A graduate of the prestigious Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Allan Hutson went on to work with a variety of companies, including Phoenix, and is a co-founder of Oxford-based Gelede Dance Company.

His dancing days are over now, and for the past two years, after a long professional association with the Pegasus, he has been the theatre’s dance co-ordinator. His particular interest is the Youth Dance Company. Last year he created the dances for the very successful After Gilgamesh production.

“My passion is working with young people in whatever field of dance they want to do, and expressing myself through the art of dance.

“The thing I really enjoyed when I was performing was learning new styles and learning new things, and trying to put something towards that, so I tried to experience as many types of company as possible, and as many different types of projects as possible.

“That’s the reason I started to do things like mixing drama and dance. As dance co-ordinator at the Pegasus I oversee what happens within dance here, so I look at all the workshops going on with young people, and supervise tutors. I also liaise with the professional dance companies who appear here, but mainly I work with the young people and the tutors, to create a better working atmosphere.”

Allan’s new piece, Stuck, delves into the mental states of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, and consists of a series of episodes in which the dancers consider the emotions of people suffering from these two conditions.

They examine how these feelings might affect their dance. Allan is the choreographer, but the members of the dance company have contributed a large amount too.

“It’s a mixture between choreography and stuff devised by the young people.

“We’ve done a bit of differentiation, and I’ve asked the people who’ve been in the company slightly longer to come up with concepts of their own, and to put over their own ideas of what agoraphobia is about, and what claustrophobia is about, and then they would create that on the dancers.

“We started off by asking the dancers questions about their own feelings about these conditions. Then we started to run short snippets of workshops, but not exactly based on these themes. For example, with claustrophobia we started with a mass of people together, and then we tried to get someone to try to snake their way out, while at the same time the group was trying to keep them in.

“So someone was always trying to push their way out of the group, but always being dragged back into it, and we built it from there. We kept on pushing and developing, and the more we developed, the more things happened, the more they started to think about what these themes are really about.

“It’s very easy to say ‘oh claustrophobia is just about the fear of enclosed spaces’, but how do you feel inside when you are enclosed in a space? What emotions are coming out of you when these things happen? With agoraphobia we’ve done lots of different tasks in the sense of trying to get them to come back, pulling them back, and having this bit of space.

“Then all of a sudden they can’t get out of this space, and then we think about their emotions and their ideas; their thought process completely changes, and you feel from their bodies how they feel about doing these things, which is very interesting to see.”

I wonder how all this translates to the stage; whether the two conditions are portrayed separately or blended together.

“Basically we are doing it from a reverse point of view, so we go from the end, right through to the beginning; how things happen. We are having aspects of agoraphobia coming through.”

Allan adds that the company has certain people who are focusing on one of these conditions. At the beginning, people, have already gone through some kind of therapy and some kind of relief, and are starting to trust people again, starting to move forward.

“So at this point they’re happy, with their friends beside them and all kinds of support steps are coming on,” adds Allan.

“Then it starts to dwindle down. The second part is where people have suddenly reverted back into their problem, so they’re kind of distant in a sense, and then they return into the person who is agoraphobic.

“At the moment the young people have gone all the way through with agoraphobia, and now they’re focusing on claustrophobia, which is kind of linked in.

“There’s no definite line between trying to escape something, and being stuck in a confined space. This is the ambitious bit, and we’ve blended it in, so the beginning is more or less the same as the end. It’s like a circle”.

Stuck is performed by 18 dancers, aged between 14 and 22, and you can see the results of their collaboration next Wednesday.