Dance Theatre in Ireland

Revolutionary Moves

A. McGrath

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137035486
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Dance theatre has become a site of transformation in the Irish performance landscape. This book conducts a socio-political and cultural reading of dance theatre practice in Ireland from Yeats' dance plays at the start of the 20th century to Celtic-Tiger-era works of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre and CoisCéim Dance Theatre at the start of the 21st.

1

Introduction

Over the past two decades, dance theatre has become a vital site of innovation and transformation in the Irish performance landscape. In addition to being instrumental in a movement of aesthetic change in performance practices, dance theatre works have also played a pivotal role in reflecting and critiquing socio-political and cultural developments in Ireland. In 2003, Brian Singleton proposed that, ‘the most exciting new playwrights in this country are choreographers who have come from dance theatre: David Bolger and Michael Keegan-Dolan. They are speaking about Ireland and writing about Ireland, using all the languages of the actor’s body, rather than speaking from an authorial perspective’.¹ The pivotal shift of perspective from the ‘authorial’ to the corporeal recognised in the work of these choreographers is particularly remarkable given the overwhelmingly literary tradition of Irish theatre practice. It is a well-rehearsed lament that theatrical performance in Ireland habitually gave primacy to the written word over the performing body,² leading director Conall Morrison to describe the body in space and time as ‘the great unexplored’.³ This focus on the authority of the word routinely confined the body to a function of interpretation rather than creative articulation, and has contributed to the marginalisation of theatrical dance in Ireland. Resisting this positioning of dance has been an ongoing struggle for chronically underfunded and culturally undervalued choreographers and dancers in Ireland, and the battle for recognition of the cultural importance of theatre dance has a long history. Yet the flourishing of dance theatre over the past two decades, particularly since the emergence of companies such as Bolger’s CoisCéim Dance Theatre and Keegan-Dolan’s Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre in the mid-1990s, has marked an important turning point, in which groundbreaking works have achieved not only a greater visibility for dance, but have also provoked a rethinking of the perception of the body in Irish theatrical performance and Irish culture. Operating from the margins and materialising in a disciplinary interval, these companies do not adhere to any genre divides. Experimenting with the intertwining of the corporeal and the textual, they challenge the usual delineations and dichotomisation of genre in Ireland. Their interdisciplinary works inhabit the space between dance and theatre to tell stories through hybrid mixes of various dance and movement vocabularies in combination with text, music and other performance media. These stories explicitly comment on socio-political issues, altering perceptions of the communicative capabilities and socio-political agency of dancing bodies in a traditionally word-focussed theatre culture. Refusing to confine dance to a realm of the aesthetic divorced from the political, their choreographies critique Irish society, highlighting and questioning the invisibility of certain corporealities and challenging the hegemony of others.

The emergence of these new dance theatre practitioners coincided with Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger era’; a period (which I will discuss in further detail later) that resulted in profound economic, cultural and political change. In this study I am particularly interested in examining how certain dance theatre works tackle some of the most urgent and difficult socio-political and cultural questions that arose during this era, and in its immediate wake. It is important to note that this study does not conduct an essentialist interrogation into what is specifically ‘Irish’ about these works, but rather it will analyse how these boundary-defying dance theatre choreographies comment on and intersect with cultural and political issues in Ireland. As such, this study aims not only to examine a particular facet of Irish dance culture and to contribute to wider international discussions of dance theatre, but also to offer a study of Irish culture from a fresh perspective, through the lens of choreographies of the dancing body.

Susan Foster writes that ‘[d]ance is uniquely adept at configuring relations between body, self, and society through its choreographic decisions’ and that in viewing choreography as a theorisation of bodies, ‘choreographic conventions can be seen as particular stagings of the body’s participation in the larger performance of the body politic’.⁴ How bodies are organised in time and space in a performance can then be read in relation to how bodies are organised in society, producing a correlation between the dancing body and the body politic. In the dance theatre works discussed here, disruptions and reconfigurations of the usual positioning of bodies in societal structures allows for alternative views of society to achieve visibility. Following this notion of choreography as theory and extending its application to the social choreography of bodies in everyday life, I will interrogate the cultural context out of which these choreographies emerged and the resonance they have with specific events and specific bodies in Ireland.

