Deirdre Mulrooney's Diary

“Extraordinary,” was the first word to pop out of Phelim Donlon’s mouth after Kitt Johnson’s staggering solo celebrating evolution, Rankefod at Project Space Upstairs last night. 

In fact it was the first word out of most of our mouths.  We’d never set eyes on anything like Johnson’s strange, but profoundly natural, minute movement before.   Forensically anthropological, it was like watching an insect in a jar – or some kind of awesome scientific specimen in its private moments.  All that was missing was David Bellamy.

With her long, rope-like blonde plait, (bound together with special mud from Africa)  curling down her naked back, vertebra by vertebra, Johnson was a weird and marvellous creature, of the ilk you might find inhabiting Middle Earth.   This performer is simply a phenomenon.

Wearing just a loin-cloth, Kitt Johnson’s magical creature would be great for kids learning about the big bang theory, evolution, and how our planet and its human inhabitants came into being. 

Dance critics Seona MacReamoinn and Michael Seaver were also utterly fascinated by this Danish creature.   Still in the afterglow of Ballet Preljocaj, which she adored, Jenny Traynor, general manager of CoisCéim (who has been at just about everything so far), was also awestruck by Rankefod.

After casting her spell on us, Kitt Johnson told me at the reception afterwards that ‘rankefod’ (“a very poetic word in Danish”), means ‘cirripidia’ (she kindly wrote it in my notebook).  In commonspeak that translates to ‘barnacle’. 

Charles Darwin, originator of the theory of evolution (just in case you forgot), wrote extensively on cirripedia between 1846 and 1854, as they were the crucial link that helped  him crack his theory.

Sarah Skaggs, whose solo Dances for Airports is on in downstairs in Project Cube was chatting to Festival Director Laurie Uprichard and Johnson at the reception.  Kitt would love to see Sarah’s show, which starts at 7pm, but she has to start putting the African mud in her hair at 7.05pm to be ready for her own 8pm start time. 

Johnson told me that she grew up in the countryside, feels very close to nature, and, yes, she studies animals very, very closely.  Think Dian Fossey  (Gorillas in the Mist), trying to trick her silver-back gorillas into believing she was one of them by studied imitation, in order to gain their trust. 

Most of the time, with her sublime body-control, born maybe of her background in elite sports (the 800-metre run was her thing), Johnson resembled some kind of larval mutant creature with legs and arms in all the wrong places, the type you might find in a sci-fi movie.  Sometimes she was an insect about to sprout wings, sometimes a gnat, sometimes the first amoeba struggling into life.

As well as athletics, Johnson’s background is in modern and new dance, contact improvisation (she teaches this at a circus school in Denmark), martial arts and the Japanese art form Butoh, also known as ‘Dance of Darkness’. Think German expressionist performer Valeska Gert, and the kind of primal and primitive energy yearned for by Antonin Artaud (French founder of ‘theatre of cruelty’).

Sometimes it felt like watching animated scientific drawings of all the evolutionary stages that led to us, the mighty bipeds.  Think the Galapagos Islands. 

Apart from Butoh artists, the only performer I have seen who is remotely in the same family, like Johnson’s strange and kinky Bulgarian cousin perhaps, is Ivo Dimchev.  Another “phenomenon”, the creature-like performance artist Dimchev, performed his weird and captivating solo Lili Handel, in Project Cube in the Have U Met Nosti festival last summer.

In the meantime, on Facebook, theatre director Tom Creed boasted that on ‘International Dance Day’ (yesterday, April 29th), he "went to see something with ballet in the title".  He can only be referring to Ballet Preljocaj at O’Reilly Theatre, where John Scott hosted the post-show discussion last night.