Lucy Suggate in conversation with Alan Lyddiard

Alan Lyddiard is on a mission to create, with others, extraordinary performances and build long-lasting relationships with older people, locally, nationally, and internationally.

He retired in 2014 at the age of 65 and went to live in Spain. He was bored after two weeks and decided to set up The Performance Ensemble, a company of older artists, with founding chair, Mandy Stewart. He settled in Leeds and started working at Leeds Playhouse with their older person project, Heydays. 
Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength. They are now the first permanent ensemble of older artists regularly funded by Arts Council England. 

Alan will be working with people from Nottingham on nottdance as Place, an afternoon of nottdance past, present and future, woven together through exhibition, live performance and conversation.

2025festival.nottdance.com/event/nottdance-as-place/

For more information on their work, visit theperformanceensemble.com

Lucy Suggate is a dance artist based in Yorkshire, working in performance, making, education, dramaturgy, and mentoring. Her work highlights how movement – dance – choreography can respond to the ongoing age of crisis and prolonged uncertainty by focusing on embodied practices and the physical and perceptual shifts that occur when engaged in long-term moving and thinking. 

Visit lucysuggate.com 

Visit nottdance Festival 

Visit Fabric Dance 

Music by Tom Harris listeningspace.xyz/

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com 

Fabric is an Arts Council England, National Portfolio Organisation. 

Transcript

Becky Bailey, Fabric: Hello. Welcome to Dance Moves People, a podcast from Fabric. It's a short series of chats between Fabric artists, friends and collaborators to celebrate the launch of our 10-year strategy. 

In this episode, we hear from Fabric's artist researcher, dance artist Lucy Suggate, who's in conversation with Alan Lyddiard, the artistic director of The Performance Ensemble, based in Leeds. Alan makes work with older artists, and in this chat they spoke about his making process, adapting and changing to older bodies and older people's needs, the importance of rest in the rehearsal process, and Alan's particular interest in developing a centre for creative ageing.

Lucy Suggate: I wanted to pick up this idea of AI because I asked you if you like AI and you…

Alan Lyddiard:  I don't like AI, I find it really intimidating. However, I asked my phone to tell me what an international festival of creative aging could be. And it wrote back to me and told me. And it was fabulous. And I looked at it and I thought, yeah, that's right. So I didn't bother to write it myself. But really what I wanted, you know, is to just use it as a note taker.

Lucy Suggate: Yeah. I realise I'm quite analogue, actually. I haven't been able to embrace technology as much as I see some people and I can see them swimming in it. And I'm just like, I just find it incredibly alien. It's not intuitive. I guess maybe there's something about I can't feel it. I can see if it can save you time, but there's also sometimes I really like the fact that sometimes writing an email can take me like three hours and that I've really faced scrutiny and thought about it and you know it's been painstaking almost and it makes me think about I don't know those moments or those things I guess in all sorts of practice that you can't really explain

Alan Lyddiard: I'm still pretty bad on a laptop, so I type with one finger. Great. And it takes me hours to write emails. And I would like to be able to talk into a machine and it suddenly presents everything that I've said, but I can't quite cope with that. So I like the idea of writing things down with one finger. And it's part of the creative process, I suppose. You know, it's part of making it. So, yeah. I don't know if I'll use it but I definitely would like to be able to not have to take notes when I'm in a meeting.

Lucy Suggate: Do you still use a pen to write?

Alan Lyddiard: It's very interesting because in my work what I do is I give everybody on the first day of a project a book and a pen and I ask them to write everything that they want. I'm doing a piece at the moment which is called written on a clean sheet of paper. So that's basically what the project is. You take a clean sheet of paper every day and you write on it. And you've no idea what is going to come out, but you write. And at the end of a week or the end of a month, you've got an incredible connection of interesting things to discuss with people and to make into a piece of theatre. So I use that a lot. But I don't do it myself. I type with one finger.

