Strange but natural
The first theatre production I created was Life in the Folds in 2000, a dance-theatre performance based on the prose poems of Belgian artist and writer Henri Michaux (1899-1984). It was the first exploration of what’s become a fundamental part of my practice of polyphonic voicing and characterisation (ongoing projects include Hamlet and Othello). Life in the Folds was a collaboration with Jenny Boot, an actor I met at drama school in London who was also trained in ballet and tap dance. I had spent my childhood doing the rounds of Irish dance competitions, training with Sheila Nolan in Newry, Northern Ireland; from a very young age Ulster and All Ireland championships were major dates in my yearly calendar. Jenny and I shared an enthusiasm for movement-based theatre and questions of form, and we wanted to fuse our passion for percussive dance with Michaux’s eerily comic prose poetry. The mix of Irish and tap dance with Michaux’s text was a startling and quite peculiar combination, but we never once questioned our mutual, youthful impulse.
Michaux was one of the most unusually inventive of twentieth century French writer-artists, and his work explores obsessive themes of pain, endurance, fragility, revenge. Ephemeral characters are impaled on spears, roasted on spits, stuffed into sacks, ground into sausage meat, buffeted by the wind. His renown as a visual artist is due partly to his distinctive calligraphic line drawings created while he was taking the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, an experiment he began following the devastating death of his wife in a tragic accident. Inspired by the Chinese and Japanese notion that the ideograms of a poem are composed not only for the ear but also for the eye, these densely detailed and hypnotic works portray signs and lines in dizzying motion: are they notation or physical gestures or dancing figures? As the poet Octavio Paz explains in his 1967 introduction to Michaux’s Miserable Miracle:
‘The rhythm and the movement of the lines bring to mind a kind of curious musical notation, except that we are confronted not with a method of recording sounds but with vortexes, gashes, interweavings of being. Incisions in the bark of time, characters and forms "more palpable than legible", these sketches are (...) a step beyond the sign and the image, something transcending words and lines.’
What could such abstract and exuberant expressionism have to do with Irish dance? Why use this traditional form to express some of the most surreal texts in twentieth century European literature? At the time, I didn’t consider my choice arbitrary. In fact, I don’t think I considered it much at all. Sometimes an idea is borne simply from the desire to work with someone or from a particular inspiration. It felt natural. Retrospectively perhaps this eccentric concoction makes sense. The French writer André Gide once described Michaux's philosophy as one that emphasizes ‘the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.’ My experience growing up in the Irish dance world offered a bounty of strangeness: starched costumes, kilts, fake tan, ringlets, tiaras, ruthless competition and – dare I say it? – nepotism, not to mention the absence of arm movements. The scene was more Strictly Ballroom than a hotbed for the experimental avant-garde. Somehow I doubt it was this kind of strangeness that Michaux had in mind.
Yet, whether it was watching Sheila my teacher in a skirt and nylons show us her new version of Planxty Davis in class, or finding the sense of flight required for the two long side-clicks at the end of my Downfall of Paris, or seeing for the first time dancer Anne Burke traverse the stage at top speed on full pointe in hard shoe, or watching Colin Dunne in a rehearsal room map out a first draft of his choreography to a piano composition by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, I often had the feeling that this was a subtle and beautiful art form. I had the same intense pleasure in these moments as I do now when a company of actors connect with the nub of a scene or contact each other in an improvisational flow. A well-crafted and -executed Irish dance move can be as fine as a line of Elizabethan verse. Yet it was not until Riverdance exploded onto our screens that Irish dance was considered artistically noteworthy on the Irish and world stage (in contrast with traditional music). No sooner did I begin to feel less sheepish at revealing my Irish dance heritage when I became disappointed at how quickly Irish dance’s creative makeover spawned a predictable palette of formulaic fare: a reconfigured Strictly Ballroom for international export.
Could Irish dance graduate into full artistic expression, leaving behind all notion of feats and ‘heats’? Had Irish dance leaped from the traditional school hall to the West-End stage without much transition and without much engagement with contemporary performance along the way, and if not, did that even matter? I found myself wondering if traditional Irish dance could ever be taken seriously as ‘art.’ Employing an Irish dance vocabulary to dramatise Michaux’s hauntingly existential writing was my own small initial step towards releasing my experience of the dance from the shackles of condescension and populism. Already to describe it as Irish dance rather than Irish dancing, on a par with contemporary dance or Jazz dance, for example, was significant. Nobody, as far as I am aware, refers to contemporary dancing. To make matters worse, to categorise what I was doing as ‘dance-theatre’ was decidedly highfalutin.
