“If you say you’re a dancer to a punter on the street, they’ll give you an eyebrow.” This statement comes from Jessica Kennedy, one half of the identical twin duo behind junk ensemble, a Dublin-based contemporary dance company. I’ve just asked about the difference between a ‘dance artist’ and a plain old ‘dancer’, a distinction the twins feel is crucial. “[The term ‘dancer’] could mean any kind of dancer,” Jessica continues. “It could mean a commercial dancer, [or] if they’re feeling lewd it could be an exotic dancer, a pole dancer… ” “There’s a connotation about using your body for movement,” says Megan, continuing her sister’s thought “whereas, [when you talk about] dance artists, it’s about artistry. It’s not just about moving – it’s about thinking, it’s about creating, it’s about choreographing… It encompasses a whole field… I would never just say ‘I’m a dancer’.”
Megan and Jessica are referring to the tendency of contemporary dancers in Dublin to function as both performers and makers of their own work. Due to Ireland’s size, and the way resources are distributed, many trained dancers aren’t content to remain solely as conduits for the ideas of other choreographers and instead often move on from company-based work to making pieces of their own. This is a recent enough trend in Dublin, and is perhaps one of the reasons for the surge in vibrancy in this section of the Irish arts scene over the last decade or so.
“Now it’s thriving – it’s hard to keep up in some sense because there are so many individual artists doing work. It’s less company-led work within the contemporary dance genre in Ireland [now] and more independent artists,” says Jessica.
Relative to the international scene, contemporary dance in Ireland is still, if not in its infancy, at least in its wilful adolescent stages. While contemporary dance has its origins in 1920s America in the work of Martha Graham (dubbed the ‘Picasso’ of dance), the first inroads of the form into Ireland are less clear. Last month, an RTE documentary entitled ‘1943 – A Dance Odyssey’, highlighted the influence of Irish-German dancer Erina Brady on dance in Ireland. Brady cut an exotic figure in 1940s Dublin, sleeping on a couch in the studio she taught in and encouraging her students to dance in bare feet and eschew classical technique in favour of individual improvisation. This may well have been the first introduction of modern dance to the Irish population.
However, it seems that things really only started to develop significantly in the late eighties and early nineties with the establishment of Dance Ireland, an association of professional dancers, and companies such as Irish Modern Dance Theatre (now John Scott Dance), Coiscéim, and Dance Theatre of Ireland, all of whom are still creating and touring work today. These companies, along with the later-established Liz Roche company, laid the groundwork and opened up the scene for the newer wave of independent dance makers that characterise the dance landscape in Dublin these days.
Liv O’Donoghue, a Dublin-based dancer who hails from Wicklow originally, also agrees that things have changed pace recently. “In the last five to ten years, I think things have really boomed.” Liv is another dancer/choreographer hybrid who divides her time between performing with Irish companies (most notably Liz Roche Company) and making work of her own, both solo pieces and work for other dancers. Most recently, Liv choreographed ‘Hear me sing your song’, a dance piece for two dancers and two musicians, one of whom is fiddler-player Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh, a well-known presence on the traditional music circuit in Ireland.
Liv’s use of musicians in her latest work (and they don’t only play their instruments – they move with the dancers too) is symptomatic of another tendency that has appeared in the contemporary scene in Dublin of late: dancers collaborating with makers from other artistic spheres. Composer Tom Lane and musician Bryan O’Connell (pictured) are stalwarts of the contemporary dance scene, having worked with junk ensemble, Liv and Emma Martin Dance. Filmmakers are also getting involved – last year, well-known documentary-maker Alan Gilsenan (director of The Yellow Bittern) collaborated with choreographer Liz Roche to produce a piece of film as part of her work ‘Body and Forgetting’.
And this collaborative spirit seems to swing both ways. Megan and Jessica see the influence of contemporary dance creeping into other performance work. “There’s a bigger theatre audience coming [to view contemporary dance], there’s a big visual arts audience coming… and I’m seeing it incorporated into other work – I’m seeing a lot more movement in theatre, for example… and I think there’s a growing appreciation of the fact that there can be movement without text, and of what the body can relay… I think people are realising that movement is just incorporated in everyday life, so why not incorporate [choreographed movement] into [a theatre piece].”
Speaking about contemporary dance in Ireland to Irish dance artists, the question of an Irish aesthetic inevitably arises. Is there a common thread that binds Irish choreographers together? In response to this question, the sentiment that crops up again and again is that the dance aesthetic in Ireland is notably diverse.
“I think the fact that we have no [formal] training here is potentially a good thing because it means that [a lot of people] leave and go… to the UK or Germany or Russia or the States or France or wherever… and then whoever does come back comes back with a different training, a different style. So I think it’s one of the few countries where you can’t really define a style, and you can’t compare [the companies] in terms of their aesthetic. I think that makes [contemporary] dance in Ireland richer in some ways,” says Liv.
