The connections between dancing, music and singing is up for grabs in a new collaboration between traditional music and contemporary dance, writes Arminta Wallace
DANCE IS on something of a high in Ireland at the moment. Peep into any of the studio spaces in DanceHouse, the name of Dance Ireland and Dublin City Council's vibrant building on Foley Street, and you never know what you might see - a single dancer working in intense silence; a crowd of boisterous senior citizens dancing in their chairs amid gales of laughter; a flamenco class. It's almost certain that all kinds of collaborations and cross-fertilisations will take place here as a sense of community builds up - but so far, collaborations between Irish traditional music and Irish contemporary dance have been relatively rare.
Which is why Éigse Carlow Arts Festival decided to invite composer Micheál Ó Súilleabháin and choreographer Liz Roche to create a new piece for this year's festival. After an initial exchange of ideas by phone and e-mail, they've come together in a light-filled studio in DanceHouse to make music become movement - and vice versa. Four dancers, of whom Roche herself is one, weave fluid patterns which seem to give three-dimensional form to Ó Súilleabháin's sinuous, rhythmic soundtrack.
But that's not really right. Contemporary dance and traditional music are difficult enough to describe in words as it is; put them together, and you almost need to invent a new language.
The music isn't a soundtrack - it's part of the piece. And the dance movements, as they happen, aren't nearly as abstract as the words "fluid patterns" imply.
"One of the reasons I wanted to make a piece like this," says Roche, "is that you get tired of trying to be too cool. Contemporary dance is often caught up in abstract ways of working, and in music that's not particularly lyrical. Often you would come with these over-arching concepts, you know? 'We're going to work with the idea of resilience'. Or whatever. For this project I'm just trying to glean movement and emotion. I wanted to look at a somewhat easier connection between dancing and music and singing. No, not easier. More physical, maybe. Heartier."
Working with those three elements - dancing and music and singing - is, in this context, a complex business. In traditional and contemporary dance circles, totally different conventions apply to relationships between one element and another. The ambiguity is reflected in the title of the piece, Unsung.
"It's a very strange word," says Ó Súilleabháin. "I tried to translate it into Irish, and I couldn't. But the song is very much part of it, because the minute you say the word the song is potentially there."
Song will indeed be a major part of Unsung, in the shape of the sean-nós singer Iarla O Lionaird. The cellists Kate Ellis and the saxophonist Kenneth Edge will also join Ó Súilleabháin on piano to create a quartet of musicians, matching the four dancers: Roche, Katherine O'Malley, Grant McLay and Philip Connaughton.
The starting point for the piece is the traditional stand-off between dance and music. "It has always been a point of interest for me," says Ó Súilleabháin, "that in Irish traditional dance music, as long as you have a constant metre - jigs and reels and hornpipes - there are ways of dancing to those. But the minute you pull the metre and you get what we normally refer to as sean-nós, the dance doesn't follow into that space. Now what makes it even more interesting to me, as a musician, is that there are tunes which are dance tunes - which have a metre - but the musicians are able to pull the rug on the rhythm and it collapses into a slow air.
"I've always wondered what would happen," he adds, "if the dancer did what the piper is doing. I don't know what it would be like - perhaps a Korean court dance, or something." Roche, for her part, is equally fascinated by the way in which traditional dance is focused in the feet while contemporary dance uses the whole body. "I know it's not a particularly new observation, and I don't want to get into a huge political thing - but I'm very conscious of moving into a sense of openness, or a softening," she says.
Her own experiences of meeting points between traditional and contemporary dance have not, she adds with a wry smile, always been happy ones. "My sister is a dancer as well, and at family gatherings when we were younger, people would say 'Oh, get up and dance for us'. And we'd be, like, 'I'm sorry, but we're contemporary dancers'. Or you might just do something - and it would be painful. They'd be so unimpressed with you. And everybody else could get up and play and dance or whatever. So I had a sense, with this piece, of wanting to bring something to this table. I'm going to pretend that somebody says, 'Get up and give us a dance, Lizzie'. And it's all ready. And they're all impressed."
Ready or not, Unsung aims to create a feeling of spontaneity - which will be enhanced through its being performed at the intimate, and recently refurbished, Townhall Theatre in Carlow. Audience and performers will be very close together, creating a kind of session environment. Unsung will also explore the curious dynamic of a session, which is both spontaneous and highly structured. In its finished form the piece will last for about 50 minutes.
"We're floating around at the moment, but a lot will happen in the next six days," says Roche. The idea, however, is to maintain as much dynamism and immediacy as possible. "There's a tendency in contemporary dance to insist on a beginning and an end - to suggest that some transformation has to have occurred. You start the piece in one way, and by the time you end there's a change. But here we don't need to do anything, just be with the music. It's not so much what we do, as how we end up doing it. It's a happening, in that sense."
As is the traditional session, Ó Súilleabháin points out. "Musicians come to a session with a repertoire of tunes. Most musicians seem to have about a hundred tunes - they won't have the same hundred, but there's enough of an overlap and they exchange. It's a bit like playing cards. You're in a circle in the corner of the pub and you're not playing for an audience, yet you're surrounded by people. It's a game, but it's also a very serious matter. People who aren't into trad think of the diddley-eye thing - but in fact it's spiritual and religious and deeply significant. It's a way of being. But it's also social."
A similar dynamic will, they both hope, spring up when Unsung is performed live. "The music being used for rehearsals is a computer version of the score, which emphasises its robotic aspects," says Ó Súilleabháin. "But when we're actually playing it, there are all sorts of ways of pulling a slight microsecond back and having a little bit of fun. That's where a bit of life - a bit of 'whoooosh', actually - comes into it." A bit of "whooosh"? Sounds good to me.
Unsung is at the Townhall Theatre in Carlow on Sat June 14 and Sunday June 15 at 8pm
