Dublin Dance Festival: 'My goal for this work has been to create something that could offer an antidote to the division and divisiveness of our times...' Catherine Young Dance's new show A Call To You will premiere at this year's DDF - she introduces the piece below.
I respond to the times I live in and to the world I find myself in at that given moment when I begin a creation.
Coming out of the pandemic and having spent the last 6 years making work around difficult subject matters, be it Direct Provision or Palestine, I felt the need to work on something more hopeful. on 24th February 2022, while I was in the middle of auditions casting for A Call to You, Russia invaded Ukraine. Hope was shadowed yet again by another crisis of monumental proportions, while climate change lurks in the background. The overwhelm is real, the harrowing images are endless. I find myself looking to art as a place to find some solace, some refuge, a place where we can come together to support one another, be that dancer to dancer throughout the process, or performer to audience when we come together in the theatre. The politics of care have become very important to me, how can we mind each other?
There is something about tragedy, whether it is war, a death, a pandemic that erodes individualism and forces us to see that we are relational, that we need the other. We look at the resilience and coming together of the Ukrainian people as they defend their homeland, the autonomous individual dissolves into the relational whole. In the West the rise of the atomised self has squeezed out belonging. More of one, means less of the other. It is as if we don’t know how to operate as a community anymore. This is something we explored in this piece, the friction and fragility but also the strength and joy of community.
The politics of care have become very important to me, how can we mind each other?
Another cornerstone of A Call To You is folk. It is often seen as parochial compared to the more seemingly 'sophisticated’ life of the cosmopolitan, especially in dance. In recent years in my delving into different folk-dance traditions - African, Palestinian, Irish, Haitian, Street and more recently Ukrainian, it has become clear to me that folk dance is where the power is, the power to build community, resilience, resistance, belonging, connection and joy. It is more democratic than classical forms, accessible to those who don’t typically have access.
One of our dancers, Anna Kaszuba, is of Ukrainian heritage, and early in the process we felt the desire to learn Ukrainian folk dance together. Perhaps it has been a way for us to connect somehow to Ukraine in our powerless state where we do can’t much else, in a way that is familiar to us, through the body and to build this into our creation as their culture suffers destruction. In Ukrainian folk dance, the formations rely completely on the group, on each other. These connections make the whole, every dancer is needed to hold the structure together, it is completely relational. In feeling part of the group, you feel joy, you feel belonging. For me, embodying the dance form of another culture has always been a way to connect in a corporeal way, it’s a different kind of understanding. And while this work is not specifically about Ukraine, we have embraced their dance tradition into the work as a way of showing our solidarity, knowing we are all connected and what happens there does affect all of us.
My goal for this work has been to create something that could offer an antidote to the division and divisiveness of our times, a counter to the endless rhetoric of politicians and the overwhelm at where we find ourselves at this point in time. The process has been a collective exploration of how we all feel at this moment. We dance together untamed, unapologetic, celebrating life and togetherness to find light on this journey. We are who we are because of our relations to others. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we are all connected, whether we choose to be or not.
A Call To You is at Dublin Dance Festival on the 20th & 21st May, with a preview at Backstage Theatre, Longford on 12th May - find out more here.
Pics: Luca Truffarelli
