It's been almost ten years since Jean Butler created her first contemporary dance performance, but her artistic concerns haven't changed much since. Hurry is her latest work and it shows how she refuses to jettison her formative Irish dance training in search of a new contemporary dance aesthetic. Instead, Butler remains constantly curious about how she can reconcile her current artistic concerns with the knowledge her body acquired through years of Irish step dance.
Currently immersed in New York’s contemporary dance community, her journey has involved much more than learning a new vocabulary. It’s more like learning a whole new grammatical structure and way of communicating. The steps have changed, but so too has the manner of performance and conceptual premise. Traditional Irish step-dance presentational styles have been replaced by more introspective performances, where the aim is to make the audience lean slightly forward rather than sit back. It has been a long process, but Hurry has a palpable sense of completeness, a self-confidence in reconciliation of Butler’s past and present.
The stage is shorn of props, a de-cluttered canvas accented with Corban Walker’s stage design consisting of a band of steel cables that slowly descends along one wall of the stage and shoot across the back wall. Butler, barefoot and dressed in black workout gear, stands at the side and gazes on the empty stage and then gradually feels her way through movement sequences. Constantly angular, and almost always tracing straight-line paths, she senses her way from move to move. At one point her foot points forward, toes outstretched, then taps the ground ahead like a blind person’s cane. At other times she stands still, making minute shifts as if sensing how the tiny adjustments feel.
Such aesthetic self-examination can often make dull theatre, but Hurry is equally seductive and intriguing. It represents a significant moment in Butler’s artistic journey: her next moves will be fascinating.