LL: [cont.] James choreographed this when his mother was dying of cancer, so basically it was a piece dedicated to his mother. It's about his family. He comes from a family of six kids, like me. The people in grey represent his family, the kids, and the people in beige are the mother and father. Gradually, through the piece, I die and there's an angel figure that comes to send me away. It's a very close piece to him and I think that when he created it he wasn't very verbal about what it all meant, but all these years later he was really able to talk about every single gesture, what it meant and where it came from. It's a very large work, but it comes from a very private, very personal place.

The things I've done as a choreographer have been on a much smaller scale than the things Bill does. Which is probably okay. Bill likes to think of something really, really big and he has a lot of people involved and they're always in really super projects. My interest lies on a much smaller, more intimate scale. I did a few solos. I did a lot of works where it's just Bill and I. One of them is called Varenka, Varenka! and it's based on a novel by Dostoevsky. I worked on it in St. Petersburg and I had a Russian composer who used to play with the Red Army. It is based on a novel called The Poor Folk and is about a man who's in love with a woman – they're very, very poor, living in St. Petersburg – and he imagines a lot of his love story with her. She's a young girl and he's an older guy and he sees her through a window and he sends her all these letters. It's a really tragic Russian novel. She ends up leaving and he's just devastated, but you never know in the story if it's in his head or if the love is real. They never actually spend time together. It's really something more in his imagination. So I had this wonderful set designer from Montreal design these cubes to represent the confinement of the space, because they live in little rooms. I had an accordion player compose the music, and Bill played the guy, of course. Basically the book is all letters, so I took every single letter and choreographed bits of it. I was nuts about it. For every word, I was trying to find a gesture. I think he's at the point of realizing that he's so in love but there's nothing he can do about it, and from then on everything goes downhill. The movement is a little pedestrian. The composer is quite something. Grew up in Stalingrad – he's a little troubled, but a fantastic composer, a genius really.

We did this for the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg and they picked a date for me and they said we can do this September 30, which is my birthday. At the end of the book, the last letter was written September 30 and I told them that and said “I can't believe it.” The Russians said, “But we knew this. This is why we picked the date.” Because of course they'd all read the book. It was fantastic.

I was given a studio for my residence in Russia. I was there for two weeks and every day somebody would knock at the door and say, “May I come in?” and I would say “Sure.” So their idea of space is totally different. I would have dancers constantly coming in, warming up, but anyway that was actually really good for the piece.

I did a piece called Interiors. I choreographed it for Bill and me and the kids. It is based on our family, I suppose, and I did that at the Enwave Theatre, and we performed it here in our studio as well. The next project I'm going to work on is a solo and I've started to work on it. I've done many pieces with Bill. Every piece starts with, “I should do a solo,” and then it involves Bill. For this one, I think I'm going to stick to the solo.

CA: Could you speak about the work in which you're involved with this community?

BC: Across the street, they're revitalizing Regent Park. It is a whole seventy acres, and they're pretty much knocking it down over the next ten years. They're relocating everybody and giving everybody the right of return. They're mixing up-market real estate, condominiums, stuff like that, with public housing. Then they're opening up the roads and they're also bringing back commerce. Right across there's going to be a Sobeys, a Royal Bank and so on. It's the oldest, some might say slum, in North America. It's the oldest social housing site. This is going to be its third incarnation. Obviously the second Utopian idea didn't work.

So this one is very interesting; Daniel's Corporation is the builder/developer. They are starting with a big building and not selling any real estate until it is actually built. They're putting in parks. So we moved here and are renovating our own building – like everyone else in Regent Park we're a fairly young couple with kids, and we don't have any money so we ended up in Regent Park. We got a letter, after we started rehearsing here, from the developer saying “Welcome to the neighbourhood.” Slowly we began to become aware of what's going on and how amazing and interesting it is.

We have started to develop a lot of relationships – for instance with Dixon Hall, which has been a soup kitchen in Regent Park since the 1920s. Primarily, the places we have worked, in Gros Morne and Val Marie, Saskatchewan, are communities under some sort of duress. Val Marie was experiencing the mad cow crisis; at Gros Morne it was the demise of fishing villages. Usually we're going places that are living with hardship; usually it's those communities that are of interest. The fact that there is potential for us to engage in this community, engage in the urban renewal over a long period of time, is a fantastic opportunity to learn and to contribute – so we're trying.

