ACCLAIMED contemporary dance company Shobana Jeyasingh Dance are coming to Truro to perform We Caliban at Hall for Cornwall on Friday, March 13.

We Caliban blends outstanding dance with powerful storytelling, inspired by Shakespeare’s brilliant last play, The Tempest. It is a tale about power lost and regained, written as Europe was taking its first step towards colonialism.

We Caliban sees this story through the eyes of Caliban, a minor character in the play whose life is changed forever when the power games of distant lands and unknown peoples are played out in his own remote island, making him a “monstrous” servant to a new master and his young daughter.

Jeyasingh’s bold and imaginative choreography is partnered by visually stunning projections by Will Duke and captivating music by Thierry Pécou. Lighting design is by Floriaan Ganzevoort with set and costume design by Mayou Trikerioti and dramaturgy by Uzma Hameed.

The Voice talked to award-winning choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh ahead of the performance.

We’ve seen We Caliban described as an “inventive, sideways” look at The Tempest. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

We are not showing the whole of The Tempest, fantastic play though it is. We are looking at it from the perspective of one of the characters - Caliban. So our choice of scenes and how they are staged spring from that. We stage scenes that are alluded to but not actually seen in the original.

For example, one of the pivotal scenes is where Prospero, self-appointed ‘King of the Island’, accuses Caliban of overstepping the boundary in his relationship with his daughter Miranda.

This incident is only reported but not staged in The Tempest. We Caliban imagines what might have actually happened. Similarly, Miranda mentions that she taught Caliban her language. We imagine and stage this - was Caliban the babbling idiot that Miranda describes or was it simply that he had a language of his own that she did not understand?

The son of a sea witch, Caliban is ‘half-human, half-monster’. Why did you choose him as the character to tell your story through?

In The Tempest he is described as half human and has been depicted as such traditionally.

The travel literature of Shakespeare’s time often described non-Europeans in such exotic terms. Columbus’s diary describes one-eyed men for example. Often such people were captured and taken to Europe to be exhibited in fairs. In The Tempest one of the sailors who meets Caliban has the very same idea.

I believe that Caliban seemed monstrous to eyes not used to him. Shakespeare gives Caliban some of the most poetic lines in the play so his sympathies are nuanced and progressive for his age. He stages the argument rather than the prejudice.

Caliban interested me as an unusual non-European on the Elizabethan stage and is symbolic of the trajectory of colonised people down the years.

What are the challenges of telling a well-known story through dance and movement?

People come to a well-known story with memories of productions they have seen or, in the case of Shakespeare, their studies at school or university. Shakespeare is a national icon and the characters he created have become part of the national memory.

Telling the same story from a different angle (as Tom Stoppard did with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from the original Hamlet) is both exciting and fraught with danger. The challenges become greater when there is the transition from language to movement. They are both strong and powerful mediums, both with very different ways of creating a narrative.

We use specially commissioned music, recorded text and projected visuals to tell our story with, we hope, credibility and power.

You studied Shakespeare when you first came to the UK. Have you always had it in mind to create a dance work inspired by one of his plays?

Not really!

My early dance works tended to be more abstract and relied mainly on the dancing body and its composition in space and sound to create a story. Dance has the power to be beautifully poetic and allusive in its own right.

In the last ten years I have been drawn more to linear narratives where text and visuals have played a greater role in communicating a sense of historical space and chronological time.

I was increasingly aware of how the critical discourse around the Tempest had changed over the time when I read it as a student and it seemed ripe for a dance retelling from a different perspective.

How do you want the audience to feel when they come out of the theatre after the show?

If the audience are new to The Tempest, it would be great if they then bought a copy and began to read it. If it was one of their favourite plays, I would ask for their patience!

The brilliant thing about any audience is that they add new and unexpected perspectives of their own and I am really looking forward to that. In any case I hope they enjoy the power of dance to move and stimulate.