Lucy Suggate: I have a cupboard at home full of notebooks, plain notebooks, and I think the last time I counted I had like 130 of them that I just can't throw away. But actually when I look inside of them, I made myself look through them, I realised there's shopping lists. to-do lists and then the odd nugget of creative inspiration but mostly a collection of thoughts but I somehow can't part with them they've become a huge part of the creative process in fact the point that I will only buy the same notebook so that when they're at least when they're on the bookshelf they match yeah they look like important or significant and the first pages i always know it's a quite neat and then as i get to more and more it just becomes a kind of a scrolling mess i think that's fabulous i admire them trying to sleep

Alan Lyddiard: I think it's a really, really good way to work. It's capturing moments, isn't it? Yeah. And sometimes it's very difficult to capture moments in this kind of busy, busy world we live in. But if you have to write something down, it's capturing forever. And if you put it in a bookshelf like you do, and it's there, how many did you say?

Lucy Suggate: Something like 130, yeah.

Alan Lyddiard: Well, I take my hat off to you.

Lucy Suggate: but then I also have to carry it around with me wherever.

Alan Lyddiard: And I've got books all over the office, I've no idea what... I haven't looked at them since we wrote with them, but I should try to put them into some sort of shape.

Lucy Suggate: Yeah. When you were talking about the kind of task that you present people with a blank piece of paper, it really made me think about the permission to not know. how important that is in the creative process, but how difficult it feels in the world that we live in, or the kind of the administrative world that we live in, how we need to know. And I just wondered if you, I don't know if you had any thoughts of that. I do.

Alan Lyddiard: I'm very worried about meaning. So I'm very worried about having to make a piece of work about something or discuss anything, actually. So I try to create structures for myself in order that we do something and then through doing it, something emerges that has some kind of meaning to it. So for years and years and years, I do this workshop, this exercise, which I call Slow Walk. And basically, people go through a kind of meditative process, and then very slowly walk forward, and then make some decisions about going back to the chair they were sitting in, and then decide not to go back to the chair they're sitting in, and move forward again. And then suddenly, at the end of the exercise, they either say, I wish, or I remember, and they wish something or remember something, but they don't tell me what it is. And this exercise I have been doing for 35 years. And I've done every morning. With the ensemble company that I ran in Newcastle, this one exercise, which lasts 5 minutes, 32 seconds, and it's to a piece of music by Liliana Butler, who's a Serbian gypsy. And they just walk slowly, and they present themselves to the world. And they present themselves to the audience. And after they've done that, they're ready to work and explore something. imagine something and think about meaning. But until we've done that, I don't want to even talk about. So I don't sit around a table that you would as a player go, well, this play is about. I would hate that. It scares me. How can I say what something's about? I don't know it. I make a piece of work and I will continue to make the piece of work not knowing what it's about. But eventually, probably after the first performance of it, I'll know. And that's, I think, a really exciting way to work because you're researching and exploring every moment. Every moment is a process of research. And eventually you learn about what it is that you've found.

Lucy Suggate: When you talk about it, it sounds kind of exhilarating because there's a sense that you have to trust the process and this sense of not knowing, free-falling, and it really resonates with me as a dance artist because I am committed to moving every day. But in a non-traditional, non-conventional way of, I don't know what I'm going to do. It's not like I'm going to go and repeat steps or I'm going to go and learn something. I mean, I was a terrible dance student because of that, because I didn't want to copy. I didn't want to... repeat or know how to do something. I wanted to constantly find something or just articulate this incredible material that we have, which is called a body. So the idea of committing every day to moving feels fundamental, but also feels really radical, actually, in terms of giving yourself that time to just kind of commit to, before we even talk about anything, we're going to do, we're going to move.

