‘Look at the camera as if it’s your enemy’: Shobana Jeyasingh’s desert dance among Hollywood ghosts

Day one: 'My obsession has brought me here' It is a chilly 6am start in late May in the Almerían desert and everyone heads to the catering truck like homing pigeons. It is difficult not to feel like intruders in this fragmented and erratic landscape dotted with dark towering rocks, dry sandy gullies and patches of scrub. We are advised not to kick any stones in case it disturbs snakes or scorpions. Fortified with just the right dose of anxiety, we begin filming.

Estela [Merlos] is playing a 21st-century version of Clorinda, the female Middle Eastern warrior in Claudio Monteverdi's Il Combattimento . In fact, it is my obsession with Clorinda – a brown woman who defiantly refuses to be the heroine in a story told by the enemy – that has brought me here. In our film, (Don't) Say My Name, British performers on tour in eastern Turkey encounter a real-life version of the baroque fiction they have been rehearsing. What happens next is what we are here to find out in the desert – a journey that will find its conclusion in an edit suite in London.

"Look at the camera as if it is your enemy," I tell Estela. I make a mental note for the makeup ladies about her eyebrows.

I get my first glimpse of the hard-won star of the scene, a battered white minibus which is the site of the fateful meeting between the performers and the Middle Eastern woman. Nearby Málaga is awash with swanky Mercs to ferry tourists, so to get a vehicle with a bit more personality has been an uphill task.

Actions and words rehearsed in a London studio resonate differently against this untamed landscape. No point at all asking for a bit more sculpting side light!

Meanwhile, the sun has climbed steadily and by 11am it has the merciless quality of a whiplash across our backs. The white minibus appears around the narrow bend, framed by dramatic high rocks, for what seems the 100th time. The bus is equally narrow and there is just enough room inside for the director of photography and his assistant. (If only we could afford a replica bus that we could slice up for interesting shots!)

Outside, I struggle to hear the dancers on our headphones, and soon the visuals on our monitors start breaking up. Aargh! Despite heroic efforts, connectivity in a desert is a delicate affair.

I found my sea legs in childhood trying desperately to determine a still point in a wildly swerving horizon as the car took the hairpin bends of "up-country" Sri Lanka. But it never quite prepares you for the lurching variables at the start of a new project.

Day two: 'Clorinda yells at me from the heights of history' We rehearse the penultimate scene of the stylised fight in a stunning natural amphitheatre formed by an expanse of earth framed by smoky blue-black hills in the distance. I am hoping that the long "scarf" that forms part of the choreography and connects the four dancers to each other will act like an island, giving them a sense of anchored space within the vastness stretching away.

At noon, sudden fierce gusts of wind toss the fabric between the dancers, giving it a purpose far more dramatic than I could have created in a studio. The music is in their earpieces, so to the eye they move seemingly in silence, conducted only by the elements and the landscape drawing sweat and laboured breath, a staccato crunch underfoot as their shoes scrape against the pebbly sand.

The director has an idea of sending the dancers into the arena as if they were entering a theatre to start their fight, framed in a magnificent top shot.

Transitions have been much discussed, given that our film moves from "real life" to fiction, from rehearsals to performance, from improvised chat to baroque music. The entry into the fight is one of the hardest of transitions, a possible screeching gear shift.

I watch as Estela ascends a steep rocky path, helping to carry the camera – no mean feat. I am with the sound man far below, dealing with cues.

"Action!"

I see the dancers enter. It is clear to me, even from this distance, that the dynamic of their walk will not connect to the movement score that has been set. One of the hardest things has been to rehearse the rehearsals.

"Shall I tell them how to walk?' I yell against the wind, sounding ridiculous as I say it. "No, it's OK," says the director. The view up there must be breathtaking in this light.

Providing the story and telling the story are not one and the same thing. Clorinda yells at me from the heights of history. "Told you!"

Day three: 'Loss is knitted deep into our DNA' Ridley Scott built an entire village here in Almería for his film Exodus: Gods and Kings , but this dilapidated old farmhouse will do us fine to explore the reality behind a line from the libretto, "war and death". Almería is littered with the ghosts of past Hollywood productions. Luckily, the rickety wooden sign that points to The Sheriff and The Jail is out of shot.

My contemporary Clorinda looks like a Kurdish female fighter as she enacts the scene where she finds the remains of a house once peopled by loved ones but now destroyed by war, leaving only a battered child's football abandoned among the ruins.

Estela really gives herself to the emotions of loss and anger, and there are real tears in her eyes. You don't have to explain loss to a person from the global south. It is knitted deep into our DNA.

Day four: 'Masters of their craft' Our final day's shoot is at an unused cafe at the edge of the desert. The landscape's ruggedness is replaced by an arched corridor shuttered with light, and the silence by a roaring motorway. The three dancers and I have about half an hour to restage the scene and adapt ourselves to these new surroundings. However, Bryony [Pennington], Jonathan [Goddard] and James [Finnemore] are masters of their craft and it is soon done.

In the late afternoon, we make a trip to our desert arena to catch the wonderful soft light that bathes it at this time. The heat is less intense, though the wind is still strong enough to have me scuttling after my hat.

In the catering van the paper napkins have to be weighted down. "Have we run out of Earl Grey tea bags?" says someone high up the filming food chain. The performative hierarchies of filming being what they are, a car is dispatched to get some. Four days filming under the desert sun deserved no less.