sarma

First published in Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the related Arts, vol. 19 nr. 2, pp.191-211

On my first day in Ireland I waited for a bus. After several minutes (which seemed an eternity in the steady drizzle of rain or what the Irish refer to as a “soft” day) I felt the slow, deadly advance of indignation. The schedule was printed at the stop for all to see and yet this bus was stubbornly refusing to materialize. After a few more minutes and by now soaked to the bone I asked the man standing a few feet away from me, the only other prospective passenger, “Are you going to Dalkey?” The man considered this question carefully and after spending some time absorbed in the mysterious alchemy of keeping his pipe alight in the ram, he announced most affably, “Well now, if the bus comes I’m going there.” This signifier of faith, this cheerful embrace of God’s will placed all things, even the timetable of Bus Eireann on the map of fate. “If the bus comes I’m going there” became both motto and mantra for me through the ten years of my “visit” to Ireland, and I can see now that the man with cap and pipe standing in the rain for all time (the bus never came so I took a taxi) was some Bord Failte (welcoming) angel dispatched to my bus stop to usher me into a decade of bemusing conundrums that permeated the Emerald Isle of saints and scholars like the steady “soft” rains.

I arrived in Dublin in 1982, on a leave of absence from the Dance Department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. I had two small sons, a precarious marriage, and a hunch that this year away would be a turning point of sorts. The year’s leave became a decade of personal pioneering for me -as the first regularly published dance critic in the country for a national weekly, The Sunday Tribune, and as the first dance appointment at Trinity College, Dublin, in the Theatre Department at the Samuel Beckett Centre. And, although this was not the case, I felt at the time that I was surely the only woman in Ireland to divorce right in the wake of the first Divorce Referendum, when the “No!” vote triumphed and rendered divorce unrecognized by the Church and unconstitutional by the State.

Writing this article during the “last orders!” of 1995, so to speak, I see that current news bulletins frame my decade in Ireland within certain social ironies. The three pantheons of that land – “the troubles,” the Church, and football (also known as “the struggle,” the Pope, and Jack Charlton) - have shifted their course in ways that seemed unimaginable at the start of my dance critic’s beat. The war cries of “Never! Never! Never!” as 100,000 Unionists in Belfast protested the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985 have, hopefully, given over to the cease-fire and prospect of peace in Ireland that was literally illuminated by President Clinton’s Christmas tree-lighting peace speeches in Belfast and Dublin in December of 1995. The bitter controversy that surrounded the appointment of Jack Charlton as the first non-Irishman to manage the Irish soccer team was transformed over the decade into a hero’s odyssey of mythic proportions as the team won the games and Jack won the hearts that catapulted him to a status beyond national icon toward near canonization; 1995 saw his retirement and a nation in mourning. And the sanctity of marriage in Ireland reenters the ring to slug it out with its rival, divorce, as the second Divorce Referendum wins the “Yes” vote, cleverly campaigned as “the constitutional right to remarry” (the word divorce is never used), and aided no doubt by the accumulating scandals of paedophile priests, secret offspring of bishops, infanticides, and immaculate conceptions - recourse to the sanctity of motherhood but not single motherhood. In a country that is a tax haven for writers, where Irish-language theatre never moves a muscle, and the national theatre, the Abbey, has never offered its stage to dance, I wrote about dance. Where The Dublin Theatre Festival, one of the most fertile cultural events in Europe, had scarcely any dance representations of any kind, and where dance companies rarely visited on tour, I wrote about dance.

The size of the country (three million, with one million in Dublin) and the fledgling nature of theatre dance allowed for repeated viewings of companies, dancers, and projects and demanded an imaginative rationale for what appeared in my column. Between October 1984 and September 1992 I wrote 208 articles/reviews on dance for The Sunday Tribune, averaging two pieces a week. From ballet recitals in dairy farm barns and world competitions of Irish traditional dancing in Limerick hotel ballrooms to postmodern video dance in Dublin art galleries, from national folk dance in Tralee to butoh dance in a coffin warehouse in Dublin, the conventions and locales of dance that I wrote about were vivid in contrast. If the occasions of dance seemed scant at the start of this venture, they had certainly proliferated and begun their ascent into national and sometimes international recognition by its end. Irish traditional dancing, drummed into prepubescents in Feis Ceoles (music-dance festivals) across the land, has reinvented itself as the international commercial phenomenon Riverdance and where classical ballet was once about as popularly consumed in Ireland as meat on Fridays, the visits of the Bolshoi, Kirov, and Georgian companies are now cultural staples with the forging of the new Irish-Russian connection via ambassadorial efforts, public relations schemes, and business investments.