Emma Martin, a choreographer based in Carlow whose piece ‘Dogs’ won Best Production and Best Design in last year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, shares this feeling with Liv, opining that contemporary dance in Ireland boasts a diversity that can’t be found in New York or elsewhere. “There’s a nice dance ecology in Ireland – there’s a nice mix in the stuff that’s being made… In New York, stylistically, it’s very samey… It seems like there’s a bit of everything [in Ireland].”
All four artists, Emma, Liv, and twins Megan and Jessica, began their training in ballet. When asked why they turned to contemporary, their answers all point to a desire to find a form that allowed for a wider expression of feeling and also provided the scope to create original and self-directed work, something much more difficult to achieve within the confines of classical ballet.
“I became a little bit disillusioned with ballet… I needed something more,” says Emma. “So I decided I wanted to make my own work.” Emma is a classically trained ballet dancer who worked in ballet until the age of 23, before taking a break to study and then making her first contemporary work ‘Listowel Syndrome’. Developed over a three week period in 2010 for the Fringe festival with no funding, the piece is based on events surrounding an infamous sexual assault case in Listowel, Co. Kerry. Emma never had any formal contemporary training, but used her classical training, as well as contributions from other dancers, as a basis from which to develop a personal movement language. In her case, it seems that the desire to communicate a reaction to the Listowel incident came first and the form developed as a necessity in response. “I was really shocked by [the story],” says Emma. “But I’m not sure where my language comes from – a lot of it is informed by classical structure and then ripped apart a little bit.”
For Liv, the break with the classical tradition of ballet was more deliberate and formalised.
“I did the whole ballet thing because that was what I had available to me in Wicklow, but I never really thought of it as a viable career because I didn’t see it fulfilling me… I knew it wasn’t going to be enough to sustain my interest… I guess it’s down to creative input.” Liv left Ireland to study at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in the UK, before returning to Dublin to work when she realised the scene here had more to offer than she’d given it credit for. “I was in London, slogging away, and I got sick with glandular fever, so I came home to get better. And it was when I came home that I actually realised how much was going on here, because I had kind of dismissed it a bit.”
For the twins, contemporary dance offered a wider field of expression than ballet, and the opportunity for a more individualised form of expression.
“There’s such freedom in contemporary dance, and that’s what really attracted me to it. It felt like there was a liberation – and not just from the shackles of ballet, because I don’t have a bad experience with ballet at all, I still take [classes], and I really like it – but it’s very much based around the structure and nothing outside of it. It’s very black and white… [contemporary] can take you to a different place,” says Megan.
The modernist tendency to value a subjective, individual perspective over an external, objective one is reflected in the dance form in this way. Any movement is acceptable in contemporary dance – in fact, some contemporary performances can have little to no movement in them at all. But this aspect is precisely what appeals to Liv – though she is careful to note that this freedom of form is stronger when placed in the context of formalised training.
“[Contemporary dance] is so open – it can be the most technical thing or it can be the most expressive, open, loose-ended thing, and then anything in between that… But I do think ballet is a really solid training, and it serves you really well… and I think it’s really important for all contemporary dancers to have that at some point, but also to be able to dismantle it, if [they] want to.”
The profile of contemporary dance in Ireland has grown noticeably in recent years. This is no doubt in part due to the Dublin Dance Festival, now in its ninth year, an event of some standing internationally that brings in artists from all over the world for three weeks of performances across the city in May. But it’s still something that the general Irish audience is only starting to come to, although this is perhaps not necessarily a bad thing. “I think the audiences here are relatively young, or relatively new, they haven’t been exposed to loads – so they’re not as jaded as the audiences in Paris, for example,” says Liv.
As someone who sees quite a bit of contemporary dance, I find it interesting to ask these dancers and makers of dance if there’s something they get from contemporary dance specifically that they can’t get from other art forms. Does it do something that theatre in the traditional sense, or a live music performance, or an exhibition of visual art in a gallery, doesn’t?
“… it allows each individual audience member to escape in a personal way… [because] dance essentially is interpretive… I like that people access images and memories of their own… I think that people get a bit caught up in trying to work out what the choreographer is trying to say… [but] it’s not about that – [you should] just experience it. I think it’s a really experiential thing,” says Liv.
Something else that makers of contemporary dance find appealing in the form is its potential to connect people across cultures and languages, for the very simple reason that we all have bodies and that these bodies move. “… it’s seeing a body move [in a way] that you may or may not recognise. And for me that brings out an emotion, an emotion that I may not have even felt before,” says Megan.
Emma, too, considers dance to be fundamental and innate. She describes how her two-year old daughter always reacts in the same way to the suggestion of dance. “I just have to say the word ‘music’ and she starts doing this…” Emma jumps up from her seat in the busy restaurant on Talbot Street where we’re conducting our interview to demonstrate her daughter’s reaction. It’s a sort of birdlike twitching, arms bent at elbow tight to the body, hands making little flicking motions, head bobbing, knees bending.
“Every culture has dance in it. We danced before we spoke. I kind of feel like… we have it in us… The energy in our body speaks so much. You see people on the street and, they’re not dancers, but how they move – that’s how they’re feeling, that’s their personality.”
Photography throughout by Lucy Nuzum.