Alan Lyddiard: I think that's why I like dance. I think that's why I like dancers, you know. I grew up as an actor and we did plays, you know, and I didn't enjoy them. I'm a theatre director, I work in the theatre, but I don't enjoy plays. I don't like people learning dialogue, pretending to be somebody else and shouting at each other across a table. It doesn't make any sense to me. But to see somebody move and to see the way that they move is, I find, exhilarating. So when I started becoming a director, I was working in Loughborough in the East Midlands. And I was part of an organisation called the Emma Theatre Company. And next door to us was the Emma Dance Company. And I thought, dancers, well, you know, a load of rubbish. What are they doing? It can't be very interesting. Anyway, and then, you know, I would roll my own cigarettes and nod and do plays about motorway service stations and things. And I thought this was fantastic, but actually, I suddenly entered this dance studio and saw a dance company making dance. And I thought, God. This is extraordinary. This is really beautiful. And since that time, I've always loved dance. And I've always worked with dance in the pieces of work that I do. So I don't make plays. I create pieces of performance. I don't like actors. I like performers. I make work with performers that is created by those performers in the rehearsal room. And whatever happens in that process is how we make the piece of work. So I'm with you. in terms of the dance aesthetic, if you like, is the way in which I create work. But it's a theatre piece, you know, and it has got people speaking, but it's still, it's a dance piece. And I work with choreographers, and I work with people that work in dance, and I work with dancers more than I work with actors.

Lucy Suggate: it's fair to say that you've been doing this for a long time.

Alan Lyddiard: Sure.

Lucy Suggate: And that at some point I've noticed that performance or theatre or alternative sort of modes of making theatre and performance have gone through again many iterations and I guess 60s and 70s it was called community-based theatre or performance and then the notion of participatory work and now I think we're in a world where it's called co-creation. So just because you've spanned and you're still so active in making and being an artist, what is it about making with people or are there certain conditions that support that making with or this breaking out or this rupturing of maybe sort of traditional forms of theatre about, you know, you said this idea of disliking, pretending to be someone. So again, this shift to an experience based. practice?

Alan Lyddiard: Well I used to love people pretending to be somebody else. You know I started at Harrogate Rec and there were French windows in every set and the drinks coming up to the age centre and somebody would rush in with a tennis racket and say anyone for tennis and I thought it was fabulous. But then I discovered Fringe Theatre and I went to London and I was at the King's Head in London and it was all political and it was all about gritty stuff. And then I realised that actually none of it was touching me anymore. It wasn't making me feel interested in what was happening in front of me. But what was making me very interested was the people around me and the streets, people that you just bumped into. And I started looking at people and thinking about their lives. And what's their story? And that started me going into another direction which was about collecting stories. And through the process of collecting stories you are co-creating because you're starting with them and you're listening to them and you're hearing what they're talking about and they're explaining themselves to you. And through the process of them explaining themselves to you, you have a reaction to that. And the reaction is, that's fascinating or that's interesting or that's exciting. Let's work together on making that into something that is maybe a little heightened and a bit theatrical and share it with people. So that's how the theatre emerges. The theatre that I work in now emerges. I listen to the people that talk to me. I love what they say a lot of the time. I try to encourage that bit of it to be shared in some kind of way, which is about probably a sort of presentation mode that we go through. And then they do it, and they've made it I haven't made it. I'm helping to place it in a way that I think the audiences will understand and like. So, starting with the Sloan walking exercise, it's all about the person presenting themselves to the world. And there's a technique that we go through in order that they can do that. And once they do that, the world is their oyster. You know, they can go in so many different directions. But mostly, if they tell their story, authentically, with love and respect, and truthfully, that can be extraordinary to see on stage. And that's the bit of theatre that I currently love. I don't love the RSC. I don't love going to the theatre and seeing a play about something. I love seeing people being who they are.

Lucy Suggate: So kind of foregrounding this authenticity, this energy, these ideas of experience and the magic that that can create. I wondered if, I don't know, it's just making me think a lot about being listened to and particularly that around, I suppose, the older performer.

Alan Lyddiard: Well, you know, older people tend to get disregarded. That might be a cliche, and it might be not correct, but it's my experience, my lived experience. OK, so that's another area of very interesting processes now that we talk about a lot, lived experience. So I'm an older artist. I'm 76. I'm the oldest artistic director in Britain of a company that is funded as an NPO. I have lived experience of what it's like to be an old person. And I work with old people all the time now because I find them interesting and like me. So when I decided that I would do this kind of work was because I was inspired by other older artists that were making work with older people. The process of listening to an older person fills me with joy because I'm old myself and I recognize what we have to go through in society. We're not loved. We're a burden on society. But what I'm hoping is that we can start to be making a contribution to society rather than the burden on society. If we use creativity as a means to help us to make a contribution to society, I think that's a really exciting way to explore what older people can offer the world.

