman searching for eternity 2013.  It stuck with me because it presented the nude figure of an older person whilst a light traced their bodies. I found this display of the older body to be beautiful. I saw it in 2014 but it has stayed so present in my mind. That’s what I wanted to do in this work, I wanted to honor these beautiful bodies and show them as sexy figures who are living that full potential of sexy! I wanted to present an intimacy between them that we should feel privileged to be able to witness. To show the element of beauty in desire and that desire as a concept is something we always have. This is the throughline concept through all the pieces, but maybe our desires change over time, but desire is something that we never let go of.

What is the message you want to convey?

This is an interesting question because I think with the work I make I don’t want to convey a message; I don’t want it to say just one thing.  What I want to do is present a truth (or perceived, constructed, contrived truth) that is available for people to have their own experience and interaction with. I want the audience to find a way that they could relate to dance, or they see something in it. (Side note or reasoning: I used to take guys out on dates to dance shows because I needed to do both activities; see dance shows and date. I would ask my date what they thought of the show, and they would say they don’t come from a dance background so they couldn’t give an opinion. I was so confused by this feeling that they could witness a performance and then could have nothing to say because they felt that they weren’t privileged to say anything or didn’t have the agency to speak.  I was curious why someone felt they needed to be an expert at something to make a critique. I found that the people I dated felt more comfortable critiquing and discussing objects such as a sculpture of a body rather than critiquing the moving physical body in the dance world.  I found that the men I was dating didn’t have a relationship with their own bodies and therefore had difficulties verbalizing what they were seeing at the dance shows we saw together and therefore they found it an alienating art form. I became more interested in making work around the idea of experiencing dance versus watching dance. Long side note over!) So, back to the answer, I have my own desires of what I want the work to be about but ultimately there is no one message.  The only thing I really want to do is give space to honour and bring visibility to these beautiful bodies. For me my work is always about the body, it’s always about bringing visibility not just to what are society’s ideas of the acceptable beautiful body but actually what are the different bodies, what are the different identities, what are the different flaws in the body? Because coming from a dance background, the physique is always glamourised, and if you don’t have a certain physique then you’re not allowed into the dance world.  I have always challenged that because I have never been able to fit into those small criteria of what is the ‘dancer body’. Some of my identities I can’t change, like how tall I am. Now I make work that is about highlighting bodies, not necessarily making a critique on them but bringing visibility to all bodies that are available. It’s so important to me because my career has never been about my technical ability, how many turns I can do, how high I leaped, physical rigour, but it has always been about how I looked.  I was never privileged to be a dancing body. I was always first a “large body” and then a dancer second, never just a dancer. It’s been happening to me my whole career and even with successful reviews I am paired with statements like “plump” as Roslyn Sulcas did in a review for the NY times in 2019. (side note: other performers were mentioned in the review and they didn’t give a description of their body size, cheers Ros for affirming the old dance world criteria) This concept of the body over technique is the reason I don’t like the term ‘body positive’, it doesn’t sit well with me.  I’m not interested in this conflict of the “proud other” which I think the term “body positivity” feels like. I know people might adopt that term but for me I don’t like it as a reference for myself. It almost feels like an argument against the social norms of muscular physique, and I just want to show that a body that moves is a moving body which means that a body is a dancing body. That’s Fat Politics!  So that’s what I’m always doing in my work.  I’m always presenting the image of a body within certain forms, or with certain movements that allow for people to have interpretations or to have a thought or a question.  But there is nothing I want anyone to get, except for maybe to see something sensual. The works have elements or qualities I’m trying to portray but it is more about the intentions behind the movement.  I’m not necessarily trying to convey a message and I’m not trying to make a political statement.  I think maybe the action itself will become a political statement but it’s not that I’m trying to make one.  I’m just trying to give space for people to be vulnerable and show something of themselves, of their personality, of their identity.  

When I looked at dance history, I didn’t see my body type in any of the works and so in a way both in my professional and personal life I wasn’t able to find my authentic self.  Who I was didn’t feel like enough.  I had to fit into such frameworks and so this work, more so than the first two pieces, is really allowing for a release from the frameworks.  I feel like in Lads and My Body’s No1, there is a formalness to them.  Wherein this piece, I feel like there is finally a release.  Maybe that’s just the way I feel now in my life or maybe that’s the way I feel with working with the seven dancers and the conversations we’ve been having.  But there’s something that releases in this work.  You won’t necessarily feel the release because the other two works are not present. Hopefully, some institution will bring all three works together so the experience of the cycle can allow the spectator to exhale.  That is the goal (I put that into the universe…)  But if you were to see these pieces in their chronological order that maybe by the time you came to this one there would be such an ecstatic, orgasmic release.  That the freedom of just being a body that shows history, that has history, that for me is what the whole piece is about. Everything in my work starts with the body as a shape, as an object, as a sculptural being whilst displaying the lived experience. 