Eighteen dance companies, four “national academies” of dance training, a host of dance forums, conferences, schools programs, mini festivals and performance projects, arts funding policies, a national dance magazine, and a national dance council all went through birth, burial, and/or reincarnation during the life of my dance column. I like to think that I nurtured, encouraged, and even willed dance to grow among the overwhelmingly literature-oriented populace of Ire land. Fintan O’Toole, the former theatre critic for The Sunday Tribune, said in one of his pieces on Irish theatre that “there is no past tense in Irish history. The ideas by which we describe ourselves, republicanism, orangeism, Catholicism, Protestantism are still in the process of forming themselves, still play a powerful role in the present.”(1) In dance in Ireland there is a constant sense of beginning. New companies, projects, and institutions were constantly introduced to my attention, only to close down quickly to be replaced by new ones. There was a constant turnover of dancers in companies as they migrated for more work, came back, then left again. Throughout, there was, and is, a constant search for a national or homegrown language of dance - perhaps forged from the traditional dance heritage - begging to be released into a newer age, newer consciousness, newer choreography, the dawning of style and identity in Irish-based theatre dance. I like to think that my dance column had a direct dialogue with the action, that it stirred things up, buzzed in people’s ears, egged dance on and put it on the map in some way. But this could all be just some Walter Mitty fantasy on my part.

The first piece I wrote for The Sunday Tribune was called “Street Life,” a half-page splash across the arts section (a generous debut) that surveyed the dance events in the Dublin Street Carnival in the “ContemporEire Festival.” Under the name Diana Taplin I was determined to make dance the very stuff of life, accessible to all the punters in the street and to democratize like “the clappers,” garrulous talkers. My opening went thus:

African dancing, Morris dancing, commedia dell’arte, renaissance court dancing, traditional dancing, classical ballet, jazz, contemporary and break dancing echoed over the pavements, seeped into St. Stephen’s Green and hovered over steps and platforms. Central to the choreography of the carnival was the dynamic flow of spectators as they created their own spontaneous dance of necks craning, heads bobbing to an infectious pulse, swaying human totems of children atop fathers’ shoulders and mass migrations from venue to venue.

As for my first observation of traditional Irish dancing, I was the reverent ethnographer at the ready. The Brendan Bastable Irish Dancers and Corrigan School of Irish Dance performances drew from me, “…a precise, virtuoso footwork against tranquil torsos and unison dancing that would be an example to any aspiring corps of Swans.” But in these dances only three boys were to be found among thirty girls, none to be found in the Irish Youth Ballet Company, none in the Renaissance Dance Company, one in the Dublin Contemporary Dance Company, one in the Dublin City Ballet, and only the merest gaggle of guys in the Break Dancing Exhibition. I was pressed to say: “How curious that in this intensely physical tinie men still cannot make the leap from muscular prowess to art without crashing headlong into stigma.” I need not have worried unduly about offending the readership with my pomposity and pretentiousness. My generous debut, so painstakingly attentive to each and every dance event, location, performer, teacher, and the ever-changing dynamics of the man in the street, was colossally ignored. That is, on Sunday, October 7, 1984, for the first time there appeared in the major national Sunday paper a half page dedicated to dance, written by a new name about an event that had been populated by what seemed half the one million who populate Dublin. There had been not the slightest ripple of curiosity on the part of the readers, that I was aware of. And the paper clearly did not share my belief that it had “come of age” by hiring a dance critic. My appointment was never formally announced, as all other critics’ and columnists’ were.

The last piece I wrote for The Sunday Tribune as staff dance critic (August 8, 1992) was about the Irish Youth Ballet, and the very last piece I wrote for the paper (January 10, 1993) after moving to Devon, England, was on the death of Rudolf Nureyev. It seems fitting some how that in a country where people come first, before work and self- comfort, and where the kinship system of the extended family is still intact, dance remains largely community-based. It seems fitting that my first article about dance on the streets of Dublin started a journey that wrapped its way around almost a decade of dance endeavors and returned to the grass roots: the sons (the male population in dance had augmented noticeably) and daughters of the Irish Youth Ballet, where mothers sew the costumes and competing ballet school teachers thrust their best students forward for auditions.

My sojourn in dance criticism, from ceili to Kirov, departed the pages of The Sunday Tribune with the same absence of ceremony as it began. I hear that is why rock stars love being in Ireland so much - because they are ignored. It is the land of tolerance and grudgingness in mysteriously balanced ratios. The elderly are seated on buses by lethal looking punkers with the gentleness of cherubs, soapbox eccentrics given their due on every church doorstep or village green, and cultural and religious icons scrupulously observed with uproarious irreverence. The “Dubs” dub the Anna Livia fountain on O’Connell Street “the floozy in the jacuzzi,” the well-cleavaged bronze statue of Molly Malone on Grafton Street “the tart with the cart,” and the proliferation of Virgin Mary grottoes throughout the land “GVMs.” Martha Graham reputedly said she would have preferred a sports writer to review her dances. I wonder if her sentiments would have extended to a food writer? The restaurant critic at The Sunday Times was at the ready to cover dance when I was otherwise engaged. Had she yielded to the sensuality of dance as she did when writing about food, this editorial policy might have been deliciously innovative!