Lucy Suggate: Those two words, the contribution versus burden, I think it feels so relevant I think in our society and the situations that a lot of people find themselves in as they sort of pass through life and time. I can feel it, it feels palpable at times. I've just spent a couple of nights with my mum who is a similar age to you, a bit older, and I can feel her anxiety as an older woman, particularly in the north of England, and basically what her world feels like it's doing. It feels like it's shrinking and shrinking. And how you can resist that, how you can resist that inevitability. And there's something about these creative acts that seem to be offering a way through. And I'm interested, I guess maybe why I'm interested in dance and movement is it's a bit like the water of life, the water to the stoniness or the obstacles that inevitably sort of seem to appear in anyone's life, regardless of circumstance, you know, to live a human life is to endure many obstacles. Even I feel that pressure, I feel that sense of time running out or time or I've missed something or I hadn't done this, I've escaped that, I've not done this, I've not done enough of that. Feeling the exhaustion and how to continue, how to continue a creative endeavour, an artistic practice, especially in the consistent change and the difficult change that we find ourselves. And I guess because you have this backstory or this understory of continuation, I'm just wondering, like, if there are any defining moments?

Alan Lyddiard: I've always had a love of energy. I'm very very lucky I'm able to sleep easily so I can sleep anywhere and when I wake up I have energy and this is what keeps me going as an older person because as you get older your energy does get less and I do get confused and I don't remember where I've left things and I need a lot of help in my daily life, you know, just where's my keys, where's my glasses, what am I doing now, what's my next appointment. If I sleep and then wake up and have a focus I can do something really energetic for two hours, then I have to sleep again. So it's like knowing that there's a process that you have to now go through, and you need a lot of help. You do need help to keep you going. But the relationship between sleep and energy, for me, is how I work. I wake up and I can do something, you know, I can make something. So we had a short rehearsal period. You know, I rehearse from 11 till one, and then I have lunch, but then I probably try and get a little bit of a lie down somewhere. And then you get... and I can do another two hours and then I'm exhausted and I have to go home to bed for, you know, wake up at seven o'clock and then start doing some work again. It's a really strange existence, but it's an existence that works for me and helps me to create. Living in Spain is really interesting because of the siesta time. So you get up very early, you work until it's too hot to work, you find an air-conditioned place to have lunch, and then you go to bed. And you sleep for two hours, you wake up, you refresh, you start again, and you can actually go for hours. And it's like having two days in one. I would like to do that more in Britain, you know, I would like to That's how I would like to work. So our company now, I'm a bit nervous of Nottingham because we're going to make a piece in Nottingham for the Not Dance and we work from four to eight. I'm not sure how I'm going to manage four to eight. I think by seven o'clock I'm going to be exhausted and I'm going to have to find a way to give myself that extra hour or I'm going to rely on them to kind of take over a bit. Short, sharp moments of creativity is how I can work now.

Lucy Suggate: I think that sort of mode of operation has been what I'm trying to create myself in this sense of prioritising rest as a way to be your most powerful. During COVID, I made a duet with a greyhound, an ex-racing greyhound, because of course we weren't allowed to see people, but we could see animals and we could be in close proximity to animals. And so I did a series of reclining duets with a greyhound. And what's interesting about that particular creature is in order to be the fastest dog on the planet, they have to rest for about 18 hours a day and then they get up and they are still explosive. And so this idea of them resting into their power is something that I'm trying to continue as I move through the next stages of trying to find ways to keep moving and dancing. And this idea of we've got to fill eight hours a day with creative activity, it just feels like such an outdated mode and model of being and also excludes so many people and so many things that you can do. When you talk about this lived experience and all these different stories that come together, we need to live. As well, we need to live, we need to breathe, we need to see, we need to feel and that has to somehow, our way of being supported to be creative needs to be different. It cannot fit into this model and particularly this Western model and even I guess the UK model of, you know, the working day is this.

