Emma Martin: ‘Dance can expand our hearts. That’s where I find my sense of spirituality’

As you climb the stairs to the Digital Gallery at the Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, in Carlow, a quote in red Gothic script comes into view on the wall. “It’s good to think about the END. It comes to us all.” Beneath it are the words Dark Days Need Ceremony, which is the title of a project by the choreographer Emma Martin. Its first part, King | Shrine, which is about to be transported to Dublin for this month’s dance festival, lies behind a black curtain.

Slip past it and, as your eyes get used to the near total darkness of the gallery, you’ll see a low but volcanic-looking peak of candles and melted wax surrounded by religious artefacts, plus old CDs, crushed drink cans and other detritus. A soundscore is playing, with text that describes an apocalypse and suggests a new beginning for the planet. This apocalypse isn’t defined, but it’s not hard to imagine that it’s one brought about by the unfolding realities of climate change.

This is Shrine, an installation that Martin has made with the theatre designer Katie Davenport. It works by itself as a 30-minute experience, but it’s best seen in tandem with a performance of King, a dance solo for Mufutau Yusuf. (Both parts debuted at Visual in February.)

“As two pieces, King | Shrine is like burning down the house in order to build a new one,” says Martin. “The first part is a simple but sweaty dance, full of swagger and freedom. It is a kind of love letter to the heart and soul, a celebration of humanity and the idea of kingliness in all of us. For me the dance is like a butterfly in the volcano. It’s him at the edge of the volcano. And then he leaves the space – and leaves us in the apocalypse with Shrine. The audience just stay together and listen to our version of the apocalypse, and then imagine a new ‘In the beginning’, but they’re still in the energetic afterglow of the dance they’ve just received.”

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If a friend has a baby I’d light a candle. It just feels like the right thing to do. I’m not a religious person, but I really do love going into churches and lighting a candle and just having a moment

—  Emma Martin

Martin and Davenport’s creation is a mixture of the revered and the ordinary, perhaps reflecting what Ireland’s grottoes can be like today, the prostrate pious replaced by vaping, drinking teenagers. A central candle dominates the installation, like a mountain peak, with wax congealed around it. “I love lighting candles,” says Martin. “If a friend has a baby, I’d light a candle. It just feels like the right thing to do. I’m not a religious person, but I really do love going into churches and lighting a candle and just having a moment. That’s the feeling I wanted to create in the exhibition space.”

She had intended for the giant candle to be lit during the exhibition, but safety regulations got in the way. The idea of an ever-increasing volume of wax spreading through the installation suggests a sense of life and growth, but for Martin the significance goes even deeper.

“I saw a quote about shrine wax in grottoes and how there is a build-up of wax over years. It is felt that all of that melted wax carries the potency of all the prayers and hopes that were put into every single lighted candle.”

Sound and light are Martin’s main allies. The lighting designer Stephen Dodd is a frequent creative partner. “It was a treat for Stephen and I to go into a gallery space and not a theatre space. I think our collaboration over the last few years has pushed us both in a way where we’re happy to accept limitations,” she says. “We didn’t have a lighting rig. There’s no side lighting, just top lighting. And there’s no colour.”

The soundscape for Shrine has been created by the musician Mick Donohoe, aka T-Woc, who also plays live during King. “Over the last few years I’ve been working with music artists who aren’t used to making dance shows, because they don’t know the rules and push things,” says Martin. “I invite them to collaborate usually because I’m a fan of their music in the first place, and I want to dance to it. That feels important, using music that makes you want to move.”

The Digital Gallery has a bench where you can sit and listen to the sounds and watch the changing lights. “Looking at the exhibition is different from how we would be expected to watch a performance,” says Martin. These days, I feel, we’re so overwhelmed with visual media, like bingeable shows on Netflix or multiple-part podcasts. We need to get out of that linear space and slow down and feel things more.”

The choreographer is also averse to prescriptive dance.

“For the past few years I was getting very weary of the question of, ‘What’s it about?’ If dance is too literal it loses its potency. So that’s been a guiding light for me, of making things ‘for’ rather than ‘about’. I don’t want to make a literal dance about how climate change is happening and how we need to do something about it. But I can reflect a common sense of dread about what’s happening not just with climate change but politically, and how there are dangerous people in positions of power right now.”

What can her dance offer in response?

“With my work overall, I think that each piece feels like an emotional, spiritual and physical workout; those three things are the thread that connects it all and keeps me making dances. In everything my hope is that the body becomes an entire universe of flesh and energy, beaming out vibrations of feeling to the audience, enveloping them in this unspoken communication, sharing time and air and allowing rhythm, dreams, shape, breath, sweat, footslaps, expression and effort be the thing, not be about the thing. I also want it to mean something for the dancers. Complicated choreography and virtuosity only go so far without intent.”

And is that enough?

“I do think that there’s something in dance that can lift our chest and that art in general that can expand our hearts. That’s where I find a sense of spirituality for myself.”

King | Shrine is at the Complex, Smithfield, Dublin 7, on Thursday, May 25th, and Friday, May 26th, as part of Dublin Dance Festival