Reuniting with producer Tala Lee-Turton, the award-winning choreographer brings this ambitious adaptation of Hannah Peel’s acclaimed work, Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia. Guillermo Nazara chats with the creative about the show’s development and how its transfixing nature will resonate across generations.
How does it feel to be opening this ambitious new take on Hannah Peel’s acclaimed piece?
It’s incredibly exciting and a little surreal. PIA is my debut full-length production, so it feels like a particularly special moment. It’s been a very serendipitous journey, from a personal creative impulse to a much larger production involving so many wonderful artists. I’m enormously grateful to everyone who has helped bring it to life.
How did the idea for this project come about?
A few years ago, I’d just come out of my first silent retreat, where I’d decided to fully commit to choreography. Arriving at Euston Station, rather overwhelmed by the London cacophony, I put on my headphones and a playlist I was listening to delivered Hannah Peel’s Goodbye Earth entirely by chance! I really responded to the music, and it sparked a creative impulse that led to a research residency and a short film. I shared the film with Hannah, which started a conversation about developing the work further. I then invited creative producer Tala Lee Turton to join me, with whom I’d worked previously on another project, and gradually PIA began to take shape.
What has the process of setting movement to Peel’s score been like?
Hannah’s music is extraordinary. It has an enormous emotional range, moving between intimacy and vast, otherworldly landscapes. I’ve been interested in responding to its textures, rhythms, and emotional undercurrents. The brass roots us in Barnsley and its mining heritage, bringing a grounded strength to the physicality. You can hear almost every breath in the brass, giving it something deeply human and tender. In contrast, the thrilling synth world invites agility, fluidity, and a sense of weightlessness.
The piece is rooted in both fantasy and existentialism. How will those themes translate into dance?
Dance can express things that words sometimes can’t. We follow three generations of the same woman through a labyrinth of memory, reality, and imagination. I’m fascinated by the almost invisible veil between worlds, where memories coexist, overlap, distort, and slip into the present. Sometimes I connect more powerfully to the feeling of a narrative through abstraction rather than a linear story. There’s a dive into mystery and the unknown, creating an exchange with the audience, who bring their own experiences and find their own stories and meaning within the work.
What other techniques have you employed and what are the reasons behind them?
We’ve drawn on physical theatre, character work, improvisation and gesture alongside a contemporary ballet vocabulary. Archival footage, photographs of Barnsley and sound design have informed an almost documentary approach to creating movement, grounding the work in real people, places, and histories. Gesture has been particularly important, with small, recognisable actions becoming fragments of memory as they’re repeated, transformed or passed between performers. We’ve also explored cinematic techniques and shifts in perspective, allowing us to experience the world through Pia’s consciousness.
Are there any highlights in the show that you’d like to flag?
The production moves between wonderfully contrasting worlds, from the Barnsley mines to a rather eccentric science-fiction universe, to Cassiopeia. I’m so grateful to have an extraordinary multigenerational cast of dancers, bringing such richness, individuality, and humanity to the work. Absurdity coexists with tenderness, and macabre humour slips between moments of intimate vulnerability. And having Hannah’s extraordinary score performed live by a 17-piece brass ensemble is incredibly special.
Why come see PIA?
I hope audiences find something of themselves in PIA. Although rooted in Barnsley, her story explores universal experiences of love, grief, belonging, and ageing, and our extraordinary human capacity for strength, wonder and awe.
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PIA will play at the Barbican’s Milton Court Concert Hall on 23 October. Tickets are available on the following link.