Today we brought Porous from the studio in Donegall St, Belfast to the Writer’s Square nearby. Porous is a 20 minute piece I’ve been invited to make for Maiden Voyage as part of their Dance Exposed series that brings dance into public spaces. It will premiere officially in the Belfast Festival this weekend, with three performances on Saturday in the gallery space at the MAC and three further performances on Sunday in the foyer of the Ulster Museum.

I don’t often do commissions and I was curious to know what prompted Nicola Curry, Artistic Director of Maiden Voyage to invite me to make a piece for the company. I think my experience of working in public space, on bodies and buildings, was part of the attraction. However I was concerned that I would have to work with a group of dancers I didn’t know and manufacture a piece in two weeks just before the show. I have no doubt I could do that, but I’m not sure that the resulting work would connect with or develop the kind of choreographic process I’m happy to have been involved in recently. Fortunately, Nicola was very accommodating, so instead of making the piece in a couple of weeks before the premiere, I arranged for us to work during the summer, with a further week of rehearsal just before the opening. By having that time in the summer, I felt that I could get to know the dancers, experiment and take risks trying out different things, without the immediate and often suffocating pressure of an imminent deadline ( a pressure that would compromise my openness and that of the performers). I knew that whatever we did in the summer, I could always set the experiments aside and return to safe ground in October if necessary. I found that freedom very positive as Vasiliki, Carmen, Oona and I worked in the sunshine in studios that are a bike-ride away from my home in Walthamstow.

Though Nicola talked about the commission for Dance Exposed being site-specific, I understood that the work would travel to different sites and therefore needed to be more site-responsive. That responsiveness needed to be in the structure of the work but also in the way the performers would inhabit the choreography and the space. I enjoyed generating with them material for an improvisation and approaches to that improvisation that would guide, connect and free them. I wanted them to be porous to their own sensations, to the interaction inside the trio, and to the environment in which their structure was unfolding. The multi-dimensional task was not easy, but as we draw closer to the premiere, I am very happy to see their increasing skill in navigating the task, individually and together. I am delighted by the surprises that emerge from this now familiar structure and material.

Photo from Vasiliki Stasinaki

Already in the summer, we took the rehearsals out of the studio, to make sure that the dancers could experience sensations beyond the confines and familiarity of white walls. Today Porous made sense to me in Writer’s Square. It seemed to belong, despite its idiosyncratic movement language. Passers-by could wander through the trio without destroying it, because the choreographic structure could already accommodate that different energy. Its boundaries are permeable, not defined by footlights or proscenium arch. Even a group of stoned teenagers who initially threatened to disrupt the choreography gradually became enfolded in it, one young woman standing close to watch the dancers while the others sat on a wall to observe. I was alert, wondering if I needed to protect the dancers, but I’m glad that they found a way to be in the work without shutting off or out the encroaching energy.

This structure I have made with them owes much to what I’ve learned from the Cure choreographers and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to transform the things I’ve learned for a group of dancers that I haven’t known as long or deeply as I have those with whom I normally work. I’m very curious now to see how audiences will respond.

As I continue to tour Cure, and try to extend the choreography in a way that invites people in to the work from different angles, it’s great to have this video reminder of the the supper we held at Fire Station Artist’s Studios before the premiere in the Dublin Dance Festival last May. Many thanks especially to the Patrick and Katherine at Create and to Julia, Ellie and Tiina at the Dublin Dance Festival who invested so much personal energy, as well as the support of their organisation in making the supper a valuable experience. Thanks also to everyone who participated.
My continuing experience of talking about Cure over food convinces me that it’s an important way to connect and to give people a way in to the performance.

Last night’s performance at Siamsa Tíre was one of the most challenging versions of Cure I’ve done to date. Preparing for the tour has been different to preparing for the premiere. Instead of concentrated time in a dance studio, I’ve been rehearsing the material in bedrooms and conference rooms as well as the occasional dance space, integrating Cure with the other things that I do. I’ve kept folding a crane a day.

At Siamsa last night the audience was small but what was difficult is that they were far away. Siamsa’s auditorium is luxurious but quite big and people seemed to sit away from the stage that also has an apron in front of it creating more distance between the seats and the playing area onstage. Fortunately my talking to people after the opening section meant that I had some sense of where people were; but throughout the performance, I found it difficult to feel their connectedness and had to draw on other resources to sustain the energy of the piece.

It’s not about the size of the audience, though. Last week at glór in Ennis, we had a similarly small audience but something about the seating arrangement that brought the audience close to the stage meant that I felt their involvement throughout and could build on that. Also, and this is perhaps crucial, I had had an opportunity to host a Cure-focused lunch the day before the performance, following the model of the Cure supper we had before the premiere in Dublin. There were just 10 people at the lunch but facilitating a discussion around personal experiences of recovery and drawing lessons from that filled me with information that fed the performance next evening. As I remind people, Cure may have a single performer on stage but it doesn’t feel like a solo. It’s only possible because that my body onstage is connected to a network of others who inform me. Part of my job as performer is to remain permeable to new information that can feed the work, as well as staying in contact with the impulses that have created the work.