We've got this dance company, and we're trying to grow it so we can actually participate in the next fifteen years in Regent Park. It's going to be great. The statistics there are fantastic. It's really a Staten Island of Canada and those people – seventy per cent of them have been in Canada less than ten years. Something like sixty per cent are under sixteen. Twenty-two main languages are spoken. Start adding the dialects and it's hundreds. It's fantastic. It is really interesting, and there is an arts and cultural centre. We are lobbying to put something really interesting in there because in ten years it is going to be great. Toronto's a pretty amazing city and this neighbourhood is going to be remarkable. So we're there pushing for some really interesting arts and cultural space.

I've been talking with the developers about working right on the site over the next ten years, working with the workers, having artist Ann Troake come and play with the backhoes, co-ordinating demolition, involving all the various community groups. It's fantastic, it's beginning to happen. We've been very lucky having people that collaborate with us and we're really fortunate to have that participation.

I know you're supposed to tick all the boxes on grant applications to say you do community work, but it's actually really hard – when you're a dance company you dance. We are trying to see what kind of organization can grow where we can consistently be involved. The foundations for that are fantastic. I think we built great connections and there's an openness for us to be involved. It's been amazing and we're hoping that far-sighted arts councils and other people will see that opportunity and support us in that as well as dancing and making pieces. So it's a very interesting time; it's in line with what the company's been doing in our work in communities and going off the beaten track. I think it's a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We're doing our best to raise two kids, pay the bills, have socks without holes in them, make dances, and see what we can do in this community. It looks kind of good, so we'll see.

Q: Let's say you were doing a duet together. Does it end up being collaborative or does one person act as choreographer?

LL: I'm going to answer that question. It's actually really interesting. When I choreograph – I was going to say there's no problem (laughs). First of all, you always collaborate – even with somebody like James, who doesn't really like anyone to improvise; he knows exactly what he's doing. Still there's always an amount of input – you make a mistake, he likes it. I think my process when Bill's involved in my pieces is a bit more straightforward. He's a dancer.

BC: She gives me the steps and I do them. I know. It's crazy.

LL: That's right. The other way around is more complex, because I'm not very good in this process, honestly.

BC: I give her the steps, she throws something at me.

LL: I yell, I complain, yeah (laughs). He has a different process. Bill will ask more for improvisation and you come up with some of the material – with his guidance. I would say Bill's process is more collaborative than mine. Mine is more, I tell him what to do and he does it.

BC: A lot of the duets are pieces by Laurence. She has a vision and she choreographs them. The terrains are very different. I'm like a cocker spaniel; I just go out and make friends and drag people in, whereas Laurence works from the inside and really explores a very intimate, sensitive, personal terrain. I think what we do, the works we do, as well as dancing, fit really nicely together. For years people would say, “Oh you do too much” or “How can you have two directors?” and we would just tell them to buzz off, because that's what we do. Now of course they think it's a good idea – well why were you bugging us for the last ten years? But all these things are very important. I think James isn't interested in working with us just because we have a dance company. It's because he finds what I do very interesting, he finds the work of Laurence and the integrity of her work very attractive and then the work we do together – they all work very, very nicely together. That's why people like John Oswald work with us; we have really long relationships with people. We involve our families, so there are multi-ingredients in the company but they really work. Even though we are continually told that we do too much, we just keep doing it. We say, “Let us make work. Leave us alone.” They're fun ingredients. Why else would James want to come hang out in Regent Park? It's great. There's a nice symmetry to everything.

We're at a point now where we're always leaping towards things because rather than “Oh let's make a company, put five people in the office and fundraise and make one dance a year and not spend a lot of time in the studio …” we have a company where we spend all our time in the studio. There are not really any employees. We abuse the system completely just so we can make works and tour dances.

We run light, we run fast and we don't want to waste money. It's a good model that functions. We're at a point now where we're always leaping. We leapt to Toronto and we decided to buy a building, because Toronto's a big city and I thought we couldn't just come back and rent and search for a studio. We wanted to come back into Toronto differently. We wanted to invigorate the community, but we also wanted to invigorate ourselves and also find a different way for a contemporary dance company to work. It's been great coming back here.

CA: Thank you so much.

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