In the sleepy zones between rest, recovering over the last couple of days, I have begun to unspool my experiences of working on this thing called ROSE. ROSE is a show that I performed with Sharon Eyal’s dancers, light technicians and company over the last week at Sadler’s Wells East in London. Its genesis is a collaboration between Sharon and the label Young. Caius, who runs Young, had seen Sharon’s work and thought this would be very powerful alongside a DJ set from someone in the creative world I inhabit. His idea was to bring Sharon together with Ben UFO. Ben built the first iteration with Sharon that opened at Manchester International Festival. Last summer it was performed at New York’s Park Armoury. I was asked to replace Ben due to a period of necessary paternity leave for Ben. I had misgivings about joining, these were primarily rooted in the lack of time we had to rehearse and build a new show around my musical direction/DJing. Caius assured me that a) I’m not all that different from Ben in my tastes and Ben had connected well with Sharon, b) I’d be up to the job and c) everyone else is very good and we’d stand an excellent chance of pulling it together in a fraction of the time they’d had for the previous iterations. As persuading as that was to hear I remained concerned, but it was exciting and presented itself in my mind as the one opportunity I would have in life to map a circle between my work and my mother’s life as a student of Noa Eshkol.

Over the last weeks I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to explain what ROSE is and I’ve generally done a terrible job. It is a show I struggle to explain. On paper it’s one thing. The experience is another. Its somehow affecting, its sum something greater than its parts. Or perhaps its parts all push each other into something greater. So what is that? I’m not going to attempt to put the thing into words here beyond the following couple of sentences, but I will recount a little about how we built it and mention a couple of the pieces of music to try and satisfy the requests for recordings, playlists and specific track identifications.

Broadly this show is a simple merging of creative disciplines - that of dance and the club DJ at this moment in time. However Sharon’s work is not straightforward. It eschews classical boundaries in dance and instead draws upon the body in a way that is total. Its controlled and expressive in equal measure. It moves dance into a very inventive space where figures create landscapes and bodies join and seperate, offsetting slow and precise movement against flowing explosions of energy. It does all the things that music does. ROSE then places Sharon’s work into both the architecture of a club and the structure of a DJ set. I had no idea really what I was working on until it was performed with the audience all around us. Suddenly the power of what we were doing began to expose itself. As far as I have understood it from the things people have tried to say to me after the shows, its connecting something in their bodies, something in how they feel dancing and giving them a kind of natural high that they haven’t experienced before just being in a club or just watching a performance. I’m sure there is a lot more to be explored here, I am not the person who can do that as I obviously feel too close to the work I think to have any perspective.

Before I started I was sent a recording of the set Ben played at the Park Armoury. There was a structure that was built around 3 pieces of music that Sharon had created dances for. One, by Koreless, has been a touring show of hers for a few years. Into The Hairy is about 45 minutes long and for ROSE she was using two shorter sections of it. Then there was a piece designed for Mormax, by Ricardo Villalobos, and another for a specific work written for ROSE by Jamie xx, called CHANTS. Caius and Mattis (who manage the piece from Young’s side,) the dancers and I all then arrived in Paris, where Sharon and her partner Gai, live. The first night we sat in Sharon’s apartment and I played her tracks I thought would work. She liked most of them.

The next morning we started in the rehearsal studio and we began to build the dances again around some of the tracks I’d played. Previously the one track she had mentioned wanting to keep was Front de Cadeaux’s Legal Illegal, but this was replaced by DJ Znobia’s U Uu. Wanting to keep something of Ben’s work we decided to keep a blend in the finale between T++’s remix of Marcel Dettmann and Surusinghe’s BAD GIRLS, albeit with the layering of Ndagga Rhythm Force’s Khadim, which I wanted to become a kind of returning theme or coda in the show. Over three days we got much of the show together musically and it felt like Sharon had built her work into the music I had thrown at the dancers in a way that gave me confidence we could pull this off. I say could because we still hadn’t seen the space we’d have to transpose it to (the set had evolved since NY), done anything in regards to light (which is utterly crucial to the thing), or even had a full run of the piece. I then headed to Glastonbury and they continued sharpening details in Paris.

We reconvened in London on the Sunday before the shows. Dress rehearsal was Wednesday, and then we had four performances, Thursday night to Sunday. Now we could access the space and start work on the lights. Three day story short; we somehow did it. That being said, the dress rehearsal was the first full run through. We did the rehearsal with Sharon holding a mic, ready to guide/interject should we make a mistake. Amazingly she didn’t have to. I had never felt this kind of pressure around a DJ set in my life. Every step and cue was timed to transitions we had agreed upon and I had an iPad next to me with a timer for me to be precise in when certain moments landed. I wanted to do the whole thing without leaning on ‘hot cues’ (if you know what they are) and just mix it as energetically as I could so, despite the preparedness, there would always remain a certain lubricity to it. There are sections where I have some freedom in what I play and how I play it, but we have to then land on segments at the same time as the dancers are counting steps, and the lights need to transition through my cues the same way each time. Much of this was down to the role played by the stage manager Roy, without whom it would have been a mess.

It is this tension between the free and the precise that is the source of so much energy. The first half is designed to unsettle the audience in certain ways. Its loud. The dancers come through the audience in a way that is unrelenting. The aim is for the audience who aren’t into it to have the freedom to leave or take a break - thankfully they do. This allows the majority to settle into the experience, sink into the darkness and find their own connection to what’s unfolding. This becomes a great strength of the show. I loved having the crowd not looking at me. I loved being able to play tracks like Glossy Bingo Stain and to see people warping themselves to a flamenco clap and harp. People slipped in and out of themselves in between puzzlement and joy, at having a spectacle presented to them that in turn swallowed them up and let them just dance.

Every night had a different feeling to it because the crowd are so paramount to the performance. On the Friday Caius barrelled towards me about ten minutes before the end and said “I think that was the best hour of my life”. That night had felt truly remarkable because up till then we had been tinkering everyday. I had initially chopped about twenty minutes from the show. On Thursday Sharon decided to add another totally new dance piece and I chopped one section and extended another. Friday was the result of all these tunings and the room seemed to take off in that second hour. Saturday and Sunday became about replicating that as best we could. That feeling that floods the room in the last ten or fifteen minutes, that is the feeling I wish could be bottled, could be released every weekend in clubs or in fields. That’s the feeling of dancing and listening and connecting to our bodies in the purest sense I can think of.