Could I use this physical vocabulary to express an experience beyond Irishness? Could it be disaggregated from its competitive context and cultural tradition, and, like any good artistic technique, serve to dramatise poetry that conveys the turbulence of human experience? Could it be loosened from the confines of its folk identity, and be seen as an expressive theatrical form with its full range of dynamics? Could Irish dance be a vehicle for literary comedy, rather than faintly risible fodder for someone else’s satire? Could the final reception of my efforts by a London audience be met with something other than a puzzled, ‘othering’ gaze?
Perhaps Irish dance has been slower than some indigenous forms to be centred or recognised in international artistic programming as relevant. Along with Wales, Ireland was of course England’s first and most enduring colony, but our traditional music and dance are rarely acknowledged as integral parts of anti-colonial repertoire. It is not a competition, of course (hard though that is for anIrish dancer to grasp), and all we can do is take responsibility for our contribution, but perhaps there is work to be done – both within and without our Irish dance and artistic communities – to consider these steps of ours as incorporating true craft and artistry, as well as some basic political principles of inclusion and solidarity. Yes, the story of the virtuosic, Olympian aspect of Irish dance is well known and prevails, but more importantly, do we see ourselves as part of the legacy of international performance at large? Even though when Jenny and I set out to create Life in the Folds we felt part of a continuum of contemporary theatre practitioners and worked with synergy and joy, I personally struggled to shake off an artistic inferiority complex: would the creative force of our endeavour be judged and potentially written off because of its ‘folky’ form? Perhaps one of the reasons I felt this was that suddenly, and ironically, I felt more conspicuously Irish in London, an identity I never wished to feel defined by or highlight in my work. But if I wanted to be taken seriously as an experimental theatre-maker, why on earth was I doing a show full of jigs and reels? It was strange, but natural.
This impulse and these questions brought me into contact with Colin Dunne, through an introduction by Máire Clerkin, and part of my desire to direct Out Of Time and Concert, was realising that it was possible to innovate theatrically through the form ofIrish dance, in the way that Israel Galván and Rocío Molina have done in such striking ways with Flamenco. By the time Colin and I met, I had left Irish dance behind to focus on directing theatre, and I recognised that the experimentation I was mining in my theatre work with text, actors and composition, he was excavating with the Irish dance form itself. We both had something to say about Irish dance, and cared about elevating its artistic status. There was an alignment: Colin on the inside and me on the outside. While Life in the Folds explored the fragility of living and surviving, Out Of Time explored Colin’s complex relationship with Irish dance and Concert, along with our co-collaborator Mel Mercier, explored Colin’s relationship with Irish music, in particular the work of Tommie Potts. All of these shows were intimate and personal in different ways, but at the heart of them was a gesture of lifting Irish dance into the arena of what I see as ‘art’, where it is in dialogue with something other than itself: with other traditions, other artists and other meanings, as well as with ourselves.
Sinéad Rushe is a theatre director and acting coach. She is Lead Acting Tutor at RADA London and Artistic Director of Creative Actor Training. She trained at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama London, Trinity College Dublin, University of Paris 8/Ecole Normale Supérieure. She is the author of Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique: A Practitioner’s Guide (Bloomsbury 2019) and co-translator into French of four plays by Howard Barker (Editions Théâtrales). Directing credits include: Who’s There?, Wyatt Theatre USA (Granada Artist in Residence 2024); Othello, Riverside Studios London, with Iago played by 3 actors (What’s OnStage nominee Best Off West End Production/Offie Nominee Best Performance Ensemble); AntigoneNOW, CairoInternational Festival of Experimental Theatre, Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center; Loaded, Old Rep Birmingham, The Place London; Concert,The Pit, Barbican, Baryshnikov Arts Centre, New York (Gradam Comharcheoil TG42018 Award-Winner/New York Bessie Award Nominee); Night Just Before the Forests, Macau Arts Festival, China; Out of Time, The Pit, Barbican, Baryshnikov Arts Centre (Olivier/DanceCritic’s Circle Award Nominee – Colin Dunne).