Dublin Dance Festival preview: Liz Roche, Choreographer and Artistic Director at Liz Roche Company, introduces Kindred, an innovative digital dance installation exploring nature and human connection, created in collaboration with the award-winning Lightscape, who use cutting edge technology to create spectacular experiences for audiences across the world.
When I think about my relationship with nature and the natural world, unfortunately my first thought is one of guilt and remorse for my own personal contribution to the damage my city life causes it.
The next place I go to almost immediately in that line of thought is to conjure a space in my mind that is occupied by nature itself. I breathe deeply, evoking experiences in which the beauty, smells, sounds and sensations of being in nature have profoundly changed my life for the better.
So the first, often slightly desperate thought of ruination is quickly followed up by a deep appreciation of the vital connection I feel to nature and how it permeates my daily life. In that moment, nature and our environment is not something separate from me, something to fret about, but is instead a deeply familiar home that I inhabit, understand and connect with. It is then that I feel part of it.
Watch: How we made Kindred
When I was asked by Dublin Dance Festival and the ESB to make Kindred, I wanted people – in this case bodies in movement - to be part of nature and not alien to it. With a belief that a person needs to feel something deeply in order to value it, I wondered if this new work could explore more extreme atmospheres in nature that would draw attention to nature as a dramatic and life changing force, but also highlight a nature that is intensely gentle and still.
When I began working with the dream team of dancers Finola Cronin, Mufutau Yusuf, Amir Sabra and Emily Terndrup, we talked first about how different the elements affect movement. Imagining moving with the sun gently warming your back, or with water bubbling up inside your bones, or resisting a strong gust of wind were some of the starting places for the work to develop, but even from these simple beginnings came complex movements and responses from the dancers.
We spoke about rhizomes - creeping rootstalks that grow horizontally - and the complex communication networks in plant-life and how that could be translated into bodies.
Setting the digital installation in the outdoor garden courtyard at the ESB headquarters in Dublin locates the work in an environment that is alive and growing, open to the elements and brimming with opportunities to experience an art work in a new light. Placing the dancers in this natural environment is also a statement of connection between bodies and nature, and in collaboration with digital designers Lightscape who are working with fascinating new forms of artificial intelligence, co-composers Ray Harman and Brian Crosby, and costume designer Emily Ní Bhroin we are all working together to integrate these elements into a shared space for our audiences to experience.
The results so far are sensorially rich and sometimes even overwhelming at times. It reminds me that if you look a little harder at something you take for granted, you often discover a multitude of significance locked into what can seem a tiny moment. You just have to take the time to see it. I can already feel that the experience of making this piece is somehow helping to rebuild my relationship to nature and is helping me to hold it with me at all times instead of treating it as an occasional experience. Maybe this will help me to be more conscious in the future and more imaginative in the ways that I can live with it in a more harmonious way."
Kindred will run 19-28 May, free and open to all, at ESB Head Office, 27 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, as part of the Dublin Dance Festival - find out more here.
