Dublin Dance Festival 2022: 'We are reclaiming and celebrating the strength of mature and ageing bodies...' Junk Ensemble founders Jessica and Megan Kennedy write from the rehearsal room about Dances Like A Bomb, alongside thoughts from performers Mikel Murfi and Finola Cronin.
We were initially drawn to make this piece in order to explore themes of ageing and care, alongside the desire to work with actor Mikel Murfi and dance artist Finola Cronin (formerly of the legendary Pina Bausch company). We are interested in showing the beauty in ageing & decline. We are reclaiming and celebrating the strength of mature and ageing bodies. The performers are comedic, fiercely independent and constantly challenging the cult of youth. Dances Like A Bomb unpacks the 'idea' of age, and explores our limits of love and care.
There is a universality to the piece and we connect with this through the universality of ageing. We all go through it. It happens to all of us. Some of us ‘perform’ age, some of us deny it, some of us pre-empt it. Through imagery, text, music and intricate movement, the show reminds us of ourselves: our vulnerability, our defiance, the things we would take back, the things we want to see, our worst and our best.
Collaborating on this work with Mikel and Finola has been both enriching and restoring and there’s a lot of belly laughs in the studio. We continually learn from them both, hearing about their individual performance experiences and their experiences in life, including caring for their own family members. They make each other laugh, they bicker, they wordlessly intertwine their bodies together, and they understand what their bodies need and feel.
Quite early on in the rehearsal process Finola one day said to us, ‘It’s just like you’re in the rehearsal room with your parents, isn’t it?’. We all laughed and in some ways it is, but in many ways it’s not. Independent of each other, Mikel and Finola ascertain and track their performance practice in a meticulous yet insouciant way, which one day, we hope to do too.
Mikel Murfi: We’re in the middle, the middle of making Dances Like a Bomb. It’s a piece about ageing, ageing bodies, care, decline, and the 'beauty' in decline. But as it happens I’m railing against ageing these days. So, I’m the 'grumpy' one in the room, writing annoyed, bad sonnets. And I don’t like that my body is no longer capable of the things it used to be able to do, like a cartoon, when I was younger.
I'm having to be patient but Jessica and Megan's process is strangely liberating. It might well calm me down and Finola is so much younger in herself than me, so that's a salve. I'm saying to myself, 'just be honest and trust the rehearsal room, something will arrive and something will pass through'.
Finola Cronin: Junk Ensemble’s Dances Like A Bomb explores the theme of ageing and issues of so-called decline, concerns of caring and being cared for, and the challenges of losing autonomy and independence. Choreography as creative expression of ideas in dance attends to bodies’ multiplicity and ambiguity, but age marks our bodies as old(er). As an older dancer, age is inscribed on my body.
My older body in performance will only sometimes do what I ask of it and I must accept that. My expectations are already diminished. My challenge is to communicate the knowledge my body has accumulated and to not worry how it ‘looks’ in the hope that the complexity of what I feel are somehow communicated.
Dances Like a Bomb by Junk Ensemble is at Project Arts Centre from 25-26 May 2022 - find out more about this year's Dublin Dance Festival here.