Alan Lyddiard: Yes. I think when I was younger, the young people, I imagine that they have got a lot of energy and they can stay up longer and they can work for a longer period of time. And that's fantastic. And so they should. And when they want to, they should be doing it. But as you grow older, you can't do that. The idea of an eight-hour day and that kind of way that you were describing the work mode that we take on in this country, I don't think is good for older people, but I think older people could make an amazing contribution to the workplace if they were allowed to do two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon and maybe two hours in the evening. So they might do the same length of day, but they do it through little short shots. you know, short moments and then they can have a sleep and then they can get up and they'll feel strong and able to do something else.

Lucy Suggate: Yeah my energy levels as a person and again I guess it's also that strange thing of it's so individual isn't it?

Alan Lyddiard: It is.

Lucy Suggate: Because everybody's body is completely different and everybody's experience of walking through the world is different but yet we have this need for connection and collective experience and we want that but it is also quite difficult because it can feel quite oppressive at times. I remember I got quite ill when I was 18 and I was diagnosed with post-viral fatigue, a kind of like temporary sort of ME. And I remember being so shocked at how tired a person could feel. And then at the same time, being at that point where I was supposed to have loads of energy and supposed to be doing all of these things that 18 year olds can do and be out in the world and just not being able to participate in that. but also wanting to continue in a highly physical job, like just finding that that was the only thing that made sense to me is to move my body in the way that I want to move it. And so just finding ways to, work with, I guess, energy systems. So when you feel like you've got energy, you can work with it. And when you need to rest, you rest. So I guess it's this thing of being able to listen to yourself and respond to those patterns But even know that that's a possibility, because again, it just always feels like, oh, well, if you don't do it like this, if you're not going to commit to this, if you're not going to work and be productive for eight, 10 hours a day, then you can't get involved. And I suppose I'm interested in how we can change structure. I guess it's always that thing that art can't change the world. But actually, there are things that we can do, which is, I think, in how we organise time, how we gather people together, how we spend our time with each other. That can be something that we can say, actually, this is really important. This works. Like, let's try and make it happen more.

Alan Lyddiard: I think it's about also the places where we do the work. If you're working in an office, it's set up for you to work in a particular way. I think if you're going to work in a place of creativity, and it's a very good example of a place that's really lovely and you feel at home and comfortable there. and the lovely studios and the places where you can sit and rest. Although I don't think there's enough places to sit and rest at Fabric, that's another thing. But I'm thinking now that actually what we need to do is to build or organise or create a centre of creative ageing, where we can look after older people and work with them so their creativity can flourish. And I think that's a different sort of building than the buildings that most community art centres work in now. There's something about, you know, taking over a room that isn't sorted out for your needs. It's somebody else's room to do something else. It isn't good for creativity and particularly with older people's creativity. So we need rooms in which older people can feel comfortable, that there's enough seats for them to sit, that they can get up and they can have water at any moment that they want it, or they can leave the room and go and lie down somewhere, or sit, or go in the air, have some air, and make everything work, the rooms work, for the development of the creativity that you're trying to engender. And I don't think there's any building that I know that is quite like that yet. So I want to create a centre for creative ageing. Ideally an international centre of creative ageing because I don't want people to get stuck in their isolated areas. I want them to always be looking at the world and I want the world to be looking at what's happening in this little centre. It's about collaboration, it's about openness, it's about creating a space which is perfect for our needs. And actually most of the time the space is never perfect for our needs.

Lucy Suggate: I don't know, just hearing you talk there, I'm just like, yeah, where is it? When can it start? But it is that thing, isn't it? The generic space that, you know, and even the flexible space, like a lot of art spaces are built to be flexible and so that they can move and change, but it's obviously missing clarity or missing intention or missing something by going, well, yeah, we can just change the space and we can make it fit everybody. And it's like, actually, what happens if you, dedicate resources and energy and space and build space to really unpick what it means.