How does being queer influence your art?

Being queer is like what I was talking about with the idea of release.  It relieves me from constraints.  I think identifying as queer, more so than as a gay male, I found a lot of judgment identifying or living within the gay male requirements. Grindr warped our brains into what is sexy!  I felt like I would never attain truth or authenticity because of a lot of discrimination within the gay community around body shape, race, and perceptions of masculinity.  When I started to think about queerness, I started to think it’s less about boxes and more about questions and openness. It allowed me to be more free in my work. I feel like I can just make things now.  I have fun with what I make. The recipe is: there’s something silly and there’s something beautiful, and there’s something emotional and I’m not so precious about it. I am not embarrassed to love something or be naive in my thinking because I said I am always learning. In order to learn, you need to be humbled to a place of not knowing and to acknowledge that. I am not an expert, I am more in a constant state of investigating.  Queerness has allowed me to break free from any judgemental boxes and it’s allowed me to ask more questions without answers and that’s also given me more substance to work with. Questions without answers are just discovery and investigation… and fun and parties. I’m just having a party when I make art. Sometimes I make art about parties! As well as have parties with art.  It’s like as soon as I started identifying with queerness, I stopped thinking about my identity but just thinking about widening my view.  It’s also allowed me to look at other things in my life through such a lens that is much more open, rethinking things like family and relationships as well as all the kinds of ideas around the social norms.  I love to look at things that don’t identify as queer but with my queer lens I re-write the inspirations that are not necessarily there in the world. We’re just coming to a place now where we have started to see our queer identities in more mass culture.  Pop culture is really important in my work and so I relate dance history and art history to pop culture. I wonder how it’s all influenced by each other or mixed up in who is influencing who. I love dance history! There I said it and I am not embarrassed! I think today we are able to look at things differently and learn from them. Certain politics of the 1920s are not problematic today but how could I rethink the politics of today while looking at something from the 1920s?  How could I not write off the 1920s?  So queerness has made me less judgemental about things, less judgemental about what I make, less judgemental about what people think about what I make.  Because for me it’s all about creating things that are there in the present and filling the world with more visibility of queerness. 

How does the exploration of queerness change over the years?

I think my exploration of queerness came quite late to me. I identified as a gay male (solely) for so much of my life and I didn’t take note of the greater political spectrum even though I was in conflict with the boxes that I didn’t fit in. I started to think more about opening up my perspective of identity in myself, relationships and ways of relating. My work has the Body at the centre of its investigation because it’s my physical body that has always been the main focus in my professional and personal life. I started thinking about queerness and the openness it has to allow for me to not fit into binaries and boxes which were never accessible for me.  I am always an “other” box ticker. It led to me thinking more about the past and the historical moments that allowed me to be so naive to not consider my body and the way it relates to the world.  My last exhibition Nasty Boys was all about that, paying homage to the queer and gay histories before me that I hadn’t acknowledged in my informative years of coming out. My exploration has led me through a process of thinking about the future and not using frameworks that exist but having a life plan that considers others and how we could support and live together.  What does it mean to grow old together and what ways will we do that work to make sure we have what we need to support and be supported? This is something I am dealing with in my work. Maybe it is not at the surface but it is there in the core principles.  Community, togetherness, and visibility of all beautiful bodies. This new work, Act 3, is a therapy and a gathering.  It is possibly the future I am hoping to create with my queer chosen relatives (M,P,N). When you see the work, you see two figures having an intimacy and closeness.  There’s one that is on display and another who sees them. But also, around the installation there are more performers sitting there holding space, witnessing, and being the community.  They are also there to “see” the other two dancing together.  I think it is important to practice “seeing” as I feel we are so consumed with “watching” but do we see? How many times are we using the word “Visibility”?  I started seeing this word and I became really concerned with the practice of seeing.  A few years ago I got really sick and even though I told people I was sick I think people didn’t actually “See” me as sick and so I don’t think I received the care I needed, the true collective experience of care.  So, my exploration of queerness has been about sitting and trying to see.  See things, people, and situations that I wasn’t seeing before.  This is so I can, with others, think about new futures and live through inspirations of the past. My work is always dealing with the past to understand my way of living in the present. I can’t speak for a general answer to how exploration changes but for me personally I have become soft so I can be a cushion for the fall, for support, for the rest that is to come. A togetherness, what does this mean? The work shows an intimacy between two but also a togetherness which makes a community. 

What has been the biggest moment in your career?

