Jonathan Goddard: dancer

Dancer, choreographer, teacher – Jonathan Goddard shifts from role to role in his eclectic stage career. He was the movement director on the National Theatre’s Man and Superman, and is currently in rehearsals as a dancer for legendary choreographer Robert Cohan’s 90th birthday celebration at the Place

What is dancing for Robert Cohan like?

It’s great – I worked with him a while ago for his 80th birthday, so it’s quite nice to come back and then work together for his 90th birthday. It’s a work for four people, and all four of us have had slightly different routes to where we’ve got to. So he’s pulled out the differences in our training and our interpretations and really worked with that. He has an amazing perspective because he’s 89 at the moment, so his memory just stretches back all this way through dance history.

And how does your movement direction impact Man and Superman?

The amount of text that Ralph Fiennes has to remember and speak over the course of the evening is a herculean task for him. And he’s incredible at it and wears it very lightly. But for me as the movement director, it’s about finding where the balance of movement sits so that it doesn’t upend the text. If there’s not movement and not visual elements, it becomes very difficult to listen to and understand. And just the right amount of support for the text just pings it to life, and it’s really understandable and its vibrant, and it’s there.

How involved were you in the rehearsal process?

When I’m movement directing, I try to be in as much as I can, because I find it helpful to have an integrated process. Sometimes you see movement that feels a bit tacked on, or that the movement director has turned up for three days at the end. If you don’t notice the movement then I’ve been successful.

Does your history as a dance instructor help you as a movement director?

Actors have such varied training. There are different ways of training in dance but all have a certain formality to them. But with actors, they really can come from any background. So I feel as a movement director I’m always trying to find the right strategy to open up the movement and start to work with it with an actor. So that training – of going into schools and working with all sorts of kids, young adults and even adults – has really helped.

You tutor students at the Architectural Association – what does that involve?

Architects are extremely concerned with spacial design. So the body, and how the body relates to form and function, is incredibly important to them. And on this course we create events that blur the boundaries between architecture and movement. And the product could be anything – a performance or a dinner – or it could be a physical object. So it’s quite out there, but for me it’s an amazing way of thinking and working.

How does putting dance and building design together work?

Very well. It was quite a joyful moment to realise that, actually, architects have very similar ways of thinking about movement and structures, as dancers and choreographers do. A building has to stand up, and a dancer has to practise steps technically to make them look effortless.

Robert Cohan at 90 will be staged at the Place, London on March 27
Man and Superman review