Alan Lyddiard: Fabric needs a canteen for the times that we can sit and have a little cup of tea or I mean there is a kitchen but it's not quite the same. You need somebody kind of looking after you when you need a cup of tea or you need a sandwich or something. So a canteen, a place to rest, bedrooms. If you're waiting in an airport There is always a little place you can go to lie down, you know, if you've got a long wait for a plane. I think we should have that in creative centres where older people are working, that they can just go and lie down for a bit and just get their energy back. And then they can go and have a nice salad, you know, that somebody's making for them. I know this is ridiculous, but I think it will really create a sense of creativity. It will give that person much more than it's a carpeted floor and we're moving all the chairs out the way so we can do a little bit of dance and it doesn't work because you're exhausted by the time you've moved all the chairs out the way and the tables and the carpet is not the most best place to do dance. You need a good floor.

Lucy Suggate: Yeah, I think it's about this creative caretaking that is something that, you know, if we were to think about, well, what could we do right now to sort of embody that caretaking in how we work with people and when we go into buildings, suddenly I immediately think about that, well, your role would shift if I was to work in this centre for creative ageing, you know, it would be like my understanding of how my practice would shift to support that experience and that work. In the last couple of years I did take a job in a local post office and it was a community post office and a community hub and just going back to sort of basics of serving customers and doing something quite practical or helping people with something that they really needed to do, really functional, whether it was buying their newspaper or sending a letter or paying a bill. Again, it's sort of something that's beginning to inform a kind of choreographic practice or a choreographic thinking around, yeah, your interruptions, the notions of hospitality, or how do you host people when they come into a building? How do you take care of people when they come into a building? And beyond saying hello and can you sign in, what then do you do? To support that role. Is it that you suddenly transform into somebody that's nourishing people with food? Is it that you are making sure that there are appropriate places to rest? Again underpinning nutrition and rest as the foundations for creativity and contribution and recognising where contribution is not always about a particular type of growth or activity or profit. A contribution can be multidirectional as well.

Alan Lyddiard: And also it's places where a conversation can happen as well. And in a way, this is very nice. You could set up a little room where there can be a conversation that can happen between two people and it can be recorded. And it's there to support the creativity. So I would like to. find a centre of creative ageing, an international centre of creative ageing, I would like to bring the world to think about ageing, because we're getting older, and there's got to be billions of older people across the world, and what are we going to do with them? There's a sense that, should we spend more time in our youth, having more free time, and start work later? and could we continue that work until much later because we're still useful at the age of 70 and you know people expect you to retire at 60 or whatever it is so maybe there's an extra 10 years at the beginning of life where we are free to explore much more and not expected to get work immediately, we're 20. You know, we start work at 30 and we work until we're 70 and then we've got this amount of time where there's lots of centres of creative ageing where you can go and be creative and through being creative find happiness because there's a definite equation between feeling creative and feeling happy. And I don't think that creativity is understood enough by governments by social services. It's important to have a roof over your head, it's important you've got enough to eat, but it's really important that you are creative in your life. I don't think we'll talk much about that. were taught how to earn money. The young children are very creative in primary school and then there's a whole range of subjects that stop you being creative. And then you start having exams and then your creativity disappears. And then you start work and your creativity goes because you're being told what to do all the time. So how do we engender that sense of creativity throughout life? And how can we explain to people how important it is because you will find more happiness if you are creative.

Lucy Suggate: Yeah and it makes me think about how we are able to use our time, how we are able to structure it. This sense of being forced into positions, circumstances, situations that in a way stifle that creativity. And you're right, it always feels like, especially in our society, our creativity, they always feel like an add-on, they're an added benefit, rather than something that is fundamental, something that is central to the human experience, if you're lucky enough. it's like seasoning and I don't know how we change that shift to make it central to everybody's lives. It's even sort of with dance education I sometimes think well if you learn to move first and then dance what the difference would be because I think even those sort of very organized or prescriptive ways of learning how to do art can sometimes be really difficult for people and that this idea of yeah just getting people to move every day in a way that feels explorative, about inquiring, sensing, thinking but not thinking, and just doing in the same way that maybe everybody should start the day with your walking exercise.

Alan Lyddiard: Perfect. Thank you.

Lucy Suggate: Thank you.

Becky Bailey, Fabric: Thanks for listening and don't forget to tune into the next episode, dropping soon.