Despite the Trib’s rather eccentric etiquette, its editorial policies toward dance were enlightened and generous for suc uncharted territory. My weekly space averaged 700 words, space cuts we re civilized for the most part (although the bold-faced titles that the sub-editor slapped onto my reviews were cringingly “naff,” or vapid), and dance was placed in the Arts Section of the paper with equal status to the other arts. There had never been a gentle breaking-in of the readership, but neither was pandering to the man in the street required. On the contrary, the policy was one of robustness and curiosity about this new column, a real “go for it” factor which allowed mc to choose my ownl subjects and carve out featured space for airing issues that I considered particularly important, such as the Art Council’s axing of the Irish National Ballet or visits of acclaimed choreographers, dance funding policies, the launching of new companies, or innovative projects. Almost every review was accompanied by a photograph. Starting in 1985, a year after my column had begun, dance got a special Christmas “Wish List” spot—a review of the year’s best dance and a wish list for developments in dance for the New Year. A year after that dance began a regular appearance in the “Critic’s Choice” spotlight, an ensured readership space. That was followed by “Pick of the Arts” and “Best of the Year” features, where I could re-review works of choreographers under a bright spotlight of praise and encouragement for future development.

But the Sunday Tribune Arts Awards, launched in 1985 and a very high profile event al the time, kept dance at arm’s length until 1989, when I was finally given a place on the “panel” and able to make dance nominations. All of my nominations that first year went to dance “enablers”: community choreographers, dance association organizers, and schools projects directors. The award winner was Cathy Hayes O’Kennedy, who had started a Wexford-based community dance company called Barefoot Dance and a dance residency in the Wexford Arts Centre called “Movement Month,” which took place in May when site-specific dances around castles or harborfront or village marketplace would incite much native participation, attract dancers and choreographers from all over Ireland and abroad, and locate the art of dance in as unexpected a locale as had earlier happened to opera with the highly reputable Wexford Opera season. The following year the profile changed completely when the contemporary company Dance Theatre of Ireland was nominated for their butoh-inspired work La Beauté des Fleurs, premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival. I privately rejoiced in what felt like a catalyst role of instigating activity, dialogue, and a real sense of growth, reflected in such different dance work and in the impressive spectrum of developments that transpired, especially in view of the country’s size and the minute portion of national funding available to dance.

Every now and again the editor, Vincent Browne, would beckon me to his office and toss a letter of praise from a reader my way. These were never published. He had suffered me a dance column and was damned if I was going to entrench myself further with any notion of popularity (tolerance and grudgingness ever operative). And there was no better man to keep the dance column pure from the noxious fumes of pedantry than Mr. Browne. Any lack of passion, attempts to “educate” rather than tell a good story, or a lack of humor (“Where’s your sense of humor?” practically became my pet name) and I was shunted out into the real world to pit my wit against the elements, so to speak. Thus, I was dispatched to write about one of the naval sail training vessels - a brigantine called the Asgard - where I was forced to take my turn with all the other trainees at climbing the eighty-foot mast while at sea and then crawling along the yards to hoist sails and getting doused with buckets of freezing Irish Sea by the sadistic bosun for spending too long writing notes and not lifting, hauling, or toiling quickly enough. Another lapse into pedantry hastened me into a low-income housing project to write about the plight of single fathers.

One of the more exotic of the enforced deviations from my dance column was a story I had to write about “the last wedding” in the Hare Krishna community of Ireland, when all the remaining single women of the sect were hitched up in one massive celebration. The wedding took place on the remote island of Innishrath, on Lough Erne in County Fermanagh. It took a three-hour minibus drive with a checkpoint stop at the border, where hordes of sari-clad, head-shaved “Paddy Krishnas” spilled out of the bus, hoping to spread the word of peace and convince the soldiers to lay down their arms and end “the struggles” there and then. I prayed to the souls of dead dance critics to watch over me. Much later we ferried across the Lough to the Hare Krishna estate, a great thirty-room manor built by Lord Erne in 1858 in a paradise of ancient oaks, flowers, peacocks, and animals of endangered species and wherein is contained the most spectacular Hindu altar in Western Europe.

A day after returning from the sacred vegetarian rites on Innishrath it did not seem strange to receive a call from a woman with an Afrikaans accent from County Longford asking if I would come to a ballet recital on her dairy farm in Lenamore; she was quick to add that she was an avid reader of my dance column. Visions of bovine ballerinas had me in fits of giggles as I left the next day. Eamonn, the photographer, was to follow. Of course, getting around Ireland by bus for a dance writer would be a perilous prospect resulting in many missed performances. One Sunday Tribune reader even wrote a letter of warning to the famous “moving statues” of Ballinspittic (County Cork) about Irish bus service saying, “The problem with the long suffering statues... is they appear to be moving in the direction of the C.l.E. (Coras Iompair Eireann) bus terminus, which is not, repeat not, the best way to get out of Ballinspittie (or anywhere else for that matter).”

