Fate helps company stage carriage return

Kam-ri's co-founders are dancer Kereiva McCormick and Grid Iron's Ben Harrison - but you could add an important third hand: Fate. For as McCormick sketches in the back ground to The Typist, a pattern soon emerges of her being in the right place, at the right time. Initially that was London, where an unintended encounter with some very elderly Spaniards led to their sharing poignant reminiscences from the true stories that now come on-stage in the fabric of The Typist.

This dwindling number of octogenarians had once been tagged as "los ninos" - children who were evacuated, in their thousands, from war-torn Spain to the UK in 1937. "Everyone reassured them as they left," says McCormick. "It would only be for three months. But no-one knew what the future held. It was twenty years before any of the children made that journey home. What they found was a Spain under Franco, and homes, lives,all destroyed. Their fate was to belong nowhere. They would tell me, when I go back, they say 'oh, you're British!' but here they say 'you're a Spaniard'. And that's where our performance comes from. From these feelings of displacement. Esperanza, our character, has a foot in both worlds. Which one is she? Is she both? Is it possible to be both?"

McCormick herself has lived a little across countries and cultures. She has Irish roots, had a childhood time in Spain - where she took her first steps in flamenco - before she arrived in London and plunged into the dance training that allied ballet and contemporary styles to the flamenco she now draws upon in The Typist. Ideas for the piece were germinating back in 2012, but the concept gathered momentum when she joined forces with Harrison to form Kam-Ri last year. They'd worked together on Grid Iron's Roam in 2006, now Harrison is in the director's chair pulling together the film images, the voice-overs and on-stage elements of music, dance and song that tell of a life fated to be lived as an outsider, a life where the present is always haunted by the past.

The need to honour that past has found McCormick and Harrison determined to evoke it with as much authenticity as possible: hence the involvement of acclaimed artists like flamenco dancer Javier Latorre (a soloist with the Ballet Nacional d'Espana) and celebrated pianist Pablo Suarez from Madrid.

"I got an e-mail from Kereiva," says a husky-toned Suarez. "It said 'hey, Pablo! I have a project...' Then she sent me a synopsis, we have e-mails and phone chats and I say 'I love this project - count me in!'" He explains that what happens on-stage has to have a sense of the past. He doesn't mean nostalgia. He means music, song, that strike chords of understanding even in audiences who know nothing of 'los ninos' but can recognise heartache and hope when they hear it.

In the same way, when Fate introduced McCormick to Alexei Sayle at a comedy gig in London, he needed no persuasion whatsoever to come on board as the narrative voice. "It turns out there were family connections." says McCormick. "Alexei's father was a rail way worker, and a strong trade union man who was very involved with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War - he provided travel passes for the Irish International Brigadists to travel over to the UK and down to Spain. Alexei remembers, as a child, meeting some of the old Brigadists - the last of them died, last year but some of their sons and daughters are coming to our opening night."

As McCormick recounts the mesh of coincidences and connections that have melded into the making of The Typist, her own truth joins up those dots when she says "as an artist, you are a conduit for the emotions, the experiences, of other people. Those children are all very old now, their stories are dying away with them - we need to hear those stories, because they still keep happening all over the world. We can't just forget all those who are like The Typist."

The Typist is at The Arches, Glasgow (Thursday to Saturday).

Tour details at www.kam-ri.com