Graeme Miller's take on country dancing has more to do with concrete than privet hedges

Guardian

My father spent a significant part of his childhood there, yet it's been transformed into an invented place, a backdrop for the Hovis ad.

Yet I do enjoy a dance. Like plenty of others, I am too old to rave and too young to line-dance, so you will see us on dull winter evenings whirling our toddlers and babies around our living rooms to the sound of Dusty Springfield, Abba and Fat Boy Slim. But it is a lonely, sad kind of dance, and I would like to be part of a much greater pattern, forming part of the knot in an unbroken chain of human bodies.

Which is where Graeme Miller comes in. He understands both this yearning and these lingering doubts. He has long been a cartographer of the British soul. In the early eighties he and his colleagues at the Impact Theatre Cooperative forged an aesthetic that still influences performance practice.

Ten years ago, his spellbinding show A Girl Skipping used sound and movement to explore the psyche of post-war Britain, charting social relationships through the rituals of the playground.

With The Desire Paths, a 1993 production named after the term used to describe routes that people choose to take across open spaces rather than the concrete ones provided by town planners, and Listening Ground, Lost Acres, a 20-square-mile landscape art installation, Miller has charted what he calls 'our own private British hell'.

Now, he believes, it is time to look at dance. But which dance? By the 17th century, English peasant dances had become all the rage at court - prettified and softened, like Marie Antoinette in France dressing up as a milkmaid. You can see country dance as a metaphor for a much wider English culture - something not disappeared but dissipated.

'We don't live under a common sky. We live in a complex society and we need to make up our own rituals for it,' says Miller, whose new show Country Dance opens at the Place next week.

At the Urban Hymns symposium last year he spoke eloquently of the need to join the pagan misrule of the jig: 'I want to be 70 years old and waist-deep in my own culture, even if it is completely invented. I mean, who invented the Catholic Mass? Someone did, and that has worked pretty well for some years now. Skas, shimmies, reels and jigs, tap and the lost juba dance are as made up as funeral rites, wedding services and soccer rules - good ideas agreed upon, then sort of passed on. I am 42 and I want to wallow before I get too old. Come on - someone just make something up.'

So Miller has taken the initiative and made it up for himself, drawing on fragments to reinvent English country dance, in as irreverent a manner as possible.

As a child in the late fifties and early sixties, he caught the tail end of Cecil Sharp's folk revival, dancing round the maypole and doing the gallop in Carshalton Beeches, a place he describes as 'the rain- forest of suburbia'. He celebrated his wedding with a ceilidh.

Turned out of their home by the building of the M11 link road in east London, he and his family now live on a Hackney housing estate, itself a melting pot for refugees, the old, poor and the newly arrived. Not what the unity of radical ramblers, socialists and Cecil Sharp probably had in mind for the English folk revival.

But it is out of the sound map of these streets that Miller is fashioning his dance. 'It doesn't spread far beyond these few streets and soon disperses in the suburbs and the bland counties beyond, but it almost catches fire,' he believes. 'It almost begins It could be the beginning of a made-up country dance for New England.'

But can the skeleton really be revived and reclothed in the tattered fragments of modern inner-city life? Miller remembers an old snippet of film that showed an ordinary Italian housewife dancing the tarantella - the hallucinatory dance based on the idea of the dancer being bitten by a venomous spider.

'There she was, thrashing about in an ecstatic trance, entirely exposed both physically and emotionally. All around her, watching and catching her when she endangered herself, were her friends and neighbours. The next day she would be back at the shops and the marketplace. Nobody would blink an eyelid.'

Miller sees such moments of 'ordinary divine madness' as a sign of a healthy culture, an emotional openness. 'A lot of English culture is about installing security lights and watching Crimewatch. It is about fear and retrenchment. It is time for us to take the poison. Poison and antidote are close cousins, part of the dynamic of a culture.

I see Britain as an antidote culture - that is why it is big on privacy, stasis. Cautious. Privet hedging expects, it fears poison. It craves poison. It needs the poison to go a bit mad'

And where will this poison be found? Only in the cultural mix of the inner cities. 'Hidden in the crates of colonial import is the cultural tarantula that might just release this sad-sack island, that might just shake it into life.'

Miller admits it is too soon to expect to see country dancing on the streets of Hackney, but his re-invention of the form will certainly be taking the streets and housing estates of Hackney into the Place.

'It is a question of abandoning tradition and grabbing what is in front of you. It is a kind of piracy. Country dance will be the whole country, its chip shops and mobile phones and TV transmitters held up in a kind of kaleidoscope. It would be great to have English country dancing done to breakbeat and garage.'

He pauses and grins: 'The result is going to be alarmingly quirky - the head of a donkey sewn on to the body of a dog, a Frankenstein built of robbed parts.'

Traditionally, English country dancing relies on a 'caller' who stands on the sidelines and shouts instructions. Miller sees more to the job. For him, the caller is the shouter or agitator on the street corner, provoking passers-by to action, anger and madness, provoking them to join in the dance. It is a role that he appears to be relishing.