In Ennis, I felt I’d planted the seeds for a brief community to emerge around Cure. At Siamsa, even though I have a long and happy association with the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, I didn’t have that opportunity to establish a connection locally before the performance and it tells me something that I felt the lack when I performed. Happily, the post-show discussion, for which over half the small audience stayed, suggesting that the performance itself had generated a connection. There were a wide range of people at the talk, one for whom it was his first experience of dance and who was grateful to have the opportunity to hear someone talk about the processes and ideas involved in something that was so new to him. Another man noticed and appreciated the economy and detail in how materials were used in the piece. He seemed touched by the folded chairs. There was an older gentleman who spoke beautifully about how he enjoys contemplating forms and movement in nature, in animals and in rock formations, and could read and respond to the dancing with the same attentiveness. We discussed what it was that prevented more people coming to see contemporary dance and one woman suggested that some people might be uncomfortable having experiences, sensations and emotions for which they have no vocabulary. If that’s true I wish I could find the way to reassure people that it’s ok not to have the words. I am always happy that the right people find their way to the performances (I don’t expect that it’s for everyone) but I do believe there are more people that could be the right people if only I could let them know that it will be ok. The challenge is that some of what people appreciate is exactly what would have put them off coming if they’d known it in advance. That post-show discussion reassured me that Cure had a resonance in Tralee, as it did in Ennis. And it’s that reassurance that makes the investment of time, resources and energy worthwhile, for however many people see it. Thanks to the Arts Council’s investment in touring that is possible in practice.

I’ve wanted to write about my continuing experiences of performing Cure but it’s been difficult to think about resuming those experiences in a coherent blog post when they feel like they are still unfolding on many different levels. I performed Cure at The Place as part of the Spring Loaded season and, unlike Tabernacle which we presented there in 2011, I felt that we’d managed to create or find a better context for the work in that theatre. I was very happy with the reception and with the engagement of the audience as evidenced in the post-show discussion, hosted by Luke Pell. ( I asked Luke to host the discussion as I trusted his ability to frame the work in a way that felt right. Of course asking him was a kind of curatorial framing of the event on my part.) I’ve also performed Cure at Firkin Crane as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival. While the Place stage is almost identical to Project Arts Centre, Firkin Crane’s is quite different, but I was ready to deal with the changes that will be necessary as we tour the piece and bring it to different locations. Cure feels like it has a sufficiently strong identity now to be able to cope with alteration and accommodation.

I’ve enjoyed each time getting on stage to perform Cure. It’s not a piece I enjoy rehearsing on my own and that is not surprising since it was never conceived as a solitary experience even though it’s a solo. It was made always with at least two in the room and even when I rehearsed in Dublin before the choreographers came, I always had Ciaran or Mags or Alma watching, always preparing me for the audience who are necessary to complete the experience of the work. For practical reasons now I have to rehearse the piece between tour dates on my own and it is difficult. Getting on stage reconnects me now with what I know to be the distinctiveness and identity of this piece.

The recent newsletter from Create features an essay by Grant Kester called Collaborative Art and the Limits of Criticism. In it Kester draws a distinction between ‘conventional art practice [where] the act of production is distinct and clearly separate from the subsequent reception of the work by viewers, during which the artist is typically
not present.’ and ‘dialogical art practices [where] production and reception co-occur, and reception itself is re-fashioned as a mode of production. As a result, the moment of reception is not hidden or unavailable to the artist, or the critic. Moreover, the experience of reception extends over time, through an exchange in which the responses of the collaborators result in subsequent transformations in the form of the work as initially presented.’ Though I’m not sure Grant would have Cure in mind when thinking about dialogical practice or collaborative art, I recognise in my experience of Cure the kind of dialogue to which he refers. Cure is a live performance. While the audience may not move about, their interaction with the work, – a kind of engaged viewership rather than passive consumption – is what makes and remakes it. That engagement extends over time, in the performance and beyond. The feedback of which I’m most proud is from people who say they couldn’t stop thinkiing about the piece or that the images stayed with them:
‘The images are still fixed in my head and I cannot and do not want to rid of them. ‘
Some who subsequently write about their experience of the work in their own blogs extend my experience of the work and reassure me that its ephemerality in the stage space is balanced by its ability to embed traces of itself in the thoughts and bodies of others. For Kester, ‘Conventional object-based practices are clearly finite; they exist for a fixed period time (the duration of an exhibition or commission, for example), and then end.’ While it might seem that a dance performance is similarly finite, in Cure, and in all my work, I want to focus on how, like the dialogical practices, that Kester favours, my work ‘can unfold over weeks, months and even years, and [its] spatial contours or boundaries typically fluctuate, expand and contract over time. As a result, this work confronts the critic with a very different set of questions. When does the work “begin” and when does it “end”?’ The work of Cure is more than a single performance. Cure is the itinerant and diverse process of its creation, it is the community who watched it evolve in the studio, in the experiences of those who saw it on stage so far, in the sharing of food and conversation that we facilitated as part of the Dublin Dance Festival and that I will continue in various forms when we tour in the Autumn, in the conversations with UCLH to do a workshop with patients and clinicians that in the end didn’t happen. Cure continues in my body and I am curious to see how it emerges again in performance when I return to it this Autumn.

‘Time, in the conventions of avant-garde artistic production, is always synchronic; new insight is transmitted to the viewer through a singular and a-temporal moment of shocked recognition. This model of reception assumes a viewer who is operating under the enforced thrall of an ideological system, which can only be broken by a countervailing moment of homeopathic violence. As a result, there is no understanding of receptive time beyond the moment of disruption itself. With dialogical art practices temporality is both extensive and irregular, marked by a series of incremental subdivisions within the larger, unfolding rhythm of a given work. As a result, it’s necessary to develop a system of diachronic analysis and notation that can encompass the project as a whole in it’s movement through moments of conflict and resolution, focusing on the productive tension between closure and disclosure, resistance and accommodation.’

In the meantime, I continue to fold one crane a day….