Deirdre Mulrooney's Diary

Ever thought about how architecture affects us?  

Moving the audience around, choreographer Tere O’Connor and his team revealed nooks and crannies, as well as magnificent and sometimes bricked-up arches, that had never registered with us before in the former church of SS Michael & John’s.  
Sarah Skaggs (Dances for Airports), there to see her fellow downtown dance artist, commented how “this festival is full of surprises,” when she walked into SS Michael and John’s vaulted space.  

Obediently, Jean Butler, NY dance artist Jodi Melnick (who was ‘dance mentor’ to Jean in does she take sugar?, and choreographed one of Jenny Roche’s solos in Solo³), Colin Dunne, and actor Stephen Rea all carried their chairs around the immense space as instructed by the four amazing dancers.

These were Mathew Rogers, Hilary Clark, Christopher Williams (who almost landed in Jean Butler’s lap in a previous performance of the same show in New York), and Heather Olson (who has been dancing with O’Connor for ten years now).   
In the post-show discussion, one of the dancers mentioned his immense “emotional response,” to the former arches that have been bricked up.  Emotional responses to bygone arches?  Yes – O’Connor and his company are the most architecturally sensitive beings that I have ever come across.  Part of their mission is to invite us to experience anew our own individual responses to space, to walls, to architecture.   

No wonder this piece is called Rammed Earth – a kind of environmentally friendly, age-old building technique, involving earth.  (Together with Slovenian group Betontanc, or “cement dance,” could this be a festival theme emerging?  Or is it just the zeitgeist?)
Well known for being against the “standardisation of human beings,” O’Connor could have been well pleased by last night’s audience, who were a highly eclectic and individualistic bunch.   

He masterminded a choreography that moved New York downtown dance-artists, Irish independent choreographers, contemporary dancers, theatre directors, actors, and the rest of us, four times around the vast, changing space.  Just in case we got lost, there was even a map/seating plan in the programme detailing exactly how each well thought-out configuration should pan out.  

To a certain extent, yes, we were becoming the content of the piece.  But not entirely!  There was no competition between us shuffling our chairs around (though that was fun) and the four dancers who threw themselves against immense walls, peered with feeling into the audience, at times lay prostrate, and, yes, danced, beautifully, in quartets, in a trio that idiosyncratically left out one dancer, and in duets that sometimes grew intense.
Theatre director Jason Byrne was there with his collaborator on Sarah Kane’s play ‘Phaedra’s Love’, choreographer Ella Clarke.  (Ella’s behindtheeyesliesbone is part of the Re-presenting Ireland double bill in DanceHouse.)  

Dancer Megan Kennedy (who I mistook for her identical twin sister, Jessica – easily done!), knew some of Tere’s dancers from her time in New York.  The talented twins’ company Junk Ensemble had just wound up their three-day Dance Festival workshops over at The Ark Cultural Centre for Children.  Megan was there with contemporary dancer Eddie Kay, who has just moved here from London.  

Dance artist Julie Lockett loved the show, and said so in the post-show discussion.  Rebecca Walter and Lian Bell, the designer of Walter’s film Walk Don’t Run, as well as her latest choreography Did I Make You Up?, were delighted by this opportunity to see Tere O’Connor’s legendary work.  

When I say legendary, I mean he has been making dances since 1982, and has created thirty works so far in a constantly growing and developing vision for his company.

He is also Professor of Dance at the University of Illinois, and as we discovered in the post-show discussion, as well as being a groundbreaking choreographer, is a highly articulate advocate for dance, who notably took on the New York dance critics recently.   Refreshing.  (There was also a New York Times critic that Tere approves of in the audience – Roslyn Sulcas.)  
And, as often happens in this town, when he peered into the audience, Tere was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar face, his former college-mate, furniture designer, Susan Zelouf, who now lives in Ireland.