This study does not attempt a comprehensive overview of all contemporary dance theatre practice in Ireland. Instead it provides detailed analyses of a selection of seven contemporary works: Giselle (2003), The Bull (2005) and The Rite of Spring (2009) by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre; Ballads (1997) and Dodgems (2008) by CoisCéim Dance Theatre; Does She Take Sugar? (2007) by Jean Butler; and Out of Time (2008) by Colin Dunne. This selection should not imply that the works discussed are the only representatives of dance theatre in Ireland that merit critical attention; indeed there exists an ever increasing community of both established and emerging dance theatre choreographers working in Ireland whose practice provides an exciting body of work for future discussion.⁵ However, for this project I have chosen to structure my investigation around specific socio-political and aesthetic issues. The organising principle in choosing which contemporary works to discuss is based on two defining characteristics: firstly, that the work resists disciplinary and genre limitations in an Irish context, expanding notions of what constitutes dance and theatre performance, and secondly, that it engages in explicit social commentary and critique, with choreographies of the dancing body that highlight the moulding of subjectivities and suggest alternative corporealities. Many of the works that are analysed use a combination of dance, spoken text and music intertwined in a narrative to create pieces that reinterpret stories of Ireland’s past and present, and envision possible futures. Others, such as Out of Time by Dunne and Does She Take Sugar? by Butler, use similar modes of performance to communicate more personal narratives, which are nevertheless critically engaged with political and aesthetic issues of corporeality in Ireland. The remainder of this introductory chapter provides an outline of the cultural context out of which the contemporary dance theatre practitioners emerged, an introduction to CoisCéim and Fabulous Beast, a positioning of this project within dance scholarship in Ireland, and an explanation of the study’s methodological underpinning.

Cultural context: the Celtic Tiger, Riverdance and other transformations

The following sketch of notable events in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first in Ireland positions and contextualises the dance theatre work discussed within the social, cultural, and economic backdrop of the ‘Celtic Tiger-era’ (c. 1990–2008). After decades of financial struggle resulting in high unemployment and emigration, Ireland’s economy entered a period of unprecedented growth in the early 1990s. Unemployment figures shrank and Ireland became a popular destination for economic migrants for the first time in its history. The US investment group Morgan Stanley named the Irish economy the ‘Celtic Tiger’ in 1994, and the title is now used to describe a phase of economic growth in Ireland which began in the early 1990s, peaked in 1999, slowed in tandem with the global economic downturn in 2001, and after a brief resurgence on the back of the housing market, continued to decline until its pronounced ‘death’ in 2008 with the onset of global recession. The 1990s was also a decade of significant cultural and political change, and it began with a ‘surprising shock to the body politic’ with the election in 1990 of Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson.⁶ Robinson’s election was a disruption to several longstanding traditions that had been upheld since the election of the first president, Douglas Hyde, in 1937. Sponsored by the Labour Party and supported by a ‘new constituency’ made up of socially active groups not aligned to any political parties, Robinson challenged the historical dominance of Fianna Fáil⁷ candidates. Additionally, in the application of her determined feminism and skills developed while working as a constitutional lawyer, she began to transform the perception of the role of president from being purely ceremonial and symbolic, to being an active and inspirational force for social change. Prior to her election, she was integral in contesting several laws that had sought for many decades to control and suppress the actions of certain bodies in Irish society. Her activities included successful campaigns in challenging the ban on the importation and sale of contraception (1979, 1992)⁸ and in securing the decriminalisation of homosexuality (1980, 1988, 1993).⁹ The optimism resulting from Robinson’s election to presidency coincided with another notable, although much less lofty, cultural event. In 1990 Ireland’s international soccer team qualified for the World Cup for the first time and despite all odds (never actually winning a match outright), made it to the quarter-finals. As all eyes focussed on the success of the Irish team’s campaign in Italy, Diarmaid Ferriter reported that Dublin streets ‘came close to the atmosphere of Rio in carnival time’.¹⁰ Interestingly, in contrast to the (relatively) unrestrained joy performed in the streets, the choreographic tactics of manager Jack Charlton that permitted these positive outpourings were criticised as resulting from ‘negative’ football; the Irish team played defensively, preventing their opponents from playing their ‘own’ (meaning more skilful) game. The defensive ‘negative’ choreography of Irish soccer at this time could be read as perpetuating a nationalistic tendency of defensively opposing dominant cultures. Yet at the same time, the wholehearted national embrace of a sport shunned by the GAA¹¹ for its Englishness, the employment of an English manager for the national squad, and the fact that the majority of the players on the team were born in England or Scotland was also, albeit paradoxically, an important step towards post-nationalism.

