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Nine Who Dared

By Wendy Perron

Dance Magazine, 1 November 2012

Charlotte Vincent interviewed by Wendy Perron

I think the more responsibility a company gets, the less women seem to be in charge. It begs the question, Why are women not being supported, or not stepping up to those roles? A lot of it comes down to having children and child care. It’s quite difficult in your mid-30s to make that choice between continuing to grow a company or grow a family.

This is one of the topics that infuses my new work, Motherland. In my own company we take children on tour with us. There are actually two children in the show. We have policies to make it easier for women to come back to work in mid-30s, late ’30s, early ’40s.

I put it in as a budget line to draw attention to it. We bring families over with us from Poland and Costa Rica. But since they are artists I’ve worked with for a long time I am willing to bring them, and invest financial support to allow that to happen. It’s as much a kind of standpoint as anything else.

Aurora Lubos, who has worked with me for 11 or 12 years now, has two children. We will put up her entire family, both when she’s over here in England and on tour.

My business plan for the next three years doesn’t only talk about making work. It talks about mentoring younger, emerging practitioners. It talks about female leadership. We’re going to do a big piece of industry research on that next year. I’m slightly nervous about that because I want to be known as an artist primarily. But as a feminist I’m saying, We need to draw attention to these issues.

To me that image of Aurora [above] is about fertility and how you can be fertile creatively and fertile as a woman. As women it’s too difficult to do both. It’s also about vulnerability, fecundity, and fertility in the broader sense. That image to me is a brighter hope, the hope of having a child that grows up in a different way. It’s also a nod to ecological issues and how we need to start taking responsibility for what we’re doing to our planet—one of which is overpopulating it. That image mashes up all of those contradictions.

Current project: I’m touring the U.K. with Motherland.