“I am kind of sorry I didn’t get into movement many years ago. There are ideas for which movement is the only possible expression.”
Bryan O’Connell, musician
Say the word “language” and most people’s first association is likely to be “words”. But there are languages that go beyond linguistic frontiers and there are ways of communicating for which a dictionary is no use. Music as a type of non-linguistic expression (discounting the lyrics) is at one remove from speaking, but it still inhabits the sonic realm and so does not feel like foreign territory to the majority. But talk about “movement” as a way of communicating (and here discount sign language) and the reaction can often be furrowed brows and scepticism.
And yet, we all have bodies that are the site of our experience of the world. Pain, hunger, lust, fatigue – these are universal commonalities and universal levellers. Words can change their import according to their context and direct translation from one language to another can muddy meanings. But a body doubling over as though it’s just been landed a punch in the solar plexus, or a hand placed on a face in tenderness, are recognisable components of a global lexicon.
The Dublin Dance Festival (DDF) celebrates its tenth anniversary this year with a typically diverse programme that takes in choreographers of international renown, street performance, adaptations of established theatre works, and a mining of Irish talent. But what’s particularly notable on the 2014 bill is a tendency towards cross-disciplinary work, with performances that bridge the divide between theatre and dance and harness the potency of communicating through multiple “languages”.
The Cambridgeshire fens are a sparse, austere landscape where seemingly limitless, flat, marshy tracts of land are scored by drainage ditches, and signs of human activity are rare. It was his interviews with long-term residents of this region that became the starting point for English choreographer Dan Canham’s contribution to DDF 2014. Ours Was The Fen Country has the bones of a radio documentary, but the stories from local characters have been fleshed out with something beyond the verbal. Dan found poetry in the mundane through layering the words from interviews with music and movement.
“One of the people I spoke to was a nature reserve warden who’d worked on the fens for 20 years and I really wanted him to speak poetically about the joy he found in watching birds, I wanted him to wax lyrical. But he didn’t. He just sort of listed names of birds. But when I went back to the interview, I realised the way he speaks is amazing, not exactly what he was saying, but the way he was saying it. So this list of species became poetry, and when you put music to that it takes it to another level, and then as soon as you dance to that music it takes it to another level and suddenly there’s this conversation happening between three points of reference – the words that are coming over the speakers, the music and our dancing, all of which are separate but all of which have deeper resonances to what was essentially someone talking about the birds that they like.”
Dan’s experience of the potential richness to be found in staging a live “conversation” between different creative languages reflects a tendency in the Dublin dance scene as well. Hear me sing your song, one of the new Irish works on the programme from Dublin-based choreographer Liv O’Donoghue, combines sound and movement on an equal footing. Drummer Bryan O’Connell and fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh were initiated into the research process to develop the piece and O’Donoghue explained that were given the same tasks to complete as the dancers:
“I wanted the musicians to be performers in the same right as the dancers. [The way I approached it was] …there were people on stage, and they all had different abilities, but they were all being choreographed in the same way. I was giving tasks to the people in the room – some happened to be dancers, some happened to be musicians – but I wanted to see how, as people, they responded. I was interested in them as bodies and people, and not as musicians with an instrument.”
The result was, similar to Dan’s findings, a layering of different types of communication. Liv describes the “sound world” of the piece as having been generated from the same source as the movement. In other words, memory or other types of tasks that Liv set the dancers and musicians required them to express their emotional reaction in the most immediately accessible way possible, without privileging their go-to talent. So the musicians could move or generate sound, as they saw fit. Bryan found the experience of communicating through movement akin to vastly expanding his personal lexicon:
“Engaging with movement in a creative setting is for me a massive and profound expansion of expression. I wish everyone did it. It’s in us and it’s natural. It’s like finding a section of the dictionary which we didn’t realise existed, and yet we clatter blindly through it on a daily basis.”
Dan and Liv are dance makers who use words and music to magnify the avenues of access to their work, or as Dan puts it, use dance to “add a layer of emotional resonance” to words or music. But the programme for this year’s festival also includes works that would, in other contexts, be called theatre rather than dance. Pan Pan Theatre, known at home and abroad for their idiosyncratic re-workings of classic theatre texts, are collaborating with John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre to bring a study of Samuel Beckett’s Quad to the festival. Made for TV in 1981, Quad contains no linguistic content and is all movement, movement exactingly laid down by Beckett in a script that reads like the working out of a maths problem.
It’s an interesting addition to a programme that highlights the ability of movement to communicate something beyond language: a theatre work that contains no words, only movement and percussive sound, by a playwright who lost faith in the ability of words to communicate meaning as his career progressed. A discussion following the short performance, lead by mathematical neuroscientist and former Trinity lecturer Conor Houghton, will address the whys and wherefores of Beckett’s wordless text and hopefully answer the question: why did an author, whose main currency was language, ultimately turn to locomotion to express what he had to express?
Dublin Dance Festival Highlights – Three to See:
Russell Maliphant’s Still Current
Thursday 29th – Saturday 31st May | Abbey Theatre, Abbey Stage | 7.30pm
Associate Artist of the London-based modern dance leviathan Sadler’s Wells and a choreographer who has lent his talent to work for brands like Audi, Lexus, Lucozade and Spotify, Russell Maliphant brings Still Current to the stage of the Abbey Theatre. The work includes trios, duets and solos that collectively draw on vocabulary from contemporary dance, ballet and martial arts. Expect physically impressive, slick dance with a soundtrack featuring Erik Satie.
Emma Martin Dance’s Tundra
Tuesday 20th – Friday 23rd May | Samuel Beckett Theatre | 7.30pm
Emma Martin Dance has a record of staging visceral dance-theatre productions, big on atmosphere and with meaty, confrontational themes ranging from civilization versus the primitive to collective mentality versus the outsider. The company’s last major production, Dogs, won the Best Production and Best Design awards in the 2012 Dublin Fringe Festival, and 2014 sees their newest work, Tundra, opening the dance festival. Residencies in Poland and Slovenia have introduced influences from East European folklore into Emma’s work and these have been spliced with themes from Dante’s Purgatorio and musical contributions from Balkan band Yurodny to realise a performance that archly references pom poms and David Lynch in its blurb.
Savage Film’s Rain
Sunday 25th May | Irish Film Institute | 4pm
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is one of contemporary dance’s key protagonists and what some might call a natural successor to Pina Bausch. If you’ve never heard of her but are a Beyoncé fan, you may already have been exposed to her choreography in the music video for B’s song Countdown, which the 54-year old choreographer publicly claimed plagiarises her iconic 1983 work Rosas danst Rosas. On May 25th, Dublin Dance Festival and the IFI will screen Rain, a documentary that follows De Keersmaeker teaching her own choreography to the dancers of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris. It’s an examination of the collision of differing sensibilities and, in keeping with this year’s programme, a search for meaning between two distinct languages, in this case the rigid vocabulary of classical ballet and the more emotionally charged idiom of contemporary dance.
Words: Rachel Donnelly
Photos: Camilla Greenwell (Ours Was The Fen Country) / Hugo Glendinning (Still Current) /
For full program information see dublindancefestival.ie
