Deirdre Mulrooney's Diary

Brian Hogan, bass player with Kila, was at O’Reilly Theatre for the Irish premiere of Ballet Preljocaj’s Empty Moves [parts I & II], last night with his partner, elegant contemporary dancer Justine Doswell. 

Hogan was fascinated to see does she take sugar? at Project Space Upstairs beforehand, especially as Kila toured Japan with Jean Butler as guest dancer in 2006. 

Justine loved Ballet Preljocaj, remarking on ‘the triplets’ (a complicated contemporary dance move).  The hardcore dance cognoscenti in the auditorium smiled with recognition at that move, which to them was a pointed homage to Merce Cunningham, one of the most important figures in American Contemporary Dance. 

The rest of us were simply in awe, admiring the precision-manoeuvres by Preljocaj’s four amazing dancers, and the genuine and inexorable build-up to exhaustion as the show neared its end, one hour later.   Dancing themselves out, this agile quartet held nothing back, burning up their energy with seeming reckless abandon. 

Busy theatre impressario Michael Scott, director of Jerry Hall and David Soul in Love Letters, currently running at the Tivoli Theatre, was sitting beside me.  He has been a fan of French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj “one of the best choreographer’s in the world,” for a long time, and was thrilled with the opportunity to savour his choreography in Dublin. 

Contemporary Dancer Katherine O’Malley, who performed in Liz Roche’s Untitled choreography, as well as her “solo” for Jenny Roche was there on a rare night off lapping up the precision movement too.  And choreographer Cathy O’Kennedy drove up from Kildare after her weekend of performances with Counterbalance dance company. 

Independent choreographer and dancer Fearghus Ó’Conchúir (and one of the talents behind the 2006 RTÉ Dance on the Box film Match), who wore red in Rebecca Walter’s quirky film Walk Don’t Run, was thrilled to see the dancers in full flight.   He has been giving daily dance class to the the Ballet Preljocaj dancers at DanceHouse since they arrived. 

Rob Dias, who danced in Dance Theatre of Ireland’s festival show, Block Party, was also absorbing the abstract, flowing masterpiece, on a night off.  

I was chatting to Ballet Preljocaj dancer Sergio Diaz afterwards, and he confirmed my hunch that the piece is dictated by the connection between them, in electron-like fashion. Yes, it smacked of Merce Cunningham’s purely mathematical precision, but with the added ingredient of connectivity between the dancers – like when each girl climbed on top of a prostrate male dancer (respectively), and proceeded to shove an elbow in their eyes.  Hmm.  Unusual! 

At points they did slip out of the pure angular, and abstract movement sequences to poke each other with their index fingers on the chest, for example.  Mathematical, but sexy. 

I loved Preljocaj’s use of John Cage’s 1977 sound score Empty Words, in which Cage shook the literal meaning out of Henry David Thoreau’s writing as he read it aloud, and somewhat nonsensically, to a boisterous Milanese audience. 

(Jean Butler also uses an excerpt of Cage’s wonderful Roaratorio – an Irish Circus, featuring fiddler Paddy Glackin and Dublin traffic sounds, in does she take sugar?)

Incidentally, I myself had the good fortune to bump into John Cage, in Paris at a revival of the Fluxus movement, shortly before he died in 1992 – and in a suitably random fashion. 

When, as part of an internship for Paris Passion magazine, I was given the great responsibility of dropping an RSVP to a left-bank gallery, none other than John Cage answered the gallery door.  He ushered me in, like a trusted friend, to land me in the middle of Yoko Ono performing her famous Ceiling Painting installation (through which she met John Lennon), for a TV camera. 

Not a bad personal introduction to Cage’s random world of “chance operations”.