My biggest moment is being where I am today, I don’t feel very visible in the dance world and have been fighting that since I was a teenager wanting to dance. I don’t fit into boxes and my practice is messy given how my brain works.  I am also messy, I am not that perfect portrait that companies can advertise and I learned that very quickly as a young performer. So being here right now is big because I have been motivated by spite, I will not be suppressed or blocked from participating.  I am humbled that Sadler’s Wells has been so supportive of my work. I started having a hobby of applying for high level jobs like when the Artistic Director of English National Ballet job came up because I feel doors for working class queer neurodivergent messy looking choreographers/ artists are not allowed to be in those institutions. I didn’t get an interview btw, surprise! I am very dedicated to my hobby of applying to high profile jobs that I’ll probably never get. But I will keep applying because I do see myself and what I have to say about shaping the future of the dance world; leading me to a possible position as a director in a company or production company.  I also got my eyes set on choreographing for West End musicals and films.  Here we go again… putting it in the universe, so the universe will provide!  Commercial musical theatre can use a bit more queer messiness. That’s just my opinion, but I did watch 30 musicals last year. The reasoning behind that is for another time but it was ultimately about learning. I love learning!  

Now for less of a political answer and a more specific one.  I think everyday I am getting opportunities that I feel are big. Or big to me because I love what I do! I love to dance and everything about dance. It’s my first husband and the “human” husband (applications are still open) will have to accept that I am already married! But those big moment examples … I performed at the La Cour d’Honneur with Trajal Harrell at the Festival D’Avignon last summer, an experience that I can’t describe. Also, I am dancing in the new Wicked film and that feels really special. I am no one special in the film but recently I have been sitting on this quote from stage director Amy Hodge said in a workshop I took; “there are no hierarchies or unimportant roles, if someone is in the scene then there is a reason for them to be there.”  But, also my previous show at Sadler’s Wells, my body’s an exhibition was something that I am forever proud of and it has given me the confidence to believe in what I am making. That work can touch people. The show was all about how the audience experienced dance and I received so many responses to the show that it was an emotional journey. It was my attempt to make a romcom about my love affair with dance and the theatre space! I feel the show accomplished that. But also size doesn’t really matter. I feel every moment to this point has been big because it has shaped me to these more recent experiences. So what makes it big is not the actual events but the archive of all the shows, people, teachers, mentors, colleagues have made me who I am now. I appreciate all those people with all my heart. My belly is full or as mentioned in the NYtimes “plump.” I am still learning and getting bigger.

 So maybe my biggest moment is still waiting to come! Let me be specific! That moment is what has always motivated me to be a dancer since I was a child, which is to meet and dance with Janet Jackson. Hello universe are you reading this… hehe

How would you describe your art?

Wow, ummm. How do I say it? I think I have described it in this article as messy but that’s for lack of better words. But at the heart of my work is choreographic! No matter if it is using dance, photography, video or tape. Yup tape art! I have been really into neon tape recently. My last exhibition, Nasty Boys, at Hyde Park Art Club in Leeds involved a series of line drawings made with tape which honoured the queer modernist icons of NYC and the queer club spaces that are now gone.  I reduced the male bodies in important paintings and sculptures down to lines. But even though the line is choreographic, inspirations came from an early computer program that Merce Cunningham used to choreograph his dances on, which used stick figures. Merce was a queer! Thank you Merce for inspiring me!

I also describe my dance works as sculptures.  I am interested in the body and how we see bodies and what they say to us. A similar practice to looking at marble sculptures. But also in time, space and energy, hello choreography 101! The works have no beginning, middle and end, they are constant in their presentation, being there when the exhibition opens and hanging out there till the exhibition closes. Like David (the guy in marble) he’s just there in the gallery hanging out or cruising!

More recently, I have confessed to being guilty that my practice is also in interior design.   I don’t just present work on walls or in museum spaces, I also fill the spaces with so much paraphernalia in order to frame the work. I don’t always say this when I get asked to show work and then I show up with a uhaul full of disco lights, tinsel curtains, mirror balls etc.  I currently own 350 mirror balls!  My studio looks like a Party City or pound shop. See why it’s messy.  There is also a choreographic practice of mine I call “Organised Chaos.” On the surface level it is chaotic but as you sit with it you start to see the individual elements because the chaos has an organisation to it.  It is related to my way of working with my ADHD identity.  My exhibitions are basically installations of the visuals in my brain but also the bedroom of my 10 year old self. Truly! I used to set up discos in my bedroom including disco lights, blue and green light bulbs in lamps and strobe lights!  I was a queer party kid before I was a queer party kid! And then I would dance my heart out or perform weekly performances of Cats with my brother Michael (also a homo). But I will leave it there but just to say when it comes to making art and dance nothing is off the table, all is game and it is up to me to find the choreographic! GO CHOREOGRAPHY! Thanks for reading and if you can now pass those flow charts and collages of cut outs to the front of the room!

More info:

Christopher Matthews Act 3 is on:
Wednesday 10 April, 4.30pm – 7.30pm – Foyer, Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Thursday 11 April, 5pm -8pm – The Kahn, Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Act 3 will be performed as part of Elixir Festival which runs from 10 – 20 April

https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/christopher-matthews-act-3