But driving is not always a straightforward solution either. Road signs are printed in either miles or kilometers without identifying which one is in use. Stop and ask an Irishman for directions anywhere and you are in for the long haul. Roadside conversation is his forte and after engaging in this pastime far longer than you can spare, the answer to your original question will end with a confident gesture toward north, south, east, or west, with an accompanying “Five miles as the crow flies.” After exhausting the flight path of the “crow” five miles later and none the wiser, you ask another native for directions. What ensues is some thing out of Rashomon, as each person has his own version of the “truth” or in this case “geography.” The “GVMs” that dot the countryside can be reassuring in moments like these and after a brief meditative stop at one of them, a signpost pointing you in the direction of your destination usually turns up shortly after.

Of course, a favorite pastime of rural youths spilling out of the pubs after closing time is the ritual called “turn the signposts around.” On the other hand you might encounter a signpost correctly pointing you toward a “phantom village.” There are two sorts. One is the classic ghost town, an intact but unpopulated village and a grim reminder of the famine or more current mass emigration. The other is nothing but a barren stretch of road, visible only on an ordinance survey map but signposted nevertheless. The Irish do not give a toss about these road side irregularities but will passionately dispute the spelling of the name of the place in question. For example, a sign for “Scramogue,” which no longer exists, was spelled incorrectly in the first place from the English translation “Scranoge.” In Irish the name of the nonexistent village is “Scranog” and it is on this point that debate will flower. Meanwhile, still orienteering my way to the County Longford farm ballet, I might if desperate enough start scanning the sky for sight of a crow.

What greeted me upon arrival at the farm was a populace swanning around in summery gala finery, drinks in hand, taped music filling loudspeakers and lulling the cows, and a gorgeous little barn theatre containing sprung maple floors, a hydraulic-winched tiered seating system, full theatre lighting, and a herd of fledgling ballerinas seated on bales of hay, warming up near the barbecue fire for the performance. “Shawbrook” Ballet Farm was opened June 19, 1987, by Anica Dawson and her dairy farmer husband, Phillip. According to Anica, it all started when she watched the Rose of Tralee contest on television and thought that the foreign contestants looked so poised compared with the Irish girls parading down the aisle, whom she thought looked dreadful. Her analysis was that they needed ballet training. With poise as her purpose she went hauling her piano around in her husband’s cattle trailer (he was secretary of the Friesian Breeder’s Club) and setting up ballet classes in any available hall in Longford. I ran a long color supplement feature piece on “Shawbrook,” liberally accompanied by Eamonn’s photographs (he had even more misadventures en route than I). The piece helped to launch the venture and today it is the home of a well-established Ballet International Summer School, with one hundred students, dormitories, visiting teachers, and R.A.D. ballet training throughout the year.

Eventually, by acquiring something of a loyal dance readership at The Sunday Tribune I was rewarded with a photograph with my byline (on September 7, 1986, to be exact). In January 1988, having at long last received my formal divorce papers, 1 reverted to my own name, Theodores, and introduced it into my column. The Tribune staff marked the occasion by congratulating me; it was univocally assumed that my name change owed to marriage and a celebratory cheeriness greeted me in the office that day. I was obliged to set the record straight. Call it fate, coincidence, or piousness, but that was the last day my photo graph appeared in the paper.

Looking back over my collection of reviews, I see the auspiciousness of the occasion when my photograph was first featured. It coincided with a review of playwright Tom MacIntyre’s highly physical, imagistic production The Great Hunger, based on a poem by Patrick Kavanagh. For me it was a landmark production in physicalizing theatre in Ireland and in opening a window to air out some profoundly exciting issues on the “moving” psyche of a culture. Only in this re-viewing of my writings have I been able to locate this moment as the most significant theatrical event during my career as a dance critic in Ireland, a moment in time when, coincidentally, two new events occurred: it was new to me to be a face in my column; it was new to Ireland, I think, to see itself so anew in this work. The Great Hungerwas performed in the cowshed “studio” of Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan, a northern border town where Tyrone Guthrie died, leaving his estate in trust to writers and artists as a residential retreat (and where I am writing this article), and then at the Peacock Theatre (part of the Abbey) and at the Edinburgh Festival, to much acclaim. I wrote about it again, for The Guardian in London, as neither dance nor theatre but on a literature page, under the title “Too Starved for Words.” I will return to this production shortly.

The Irish traditional dancing form has been a constant source of investigation for choreographers of theatre dance - an intoxicating quantity of steps for absorbing, manipulating, and transforming. The Irish National Ballet’s Playboy of the Western World, choreographed by Joan Denise Moriarty to music by the Chieftains, is a historic example. Here, play text, traditional Irish dancing, classical ballet, character acting, and music converged to create a “national folk ballet” performed internationally. The Irish National Ballet no longer exists, but in its day this production of Playboy was lively, literal, and well crafted in its handling of these elements. But little purpose would have been served or theatrical need satisfied by creating more of these ballets. As a one-off production it demonstrated entertainingly that ballet could tell a classic Irish narrative via a hybrid “step ballet” language. At the end of my first year of dance writing in Ireland I was aware of a sustained effort by choreographers to explore notions of Irish-rooted theatre dance. I gave some examples of this in my year-end “review of 1984”:

