BS: As for me, I have always thought Lola is just like a bird, an intelligent bird, a chickadee. A chickadee is a bird that collects seeds. Scientists actually did research about the brain of the chickadee; when they gather the seeds and store them, apparently their brains actually expand and then when the winter season is over, they can find all that stuff, wherever they put it. So, for me, Lola is just like this little chickadee – she gets all this information and saves it everywhere and then she knows exactly where it is. And every time I saw her after I quit dancing and Eponymous became her manager, she would say, “Oh my God, my basement is just so full of stuff I don't remember where it is, where I put this stuff.” However, if you asked her, she would go and find it.

Q: (Claudia Moore): I just wanted to urge everybody here to go to the show. I think that Lola's work is really extraordinary and very, you could call it idiosyncratic, but creating an individual vision – it's not easy. Not many people achieve it, I don't think. Lola has. The physical vocabulary in Lola's work is one thing that's very extraordinary, but what is remarkable about her work is the completeness of vision. She manages to integrate the visual with the physical; the emotional world is present. You should not miss the chance to see her work. It's a good show.

CA: I have dance notes about Provincial Essays if anyone is interested. To follow up from what Claudia said, one thing Lola has talked about and is important in her work is a German word, gesamtkunstwerk, which means the total work. Just as Bernard and Caroline and Alison have been talking about, every single minute detail and facet of the work is something that has meaning – there are no mistakes. There is no randomness in Lola's work at all. It's very pristine, it's very highly crafted and expressionistic at times. So that's used to describe her work too. Many things filter into her creative life and her creative output and one thing that I notice, because I've been friends with Lola for a long time, is always the sense of place, whether it's Vancouver or it's the cities or it's Volio with that video-blue sky. There's always a sense of place that puts her work into a conversation with the world. That's a beautiful thing to see.

We have time for a few questions.

Q: Alison, you talked about coming into the work as a remount. It sounds like with Lola there's a lot of different movement that is really intricate so I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how you approach that.

AD: How I approached learning it or going into the piece?

Q: Well, there was all this research that everyone had access to during the creative process. So how do you, for yourself, go further with the work, being absent from that?

AD: The main thing is to try and own it. I've had to trust that people on the outside will tell me if I'm going too far or if I'm not interpreting it right, and that's an experience I've had in remounts of other works. If you go into it timid and unsure that is going to read really strongly – no matter how physically good you are – if you are not sure what you are doing with your expression, with the outer space of your dancing. It's kind of an inner trust thing, and I've been banking on that. I've just gone for it. I've just jumped in and I've been banking on Lola, and now Susan Elliott, to tell me if I'm not interpreting it well enough and I think I'm doing pretty well because I haven't had any notes that are like, “What the hell are you doing?” It's confidence but also there are certain movements that just don't connect. So I've gone to people and asked, “Where did that come from?” Because it might be just an image, but now I can take that image and interpret it. Also, watching the other dancers is valuable, especially for the group parts. What's their sensibility? What is their sense of it?

I sense a lot of energy from people; something I learned really strongly at Dancemakers was how to work in a group. It's not all about you, it's about the whole group and I think that's a big thing. So right away I look to see, what are they all doing? And if they're doing different things, then I ask questions. So just asking questions and then not being afraid to try things. Especially in solo work. We all have solos and I had to go for it with the solo because solos are more in-depth, one-on-one; I've had to make some decisions and hope people on the outside will tell me.

CF: It was fascinating for me, watching Allie take on that solo, watching Lola work with Allie on that solo and making shifts and changes quite happily to the choreography, the flow of the choreography, changing movements. That was really fascinating to me because of her specificity, wanting things exactly like this. So you worry, as a dancer, and lo and behold she says, “Well that's not really working is it? What if you try this? How about this? What about that?” and she'll just keep tweaking until a completely different movement emerges. Then she says, “That's it!” As a dancer watching outside you think, “Really?” It's not like the original movement at all, but it has caught whatever the essence was that she wanted. So that's been fascinating, watching that process shift in quite small, little ways, into Ali's solo. It's not Andrea's solo any more. It's Ali's solo.

BS: If you think it's easy to replace a dancer, especially in Lola's work, it's not. It's not a corps de ballet where it's easy to replace someone. It is absolutely not like that. It is a difficult process. So when there's talk about a remount and you can't get the same cast, let's say, you talk about it six months in advance, because this is how Lola thinks about the whole picture and who would be the best person to be a replacement. She considers everything precisely; a dancer may be technically amazing but are they emotionally together: It's a very intense process.

CA: Thank you.

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