WHEN the Glasgow-born dance artist Christine Devaney eventually set herself up as a dance-theatre maker – founding her company Curious Seed in Edinburgh in 2005 – choreographic signature was not her exclusive aim. 

Instead, Curious Seed’s methods have involved the gathering of several trusted peers with specialist skills and multi-media interests, to embark on experimentation, in the ethos of “nobody knows.” Christine then finds (in solitude) that some arising nugget of an idea “won’t go away”. A Curious Seed work is then catalysed when she describes said nugget. 

I put it to her that her team will have been ductile in anticipation of her intuition. This she amusedly accepts.

Agile leadership and the committedly earned warmth of an entourage are factors that sing out in all of Cristine Devaney’s recent work, this being especially true of her Field – Something For The Future Now; an ambitious outdoor event for a multi-generational cast mounted on Holyrood Park’s marching green. In this immediately post-Covid project, a manifestation of community emerged as vital to its audience and necessary to all involved. 

I ask her if it were ever thus.

We touch on her training in London and her skilled prominence as a performer through the 1990s, with physical theatre troupes like Quarantine, Frantic Assembly and V-Tol. I recall her riveting credibility as the central figure in Unicorn Theatre’s piece Red Red Shoes; a traumatically lucid tale of the Balkan conflict as portrayed through the experience of a young girl. 

We also pinpoint how the young bucks of the physical theatre genre could fall over each other in their eagerness to assert their work’s identity and worth — often verbally trashing equivalent dance practitioners in the process. Yes, there were edges and yes, there were elbows! 

We agree that the London-based sector impelled accomplishment without proffering much fellowship or security. 

Returning to work in Scotland in the early 2000s and experiencing significant disorientation, Devaney “stopped dancing and stopped everything” for a time. She nearly became another Pilates instructor. Fortunately, an amended way forward came to being. 

She explains: “I had been an effective right hand-collaborator with the kind of choreographers and directors who engaged performers to devise much of their own material.” When she adds: “I realised I could apply my devising abilities toward an act of shaping a bigger picture” I comprehend the significance of a driving-seat in this maturing artist’s ongoing navigation toward self-determination, wellbeing, and effective functioning. 

Christine’s recently completed medium-term residency at The Den – a pop-up venue in a vacated retail space in the Ocean Terminal mall in Leith – has, by design, nurtured an informal cavalcade of free professional practice, undergone independently of a funded remit or obligation. Unflaggingly, Devaney has opened doors to ears-to-the-ground dance improvisers, visual artists, and musicians, for constructive jamming amid an eclectic programme of curated gatherings and specialist brainstorming. 

She likes it when I observe that her current physicality is informed and diversified by this connection with a warm swathe of souls. 

Ivory tower procedures – where perhaps too many arising nuggets “won’t go away” – can freight all manner of alarm, but in a culturally healthier scenario, as the co-maker of the exemplary We Are All Just Little Creatures (2019: with Lung Ha Theatre Company) Devaney is seen to generate a collective salve, via myriad acts of discovery and challenge, patterned in the liveliness of a neuro-diverse mixed-ability cast and diffusing out toward a fresh audience contingent. 

Clearly replenished by such means, and in the circular way of things, teaser footage of Christine’s 2021 inter-disciplinary solo work And The Birds Did Sing — now being re-staged by Curious Seed for a Scottish tour — evidences a layered and connected performer lyrically vocalising and seamlessly shifting to conjure facets of a cherished character. 

In keeping with the Devaney embrace, 2024 performances of And The Birds Did Sing will be framed by Staying On, a lively featuring of artists, musicians and storytellers, locally devised for the given venue, making for a well-rounded night out and a real gathering.

And The Birds Did Sing tours from March 19 - April 16. For more information see: curious-seed.com