1984 seemed to stir the ethnic consciousness of choreographers. The ContemporEire Festival paved the streets with folk dance. … The Irish National Ballet revived Joan Denise Moriarty’s Playboy of the Western World, Ireland’s grass roots signature piece. Anne Courtney at Dublin City Ballet launched the new Dublin Youth Ensemble with Celtic Suite and the Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre worked at a folk hybrid in their new full length work, Lunar Parables. All in all, a good opportunity for some choreographic fantasy about national style in theatre dance.(4)

I see that my use of the word “fantasy” appears somewhat disparaging now. In fact, I intended it to embrace the notion of “play,” “magic,” “conjuring” - perhaps the supernatural act of creating a new form. Looking at some of the reviews I wrote of Lunar Parables affirms this:

Lunar Parables. . . set to haunting and poignant tunes by De Danann, Stockton’s Wing and Clannad this suite of dances explores with simplicity and innocence some of the possibilities for Irish folk-inspired contemporary dance with fertile results. Running through all the dances is a sense of community, a unity of purpose, as the dancers [perform] a rhythmically and gesturally refined ritual, at once mystical and earthy... all the while the dancers maintain a relaxed, elastic quality, yielding to gravity with soft knees, easy hips and gently curved torsos. Against this their feet intermittently cut out little staccato phrases suggesting jigs and hornpipes.

Another viewing of the work, marketed as “a moving journey into the many moods and visions of W. B. Yeats,” attempted to clarify the specifics of the style being forged but only managed a slightly more poetic description:

[The] dance space is shared with screens filled with images of ancient Celtic designs and galactic images of outer space. The mystic folk music washes over the space and the dancing, often slow-motion-like, explodes intermittently into little meteoric-paced folk fantasias of stomping, shuffling and swirling. The dancing is always circular; the dancers whirl round and round on fixed points... they revolve around each other in a kind of planetary square dance, and always, they traverse soft, spiralling journeys around themselves, maintaining throughout a... contradiction of earthiness and weightlessness.(6)

I returned to traditional Irish dancing again and again as the source (or one source at least) of these contemporary choreographic quests for some sort of signature theatre dance style. What answer was I hoping to find on the floors of pubs, church halls, theatre stages, and street festivals, contained in thick-heeled somber shoes by the thousands? In a review called “Limerick reels over,” on the Oireachtas Rince na Cruinne, where more than one thousand performances of reels, jigs, hornpipes, and figures were performed for the World Competition in Limerick, I wrote,

If dance is a measure of a culture then Irish dancing offers up a great mystery of Irish character. Nothing is in greater contrast than the gift of the gab in Irish dancing feet and the stony silence of the Irish dancing body. I marvelled as I watched one thrilling performance after another of beautifully precise clips and rolls and drags of the feet and flingings of the legs exclaiming with joy, grace and wit while high above, arms were pinned to sides, shoulders pressed down and bodies remained rigidly erect.(7)

At every opportunity I “plugged” the issue of an Irish theatre dance style waiting to he born:

[The] first new company to hit the floorboards... since the axing of the Irish National Ballet and the Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre… is Irish Dance Works. Reel to Reel, Cois na Farray! and Poguetry in Motion Part II explored some of the ways in which traditional Irish dance steps, jazz, tap and classical vocabularies can rub up against each other with electrifying potential.(8)

And another example:

With its magnificent new Theatre Tralee near completion Ireland’s national folk company Siamsa Tire is poised for the possibility of transforming into a major theatre dance company of Ireland - if it wants to. For years Siamsa Tire, under the artistic direction of Father Patrick Ahern, have gathered, preserved and performed dance and song from the environs of North Kerry... The Arts Council funded project Between Two Worlds (Idir Eatarthu) with choreography by Anne Courtney and music by Michael O’Suilleabhain… examines the relationship between the traditional and the con temporary... The dance exposes some scintillating possibilities for a new ethnically relevant theatre dance. (9)

And so on and so on. From the examples I have quoted, it would be reasonable for the reader to assume that my dance reviewing in Ire land was rather restricted, an impression I should put right. Despite my fascination with the issue, no significant “Irish” dance theatre emerged in the ten years I was there. Rather, choreographers created dances for Irish audiences to look at. The dancemakers—Irish, American, continental, amateur, and professional - created classical ballets, folkloric spectacles, postmodern dance installations, contemporary chamber works, epics and studio “events,” structured improvisations, succinct and rambling narratives, and poetic and punk dances. The more I wrote, the more there seemed to be to write about. The varieties of immediacy and impact of the body in space were the common reference point for choreographers. The net asset of these endeavours has been the simple/profound claim that dance exists here, that it is alive and present in this country. Seona Mac Reamoinn, who took over the dance writing at the Tribune when I left (my definition of a pioneer: one who carves out a dance column that continues under new editorship and with a new critic), asked, in her controversial commentary on Riverdance, “If we are seeking a way to create a future for Irish dance will it be through some yet unidentified organic process or through more immediate acculturation and attachment technique?”(10)

