Dancers Sarah Golding and Yukiko Masui celebrate the joy and innocence of making up dances to popular music. Working with music artists, they have combined dynamic contemporary styles to create a slick and playful performance. This will delight and is sure to inspire young audiences to get creative with movement themselves!
1pm & 3pm (15 mins) in Queen’s Square.
Commissioned by The Place, London
Click here to watch the trailer
Find out more about SAY (Sarah and Yuki) here.
Images by Jessica Hand and Sabrina Carter
Can you tell us more about SAY? Who are you, how did you meet?
We are Sarah Golding and Yukiko Masui. We both trained at Trinity Laban but in different years. We knew each other from training, through friends and bumping into each other in auditions sometimes. However, we never actually danced together until 2019 for Cathy Waller Dance Company.
During the rehearsals, we realised that we like bouncing around together. One day we stayed after the rehearsal and made up a dance routine to a cool tune and just had fun. For both of us that’s how we used to dance when we were kids, going to the playgrounds and choreographing to our favourite songs with our friends.
And both of us have passion for music and we connected over that so we decided to make some dance and cut shapes together with exciting music.
What made you decide to do the work you do and pursue this career?
I think for both of us, we had a similar journey into contemporary dance. We always had a love for movement and music. Being able to physically express feelings and do it alongside a piece of music that excites us keeps us enthusiastic about what we do. Having a career in dance isn’t easy, trying to juggle being creative for yourselves, being creative for others, being a choreographer, being a dancer, keeping your body fit to do the job it needs to do and having a life outside of the studio is a lot to work around so it was really important for us to create something we genuinely feel excited about sharing with others.
Can you tell us more about the album? What can the audience expect to see?
During the album, we are going to be dancing to music from exciting musicians and singer songwriters.
Each track has a different movement idea and atmosphere. So there is a track for everyone within the album.
What’s the best thing about performing outside?
The best thing about performing outside is the potential to allow our work to reach audiences that wouldn’t usually go to a theatre setting.
We are really passionate about the brilliant music artists we have collaborated with on the album and hope that people will hear the music and will want to come and check out what we are doing.
The theme of the event in Crawley is ‘Stories of Strength’ – can you tell us about a time when you were brave, a time where you showed determination, persistence or resilience or a time where you made it against all the odds?
Generally, as dancers we are constantly showing determination.
Going to auditions and being asked to perform knowing there 1 or 2 spots available in a room of 30 dancers constantly means the odds are extremely low. Having the strength to be cut from an audition and to be able to get on with your day without taking it to heart takes a great level of resilience.
During the Covid, we were supposed to have a lot of opportunities to perform our work but everything got cancelled which was devastating as we’ve been working on this idea for a while and put a lot of effort in. Especially collaborating with so many amazing musicians who put trust in our work to choreograph to their music, we really wanted to showcase our work and the amazing music.
With all the disappointment, we kept going and this year hopefully we can share a snippet of the album outdoors with people.
How do you find strength through dance and in your practice?
Although we have our company, SAY, which we both put a lot of time and energy into; we are both independent choreographers and performers working on different projects too.
Being able to come into the studio together, switch off our admin brains and know that we are able to move and create together with synergy and just have a great time, gives us the strength to deal with whatever is going on outside of the studio that might be challenging
How does the strength of your friendship influence your work together?
Our work is literally about our friendship and how we bounce off of each other enjoying the music through dance. When we were thinking about the theme of the album, and a thread of this show for a while we weren’t sure what it was going to be about, until we had an online sharing last year that the theme is us, our friendship.
The skool edition is aimed at young people, what do you hope young audiences take away from the album?
We hope that young people who see the album: skool edition recognise and can relate to the joy and innocence that can still be maintained whilst ‘adulting’. We hope to inspire young people to have an interest in contemporary dance and creativity and to go and make up their own dances in their own playgrounds.
the album: skool edition by SAY commissioned and co-produced by The Place (@theplacelondon @s_a_y_dance)
Images by: Sabrina Carter and Jess Hand
