May is dance festival month in Dublin. The annual celebration of movement in all its forms has been on the go for eleven years now, with growing audiences every year. This is in part due to the influence of director Julia Carruthers who, for the last four years of her tenure as head of the festival, has made it a personal crusade to bring dance out of theatres and onto the streets, championing flash mobs and site specific outdoor shows. With each year that passes, the dance community in Dublin have become more voluble and ever more vibrant, staking their claim with growing confidence on their corner of the city’s humming arts scene.
Like its older siblings the Fringe and Theatre festivals, the Dance Festival takes in venues across the city, stretching out comfortably like a visitor on Dublin’s couch for the duration of the programme, embracing spaces both big and small, lo-fi and luxurious. But it’s a curiosity of the festival’s programming history that the hallowed boards of the country’s national stage, the Abbey, have always been the preserve of international companies. No contemporary Irish choreographer has ever had their work performed there – until now.
Liz Roche Company (formerly Rex Levitates Dance Company) has been making work in Ireland since 1999. This year, choreographer Roche was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin Dance Festival and Kilkenny Arts Festival to create a piece to be performed on the Abbey main stage. It’s a historic moment in contemporary Irish dance.
When approached about the commission, Roche knew immediately what she wanted to work on. W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ had been rattling around in the back of her mind ever since she’d first read it as a child, and its themes of mortality and the soul had first struck a chord. The Yeats connection was also conveniently synchronous, given the Abbey’s heritage.
‘I remember the poem from sixth class. It was the first poem I read that ever really meant something to me. I remember thinking, this is amazing because I like this poem and I’m not pretending that I like it. And for me, it was the existential question in the poem that made an impact. I was really struck, even at ten years old, by the lines:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
I really connected with that idea, that the body is nothing without the soul that’s filling it and lighting it. The poem is [about] moving away from the body, asking the questions, “When all of this is gone, what will remain? What imprint is left? Where do you go, and does it matter?”’
The poem is one of many sources Roche drew on in developing the piece, titled Bastard Amber (the name of a type of lighting gel used in stage work). Yeats’s Four Plays for Dancers was also an influence, along with painter Patrick Scott’s gold meditation paintings and a dash of Eastern mysticism. The piece has been described as choreography that moves way from the body and ‘into the soul’, territory that seems counterintuitive for dance to explore. It isn’t for Roche, who thinks the two are inextricably linked, even into old age and through the body’s degradation, an idea she finds in Yeats’ writing.
‘There’s a very honest struggle with the body, honest frustrations *[expressed in the poem]*… I don’t think Yeats had a romantic view of the body and I feel I share that. The dances I make are complicated and there’s pattern in them, but the constant body in the work is a normal body. That body is never too far away from the everyday, for me. I know some people don’t like that, but I like that you’re watching something that could be yourself – I think if you’re watching something that’s really alien to you, which could easily be something really beautiful, it’s harder to connect with it.’
The piece is set to be grand in scale and opulent in aesthetic, channelling the joyful feeling Roche herself got as a child when reading Yeats’ lines about arriving in ‘the holy city of Byzantium’. A cast of eight international dancers will be framed by live music and original set, lighting and costume design, all devised collaboratively within the frame of reference Roche drew on for her choreography.
The Abbey commission is a significant step in her career as a dance maker. ‘It’s a big stage to fill. But I also know, having performed on it myself, that it’s a warm stage and I think it’s a beautiful stage for dance. It’s also important in terms of confidence, support and visibility for contemporary dance. I know personally, more times than not when you tell people what you do for a living, they don’t quite know what to make of it. That situation is definitely better than it used to be though and there’s been an increasing sense of dance taking its place with everything else. I think this is another positive step towards that.’
Bastard Amber will be performed at the Abbey Theatre on Monday 25th to Wednesday 27th May, tickets €22-38. The Dublin Dance Festival itself runs from Tuesday 19th to Saturday 30th May at a variety of venues. Full listings are available in our Listings section and on www.dublindancefestival.ie
Three to see
Built to Last
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods
Built to Last opens the festival on the Abbey main stage, a piece grand in scale and imagination.
A shifting soundscape that takes in Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg and other classical composers is the backdrop for a dynamic set that pictures the movement of planets and dance that is by turns idiosyncratic, epic and weird.
Tuesday 19 – Wednesday 20 May | Abbey Theatre | 7.30pm, €22-38
Douglas
Robbie Synge
A descendant of the playwright John Millington Synge, Robbie Synge describes himself as a ‘garden shed’ choreographer, a behind-closed-doors tinkerer who revels in the possibilities afforded by the accidental. Douglas is the fruit of a two week residency in the Scottish highlands, a curious interaction with inanimate objects that tests out the notion that all things are connected. Is Douglas the mover, or the moved in his environment? In talking about the piece, Robbie used the phrase ‘harvesting objects for their Newtonian properties’, but don’t let that put you off.
Saturday 23 May | Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College | 6pm, €22/18
Dance Uncovered… (Sensational)
Philip Connaughton
The man who brought you the wondrously lunatic Tardigrade at last year’s Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival now joins the Dublin Dance Festival bill with a talk-performance on what contemporary dance *is*, exactly. Personally, I’ve been waiting to find that out for years – should be revelatory, and funny to boot.
Wednesday 20 May & Saturday 23 May | Project Arts Centre | 6.30pm (Wed), 9pm (Sat) €10/8
Words: Rachel Donnelly
Images: Luca Truffarelli, Eva Würdinger