“Organic process” is surely the means by which an Irish theatre dance will take form. “Attachment techniques,” whereby Irish traditional dance steps and rhythms infiltrate other theatrical dance conventions and vocabularies, may not oppose this organic process in any way, but may rather be a part of it. But only a part of it. The mesmeric rhythms, the fleet-footedness, the tight unison corps work, the verticality and boundedness of torsos, the gesturing eloquence of legs and feet, the speed, the precision, the drivenness of Irish traditional dancing, and the dialogue between music and body rhythms are ever vivid corporeal offerings to choreographers. (The best traditional Irish dancing I ever saw was an impromptu performance by an actor, Ray McBride, in the middle of a De Danan concert at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Astaire easily came to mind.) And the solitariness of Irish dancing, with its historic resistance to physical touching (or as one Irish classical choreographer put it, “Ireland: country responsible for the extinction of the pas de deux”) is an even more intriguing challenge to penetrate. There is no doubt that these characteristics and features can and do contribute to the organic evolution of a physical identity in Irish theatre dance, and dance theatre. From well before Playboy of the Western World to post-Riverdance, many choreographers have grappled (and still do) with the shaping of a theatre dance language that has relevance and resonance. But as long as Irish traditional dancing continues to be observed, manipulated, grafted, or even “acculturated” as a “culture of steps,” its capacity as a heritage - culturally and theatrically empowering - is devalued. That which is “unidentified” in the organic process that Seona Mac Reamoinn refers to is, I believe, a key issue in any discussion about national style and has more to do with behavior than with steps. And it is here that I return to Tom MacIntyre’s The Great Hunger. My Sunday Tribune piece described it in this way:

In Tom MacIntyre’s The Great Hunger there is a scene in which Patrick Maguire (Tom Hickey) and his mates (played by Vincent O’Neill and Conal Kearney) lean on each other in a vacant stupor and guzzle their Guinness. In this grunting support structure, slurps, stares, shrugs and shifts of weight are more articulate than any words spoken... The Great Hunger introduces the value of words in a new way... In one scene Tom Hickey as Maguire kneels before “Mother” (a mysterious wooden concoction that looks like a sphinx and a chest of drawers combined) and pounds his fist into her “chest”. Over and over and over he pounds. Sometimes his pounding is like an axe splitting wood. Sometimes it is the desperate pounding of a fist on a chest in an effort to revive a heartbeat - to bring about life again. In another scene, Maguire and the others labour along rows of potatoes, filling their buckets to a cacophony of coughs, hacks and splutters. Each bucket is filled and dumped out with a belligerent crashing and all the while Maguire calls out for his dog and mutters: “never where he’s wanted” with resigned fury.

The repetition of ritual is pursued relentlessly. There is the ritual of pouring water from a bucket to a kettle, the ritual of folding and unfolding cloth, the ritual of mass... Above all... The Great Hunger is a ritual of the unsaid, a ritual of stillness. In what is surely the most magnificent pas de deux of timing I have seen in any ballet, Hickey and Kearney edge their way towards each other behind a fence like alert animals sniffing and staking out their territory. Face to face they begin to batter each other with their hats in tense fits and starts. Their bodies literally hiccup with jabs and jerks and withdrawals. When the game is over and they can no longer out-anticipate each other’s attacks, they stare out over the audience and slump over the fence like two obsolete scarecrows. The language has been eloquent. Not a word has been spoken.”(11)

This production answered the search for a physical identity in Irish theatre, and also in dance, possibly more aptly than any of the amalgamations between classical or contemporary dance and tradition al Irish dancing, including the blockbusting Riverdance. The Great Hunger deconstructed both language and behavior in Irish culture and offered it in distilled visceral and visual imagery, anchored in an archetypal consciousness of a whole culture, a living Ireland. In this country language is eloquent, idiom-rich, and maddeningly witty. Words are not economical but luxurious, vividly accented, uttered with almightiness or stunningly withheld. MacIntyre’s restraint and sparseness with words in a theatre traditionally steeped in them stripped a culture down to its bare rituals, its temperament and composition. The intense physicality of Irish theatre is in its very resistance to movement. On these terms it can summon a breathtakingly tense or poignant dynamic. At other times it appears comical, threatening, or mysterious. The immense musicality of language in Ireland and in Irish theatre forces the contradiction of a static body culture into stark view. Likewise, the exuberant traditional dancing form constantly contradicts itself in the rigor of its precision and uniformity - the primitive and the danse d’école in constant check and balance. These contradictions and resistances are about paradox - Ireland’s national asset. In its rich exploration of resistance - its potency and bereftness - The Great Hunger forges a raw and struggling identity for the physical language of theatre and clears a path less travelled but more truthful and viable. Dance-theatremakers would do well to look deeply at this work.

