Biography

There are so many things that are painful but also absurd. I have been to funerals where people collapse into laughter. It's their way of handling things. All really good comics talk about things that are painful: your parents, the self-hatred that creeps into all of us. How fragile, how magic it all is, and also ridiculous, cruel and hilarious. This piece, more than any other I've done, is a dance between these two places.

[ on 'Highgate', a ballet set in the famous 19th century London cemetery]. I knew the work needed to be authentic, and my job was to let the dancers find the true voices and bodies of their characters... Accurate Victorian garb, except that we don't wear corsets. I tried on a Victorian corset and it was unbelievably uncomfortable. We needed to know how heavy they were, how the skirts will move, what it's like to dance in hats, long sleeves, high collars.

[on choreographing the reality of death] There's an edge where you can go dark, but you always need a little lifeline to the funny. I like to dance around that line. I find it satisfying in a difficult and delicious way to deal with the hardest things in life. The importance of existence becomes so palpable when you deal with the thing we all have to deal with. It's the vulnerability of us all, and the fragility.

I'm not a religious person at all. I was really interested in the idea of the ritualized body, and what we do to our body, and the polarity of hating the body in religion, and using the body as a vehicle towards salvation or faith or enlightenment.

[on her pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and its influence on her dance work 'Porno Death Cult'] I started to focus on the statues and, of course, there's always a big Jesus. And this Jesus, he's almost naked and - for some reason - as I walked, the statue became more attractive. The churches were largely populated with women. And not only does Jesus get more attractive - that was the pornography thing that popped into my mind - but it also got bloodier. It gets gory of course. That's where the title came from. It just popped into my mind like, 'Oh, a bit of a porno death cult'. And it stuck.