Susie Cooper (1949–2024) in memoriam

Looking back after looking forward

In the past, when close friends or colleagues have died, I’ve quickly felt I wanted to write something about them here. With Susie, somehow, it was different. I’m not really sure why. Is it because, when she knew she didn’t have long to live, she asked me to be her executor? Or because I was so close to her that I couldn’t find suitable words to talk about her?  I think it’s more the first. Being an executor for a close friend, I came to realize, is just a continuation of the friendship in another dimension. Until the job was done (which it mostly is now), it hardly seemed as if she had died at all. I felt Susie’s presence in the last 18 months more often and more intensely than ever.  In life, we’d have long chats over coffee or a late lunch, talking until we were all talked out; but that was only every few weeks, or sometimes months. In death, she was with me in some way or other almost every day. Tax returns, cancelling subscriptions, going through everything in her flat until there was nothing left except a windchime and a few coins on the fireplace.  Talking to a mutual friend who’s been involved in helping with the estate right from the start until we could put the last piece of the posthumous jigsaw in place, I found that we had both been lining things up in our minds that for us would symbolize the end:  the final council tax bill; the small refund from the contents insurance company; finding an archival home for her research materials and so on. Until these tasks are done—what Rev. Richard Coles called “sadmin” in The Madness of Grief, you are still always looking ahead to the end of a process, and so the backward glance of an in memoriam feels out of place. 

Susie and music

But now it doesn’t. I’ve already written two short pieces about Susie in my advent calendar from 2005 and 2006, and in passing here. As in those, most of my memories of Susie are somehow music-related. My first introduction to contemporary dance was through her classes (it’s slightly ironic that in more recent years she ended up teaching ballet—brilliantly—rather than contemporary). I remember little about the classes except that she would come to the piano and listen to what I thought I might play for what she was teaching (the falling off a cliff music that I refer to in one of those earlier posts was Ravel’s Jeux d’eau). This was quite different to anything that happens in a ballet class, and as I realize now, formed part of my education as a dance pianist. I never once had a sense in class of working “for” Susie, or even working with, or alongside. It always seemed like serious play, in the way actors can devote themselves earnestly to playful improvisation as a warm-up to rehearsal. Susie was very unlikely to reject any piece of music as “wrong”  for an exercise, she’d always find a way for it to work, or at worst, she might laugh—with you, not at you— if it was ridiculously wrong. Never the stony stare and moral judgement that you get with some ballet teachers if they don’t like what you offer, or don’t get  exactly what they wanted. In relation to that, I often think about Adam Phillips’ reflections on the term satisfaction in his article “On Frustration” in Missing Out. Worth remembering that despite its positive overtones, it’s also what you demand to get in a duel.

Susie’s musical taste was eclectic, and her knowledge vast. She’d sing “Any dream will do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat for an exercise that eludes me now, but whatever it was, the music was a surprise, so different to what was usually requested by other teachers; and because it was a contemporary-ish musical, it had none of the musty veneer of what people sometimes refer to as “plinky plonk ballet music.” The song would bring a naturalness to the movement and to the impetus for it that was quite different to the kind of Minkus polka that bangs the movement into you so urgently you barely register it as music at all. (As eclectic as her tastes were, what Minkus stood for—music for the competition-cum-gala of something like Paquita—was everything she was not about, something she would laugh about without denigrating the tradition). Her PhD thesis focused largely on Norman Morrice’s That is the show, with a score by Luciano Berio. For her choreography classes, she had a mixtape of pieces that she’d get students to listen to. She adored Debussy’s Rêverie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The King and I, Balanchine’s Serenade, Paul Taylor’s Esplanade. We watched Mark Morris’s King Arthur together at the London Coliseum, laughing in our seats at The Cold Song and what Purcell and Morris made of it. The list goes on and on, and I expect everyone who ever studied with Susie will know her favourites, and be able to add to the list.

Susie’s sense of humour

I suppose if anything stands out about Susie, it’s her laugh. I don’t think I ever had a conversation or a class with her when she didn’t give out a huge “HAH!” at something that made her laugh. And once she’d started to find something funny, she could riff on it until she’d say to herself “Come on Susie, stop it!” And then laugh and start all over again. It happened once when I was playing the Valse Lente from Sylvia for an exercise. When the main theme returns, there are trills on the flute, which for some reason she found terribly funny, and thought it sounded like a bird. This turned into something for the dancers to work into the exercise (“see the bird land on your shoulder—hah!” or something like that) and every time the trill came again, it would make her laugh. And so I’d play it with even more attention than it deserved the next time to make her laugh more. 

If she ever looked stern, it was usually as a joke. For example, teaching pointe work, she’d tell students not to put on a pained “I’m on pointe!” face (a mixture of uncalled for seriousness, frozen fear and anxiety). That’s not to say she was just sugary lightness. Students would say uh-oh the neck . . . by which they meant the way that Susie’s neck would perfuse and redden when she would start to get what she called aerated about something. You’d see the neck before she was aware of it, and you knew it was time to take cover and try not engage. But the great thing about Susie is that you could engage—I don’t think I’ve ever argued so loudly and vehemently with anyone else, without it being rancorous or personal. I once told her it was like arguing with a Rottweiler, something that we laughed about ever after. 

Susie’s dedication to students

One of the nicest things you can say about Susie is that she was profoundly, maddeningly irritating when she got on to the subject of her students. When she was in charge of the degree course at the Urdang Academy, she could spend a good two hours effervescing about how wonderful the students were before you could get a word in edgeways, and you’d get the lowdown on all of them, names and specialities, what they’d performed in the school show, what their dissertation was on. Likewise any of her students on the many courses she taught at the RAD, or the choreography course at White Lodge. At Susie’s funeral, there was a ripple of laughter as two former students, independently and without having conferred, said that it had come as something of a humbling surprise, when they saw the tributes pouring in from other people, to realise that her encouragement and enthusiasm had not been limited to them alone. Her commitment to students as individuals was so personal, so intense, that it felt like there could not be room for anyone else, but there always was. Everyone I’ve spoken to about Susie has a story to tell about her life-changing support and encouragement, and indeed, I have one (or rather, many) of my own too, of which this post is just a tiny part. 

In so many ways, Susie was a free spirit, so that it might seem quite surprising that she stayed committed to the RAD in one way and another for nearly forty years. She continued to freelance there after she left to lead the degree programme at Urdang. She bought her flat around the corner from the old RAD building in Vicarage Crescent in 1985, a year before I met her, and never moved. There was something almost monastic to her steadfastness that reminds me of the Benedictine vow of stability, meaning a commitment to the same community over the lifespan, but that stability was a base from which she never stopped doing new things in her own style. Although she could be harshly critical of the RAD when she needed to be, she was not a quitter or a door-slammer: she found her own way to be an inspiring, innovative teacher and colleague within her vocation, noting dismissively of external gripers that the RAD was just “one of those places people love to hate.” 

Susie talking about her years at Rambert

Perhaps it’s this ingenious mixture of stable commitment and free spirit that defines Susie the most for me, a madly spiritual, esoteric, flower-power, crystal-collecting dance enthusiast who was equally one of the most grounded people I have ever met, bulk-buying subscribe-and-save cat litter, or ordering weekly vegetable boxes from Riverford, and filing her receipts for her tax return assiduously until a month before she became ill. Whether you knew her or not, I think you’ll love to hear her talking about her time with Rambert in this archive interview from Rambert Voices which I only discovered recently.