It has often been said that there is great sympathy and affinity between the spirit of Poland and Ireland. Polish theatre is readily identifiable in the way stage space is used, or in its use of light and dark, or in the crystal-clear architecture of each physical performance moment of its ensemble, and so forth. The physicality that distinguishes Polish theatre is in some momentous way consistently truthful, enduring. Irish theatre dance and dance theatre may find it more profitable to look to Kantor rather than the ceili for relevant inspiration. Both sources, Kantor and MacIntyre’s Hunger, poetically and austerely build physical imagery from the behavior of a culture. The ways in which language in Ireland has given physical shape to its utterances, while the body at tempts to defer to the spoken word; the ways in which living rituals still choreograph the culture; the mercurial quickness of traditional steps and rhythms against the slow-tempoed patient fatalism of the day-to- day (“if the bus comes I’m going there”); the tolerance and grudgingness; the flashiness of feet against the chastely rigid torso; the song drunk and the erotically famished - These are the aesthetics of a culture that revealed themselves to me over ten years of looking at dance and living a life in Ireland. The interface between the delirious Celtic spectacle that Riverdance has produced, where the world of unicorns, harps, and mist is invaded by battalions of crackling hoofers, and the alienated, eccentric ritualisms of The Great Hunger will necessarily take a long time to occur. Between two worlds (“Idir Eatarthu”), dance and theatre, the physical shape of things to come is beginning to reveal itself to choreographers The search for a national style in theatre dance and dance theatre is invested with a renewed sense of purpose. I look forward to reading what emerges in the dance column of the very capable new critic as she puts it into perspective.

Notes

All references are to The Sunday Tribune, Dublin.

1. December 2, 1984.
2. June 28, 1987.
3. August 30, 1987.
4. January 6, 1985.
5. October 19, 1984.
6. December 30, 1984.
7. March 30, 1986.
8. July 6, 1989.
9. September 9, 1990.
10. February 12, 1995.
11. September 7, 1986.

