“…this guy in the audience was leaping out of his chair. I clocked him and I was like, “I need to speak to him.”

Movie references, TV fandoms, podcast communities; how popular media influences the work of Choreographer Jamaal Burkmar.

It’s the end of a long day of rehearsing for Fertile Ground dance’s latest Double Bill Play, Pause, Repeat, and I’ve been working with choreographer Jamaal Burkmar (@extendedplaydance on Instagram), on his new piece How to Decouple in an Ethical Way. The piece uses audio from reality TV show Couples Therapy, which follows real couples from the US who are going through real therapy, one of which is figuring out – you guessed it – how to ‘decouple’ in an ethical way.

Jamaal describes himself as TV-obsessed, and I’m curious about how this obsession feeds into his creative process, and why the general public’s ability to focus on and be challenged by TV and popular media doesn’t seem to translate into Theatre, and especially not into Contemporary Dance.

I think we've got enough brain power. Good to go?

Yeah, let's do it.

Could you start by just talking about how you've used TV and Popular Media in your work so far?

I think when I think about popular media, and how we’ve used it, I think I generally refer back to it quite a lot. Examples will pop up, and I'll talk about them with the dancers, and we’ll just reflect on it, so overall it's quite a subtle, silent part of the process.

And then over the years, I think I've gotten more brazen with it. With Donuts, we were looking at popular culture, but the riskiest that I got with it was that as the audience is coming in, they had the sounds of sitcoms playing instead of opening music. Which was fun, because you'd watch people come in and then go “Oh, this is Brooklyn Nine Nine” or “this is Scrubs” or something. But then it's not until now, with How to Build and Universe and actually also with [How to Decouple in an Ethical Way] that I've made that a bit more overt by actually putting it in the work. With those references, the most obvious ones are the TV ones, but there's quite a lot of literature too. How to Build a Universe has quite a lot of well-known passages from books, as sound or as someone reading them, or even like the audio book itself is in the work. More and more I'm like, “Yeah, let's just put it all in.”

So this piece (How to Decouple in an Ethical Way) obviously is a great example of it. This is just, well it is a TV show; it's a reality TV show, even worse. I feel like the far end is that one day, there's gonna be a scene from Love Island in a dance… But yeah, I think it began as just a thing that would be in the studio, but wouldn't make it to the work, and now, it's part of all of it.

Was that a conscious choice that you've made, to put it more in the work?

I think I'm at a point where I'm trying to source the people that get it. I was raised as a child of the internet, I think is maybe the best way to describe it, but I'm also an obsessive TV person. I've always been obsessed with film and TV. And I think that what I'm aware of especially, and it sounds really silly, but whenever a new movie trailer comes out, I'm always so early to watch it. And seeing the comments, I know that there's this community of people out there that are also like me - really obsessed with film and TV.

Do you know the show Community? I'm such a strong Community fan, and I know that that fandom is also quite rabid, like, we're quite obsessed about it. So I know that if I make something and that's in there, and there's somebody in the audience who knows it, they know something about the work that other people don't. Because they know something about what it means to be part of that fandom.

I remember we used a podcast called Tiger Belly, it was so mad- I was using it for a while and people were responding to it like “Oh, that's a funny little clip”. And then one guy messaged me the words “Nosotros Papaya”, because that's a line that the guys in the podcast say all the time. And then me and him had this really long conversation about the value of that scene in the show, and he had all of this insight that loads of people won't have. I think that maybe it feels quite niche in the dance world, but actually in terms of the World world, these sources are really well-known. I think I'm just trying to more and more blur both of those worlds, and just try to keep finding those people.

We did a show in Gloucester the other day, and there's a scene in the piece where there's a comedian talking and this guy came up to me afterwards, and he went ”I'm a big Patrice O'Neal fan” And he was like, “Have you watched The Green Room?”, and I have watched it, it's a show about comedians talking in a green room after a show but with an audience. And we just connected on that, and then we connected on why that matters to the show. So, I don't know, I feel like it's gonna take me 20-30 years, but I'm just trying to put those things in to keep highlighting them to people.

They seem really far apart, which is interesting, because it seems like there's this really passionate fan base when it comes to film and TV, that doesn't trickle over into theatre. I'm surprised that I put in Community, and there's two hundred people in the room and maybe like, three or four know it as a reference. Millions of people watch that show, like where are they? Where are they? But they're all just at home watching more TV shows.

But I guess it's a way to build new audiences, potentially, if people know that that's in the work?

Yeah, even simple things like someone said to me recently,