Another important cultural shift and significant change in the Irish social fabric was the undermining of the moral authority of the Catholic church in the wake of a series of clerical child abuse and sex controversies. From its inception, the ideology of the Irish state was closely intertwined with the teachings of the Catholic church and it was largely the church’s influence in state matters that had sustained the rigid and repressive control of sexuality in Ireland to a ‘strictly enforced sexual code’.¹² Although the power of the church was already on the wane in the early 1990s, the spate of scandals relating to abusive and paedophile priests that began to emerge after 1994, when Father Brendan Smyth was found guilty in Belfast of 17 charges of child sexual abuse, and later pleaded guilty to a further 74 counts in the Dublin courts in 1997, came as a shock to the nation. Arguably the most disturbing aspect of Smyth’s case, and several of the cases that followed, was that many instances of child abuse might have been prevented if senior clergy had not tried to cover up the actions of perpetrators by silently moving them from one parish to the next. This deception caused the reputation of the church to suffer severe damage. Following these revelations, Terence Brown writes that, ‘the moral policing in sexual matters the church had enforced in the early decades of independence had almost completely broken down’, and Mary Kenny goes further, proposing that, ‘the very concept of “Catholic Ireland” was by the end of the century, gone’.¹³ These seismic pressures on the previously unshakeable Catholic-nationalist social order fuelled the growing movement towards secularisation. Joe Cleary argues, however, that a more significant consequence was ‘a wholesale reconstruction of Irish middle-class subjectivity, now decreasingly defined in terms of participatory citizenship or of adherence to communal Church practices, and articulated [. . .] in terms of individual capacity to participate in various modes of consumer lifestyle’.¹⁴ On the one hand oppressed communities and corporealities benefited from socially transformative legal actions and the relaxation of the church’s stranglehold on sexuality, while simultaneously, consumer capitalism, with its disregard for those in society who cannot keep pace, started to come into its own.

In 1994, the same year as the arrival of the ‘tiger’, a new-found fiscal confidence and national pride seemed to be perfectly embodied in a seven-minute showcase of Irish culture broadcast to millions of television viewers around Europe. Riverdance was initially choreographed as the interval entertainment of the 1994 Eurovision song contest held in Dublin, which Ireland won for the third time in a row that year, and an unprecedented sixth time overall (Ireland would go on to win the competition for a seventh time in 1996).¹⁵ The piece is credited with having modernised the competitive Irish step dance form (adding arm gestures to the normally stiffly-held, straight-backed, arms-by-the-sides upper body posture) and famously added a sexually charged dimension to a dance form that Flann O’Brien once described as ‘emotionally cold, unromantic and always well-lighted’¹⁶(this was particularly evident in a duet for champion dancers Jean Butler and Michael Flatley in which Butler performed a stepped circle around Flatley with her arm trailing around his waist, while they gazed into each other’s eyes). However, the most memorable moment of the piece was the exhilarating finale in which one long line of 25 perfectly synchronised Irish step dancers closed the performance in a thunderous chorus line. Following the hugely positive response to this original incarnati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Danced Precedents from Yeats to Davis
• 3. Genre Debates: the Dance and the Bathwater
• 4. Choreographing Narratives: Buried Bodies and Constitutive Stories in The Bull and Ballads
• 5. Choreographing the Unanticipated: Death, Hope and Verticality in Giselle and The Rite of Spring
• 6. Choreographing Dissensus: Dodgems and Roundabouts
• 7. Concluding Thoughts and Future Moves
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index