Appendix

Dance Events in Eire during The Sunday Tribune Dance Column 1984—1992

1984 Peter Brinson, Head of Research and Community Development at the Laban Centre in London, is commissioned by the Irish Arts Council to prepare a survey of dance in Ireland.
June 1984 Tenth anniversary of the Irish National Ballet (Cork). Launch of the Irish Youth Ballet (Dublin). Refurbishment of Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, christened with a performance of The Sleeping Beauty by Northern Ballet Theatre. Trinity College Dublin launches the Samuel Beckett Centre for Theatre Studies, a conservatory program for acting training and featuring the Movement for Actors course (my first appointment at TCD).
October 1984 In Dublin, my first view of Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre (established in 1977 with the objective of developing an Irish-reflected basis for contemporary dance”) in Lunar Parables at the ContemporEire Festival. Revival of Irish National Ballet’s Playboy of the Western World , choreographed by Joan Denise Moriarty. Debut of Irish Youth Ballet at Olympia Theatre, with an all-female east in Ashton’s Les Patineurs, Petipa’s Paquita, and Bournonville’s Napoli.
December 1984 In Dublin, Anna Sokolow mounts a program of works on the Dublin City Ballet.
February 1985 EEC Cultural Committee provides the first funding for Dance Exchange, to foster activity among EEC-based companies, directors, and choreographers. Flora Cushman (artistic co-director of Béjart’s International School, Mudra, in Brussels) conducts a sponsored residency with Irish National Ballet in Cork to train the dancers in Graham technique in preparation for a new work. DublinContemporaiy Dance Theatre collaborates with the New York-based choreographer Yoshiko Chuma and her School of Hard Knocks on a new work, and expands company.
April 1985 The seventy-member Georgian State Dance Company appears at National Concert Hall in Dublin.
May 1985 Recommendations in Peter Brinson’s survey report The Dancer and the Dance launched: “Ireland is to go modern”; Irish National Ballet reorganized and reduced; Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre increased budget and augmented company, with objective to “produce truly Irish forms of theatre dance”; need to estahlish a national school of training; launch of Dance News Ireland and plans for a national dance archives. Total dance budget (Arts Council): £375,000.
June 1985 First professional choreographers’ training course at Wexford’s Movement Month.
September 1985 Dublin Theatre Festival, with Jennifer Muller.
February 1986 Pas de Deux Dance Company begins a series of studio dance events for classical ballet performance in Dublin. Launch of a new venture called Dance Students Workshops at the Dublin Dance Centre, a new location for dance training, rehearsing, and performance events. In response to the Brinson report Radio Telefis Eireann airs “Exhibit A” program on dance in Ireland.
March 1986 National Manpower Service and Dublin Dance Centre launch a six-month trial schools Outreach in Dance Project, directed by Paul Johnson. Launch at Dublin Dance Centre of Overdrive, Ire land’s first “pure” jazz dance company.
June 1986 Dublin City Ballet shuts down. Launch of Rubato Dance Company by Fiona Quilligan, which introduces studio-based performance or the “dance salon” concept into the dance community in Dublin. Launch of Irish Theatre Ballet by Babil Gandara, with the objective to merge strong Irish folk tradition with classical ballet and nurture an Irish-trained classical ballet company with a portable repertoire. Return of Anna Sokolow to Dublin City Ballet’s season at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, with her work Magritte Magritte .
July 1986 The Bolshoi Ballet returns to Dublin after twenty years.
August 1986 Irish National Ballet is left without an artistic director following the resignation of Joan Denise Moriarty.
September 1986 Tom MacIntyre’s production of The Great Hunger, directed by Patrick Mason, takes place at the Peacock Theatre.
October 1986 Irish National Ballet gets a new artistic director, Annelli Vuorenjuuri-Robinson from Finland, and honors the fiftieth anniversary of Garcia Lorca’s death with The House of Bernarda Alba at the Abbey Theatre. Dublin Theatre Festival. Appearance of Peking Opera.
January 1987 Launch of Adrienne Brown’s New Balance dance company in Dublin.
February 1987 Eighty-four-year-old John Regan, former dancer with Diaghilev in Paris in the 1920s, performs a pas de deux at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, partnering his fifth wife, Joanna Banks.
August 1987 My first encounter with the “Shawbrook” Ballet Farm in County Longford, which launches the International Summer School in Ballet and Choreography.
September 1987 Irish National Ballet’s farewell performance at the Everyman Theatre in Cork, as company is downsized and contracts reduced from fifty-two to thirty-four weeks.
October 1987 Jan Montague launches the Dublin Performing Arts School, a three-year professional dance training course, at the Dublin Dance Centre.
1988 Shutdown of Irish Theatre Ballet.
April 1988 Arts Council axes all funding to Irish National Ballet.
May 1988 Deirdre O’Donohue establishes the first national training course in R.A.D. teachers’ certification at her newly opened Nation al Academy of Dance in Dublin.
July 1988 First visit of Kirov Ballet to Ire land, performing on a stage especially built for the occasion at the Royal Dublin Society at Simmonscourt.
October 1988 Dublin Theatre Festival, including Groupe Emile Dubois.
January 1989 The Sunday Tribune Arts Awards feature dance as a category for the first time. Taoiseach Charles Haughey gives £120,000 lifeline to Irish National Ballet to resurrect it after the termination of Arts Council funding; new artistic director, Patrick Murray, relaunches the company at Cork Opera House with Oscar , choreographed by Domy Reiter-Soffer.
March 1989 Arts Counci1 terminates all funding for Irish National Ballet and Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre; underfunded dance world in Ireland in perilous state.
July 1989 Launch in Dublin of Irish Dance Works company, which merges traditional Irish dance forms, classical ballet, tap and jazz.
August 1989 Return visit of Bolshoi Ballet to Ireland in Point Depot Theatre in Dublin.
September 1989 Launch of Irish Youth Dance Company, sponsored by the Arts Council to “nurture the process of theatre dance by providing opportunities in training and experimentation.” Dance Council of Ireland hosts “Future of Dance in Ireland” forum as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Debut of the new Dance Theatre of Ireland (formerly Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre) in a new work, La Beauté des Fleurs, a full-length butoh-inspired work prepared in collaboration with French choreographers Pierre Doussaint and Isabelle Dubouloz. Ballet Rambert at the Olympia. Launch of National Choreographers Course. Launch of New Music/New Dance Festival.
December 1989 Samuel Beckett dies.
January 1990 Dance Thetre of Ireland nominated for The Sunday Times Arts Award in dance.
April 1990 New Music/New Dance Festival in Dublin.
June 1990 Kirov Ballet returns to Dublin at Point Depot Theatre.
September 1990 Siamsa Tire National Folk Theatre of Ireland moves to new resident theatre in Tralee, County Kerry. Arts Council sponsors special performance work, Between Two Worlds.
October 1990 Dublin Theatre Festival: The Kosh, 42nd Street.
November 1990 Dance Theatre of Ireland launches itself as the major contemporary dance company with a season al the Tivoli Theatre in Dublin; sets designed by Nigel Rolfe. New performance art company, I-Contact, debuts at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, with Zero Crossing, choreographer Snaggy O‘Sullivan, composer Roger Doyle, dancer Cindy Cummings, and video installation artists.
December 1990 The Sunday Pick of the Year’s Best highlights John Scott for accomplishments in choreography for The Titanic by Co-Motion Theatre Company al the Dublin Theatre Festival, along with Snaggy O’Sullivan for Zero Crossing.
1991 Dublin is Cultural Capital of Europe. Scottish Ballet production of The Nutcracker at the Point Depot Theatre in Dublin. University of Limerick (NIHE), Thomond College, establishes a dance program and its new Dance in Education company, Daghda, starts touring.
June 1991 Eight young Irish ballet students begin a pilot project, studying in Perm for one year; the objective is to establish a Russian Irish ballet company in Ireland. Daghda creates a work for Limerick’s “Treaty 300” celebrations.
July 1991 Vaganova Ballet Academy hosts a summer ballet school for Irish dancers at Cork Opera House; exchange program for Irish students to Leningrad launched.
February 1992 In Dublin a new and very ambitious multisite work, Tower of Babel, by I-Contact presented at the new Museum of Modern Art at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.
May 1992 Choreographer John Scott establishes the Irish Modern Dance Theatre.
Annual events: Dublin Theatre Festival, Wexford Movement Month, New Music/New Dance Festival, Dublin Grand Opera Ballets, Belfast Arts Festival.