It wasn’t until the a couple of hours before the performance at the Bluecoat in Liverpool that I read the wall text that accompanied Bisakha Sarker’s installation. I’d arrived to perform in ACE-supported collaboration with pop band Stealing Sheep and contemporary music ensemble, Immix as part of The Liverpool Irish Festival. I’d planned to be dancing alongside Aoife McAtamney but a last-minute illness prevented her from performing and so the planned duet became a more improvised 30 minute solo on a raised cruciform platform flanked by musicians.

I’d been passing the installation on the way to and from the rehearsal space and was taken by the lustrous projections of an older woman (b is in her seventies) in a predominantly red sari.

On Sunday, before the show, I was a little daunted about the prospect of performing on my own. The collaboration had happened virtually with demos of Stealing Sheep’s music arriving via Dropbox and Daniel from Immix explaining via email the structure of the composition. But it wasn’t until Saturday, the day before the performance, that Aoife and I heard the whole sequence of music and on Sunday, by the time it was clear that Aoife would not be able to dance, I was hearing the whole sound of Stealing Sheep and Immix Ensemble together for the first time as I figured out what I could do. But what a sound. I accepted the invitation from Laura Naylor of the Liverpool Irish Festival because while I liked what I heard of Stealing Sheep and Immix’s separate work, it wasn’t music I’d usually choreograph to. But I think it’s important to get beyond your habits and comfort zones, even temporarily, so you can find new things and maybe return to the familiar approaches with renewed insight and understanding. Seeing Stealing Sheeps slick, graphic image, I wasn’t sure how my more organic, raw style would sit with their sound, but Cunningham and Cage have taught me not to worry too much about such things. I described our collaboration as a salad of tasty ingredients, rather than a stew. We didn’t have much time to have our flavours blend into a stew but could trust the audience to do some of the digestion for us.

Without Aoife, it felt like a bigger challenge to meet the music as an equal element in the collaboration. It was clear that this was a gig format rather than a dance show. I was dancing on a platform but the audience was standing and there was a support act before it. Knowing it was a gig was an ease in some ways: most people would be there to hear the music and there would be fractal projections over the stage that they might find a more familiar visual accompaniment. But I didn’t want to be a backing dancer in that scenario.

Reading the text accompanying Bisakha Sarker’s installation, I discovered that she is a dancer choreographer now in her seventies who worked with a contemporary choreographer to explore new ways of moving in her mature body. She was inspired to keep dancing by a quotation from Tagore, ‘Do not fold your wings’. Seeing these words and her image inspired me in turn to keep enjoying the dance I am able to do, to enjoy the spread of my wings, their beating and where they carry me.

The performance seems to have been a success. I did feel that it took the audience a while to know how to see me in this music context but gradually, as I fed from the music and the musicians, and unravelled the movement material and ideas I’d brought, I felt part of the bigger sonic, kinetic and visual energy we created together. I’m grateful for all of these opportunities to be dancing with and for people. And I hope that I will be as brave, curious and creative as Bisakha Sarker.

– Bluecoat, Liverpool, 25th October 2015
By Andy Vine · On October 27, 2015

LMW_Stealing SheepThe stage is set, in an inverted T-shape with a low catwalk in the middle, so the widest part is closest to the audience. Stealing Sheep’s equipment is set up on the left, a row of six chairs are set out facing them on the right for Immix Ensemble. The wall opposite shows a projection of the net of CGI shapes – spheres stretched into a point on one side suspended in the air as glitchy electronica floats over the PA.

Stealing Sheep arrive without fanfare. Immix file in on the right and take their seats. They begin to warm up their instruments and the low brass tones blend with the fuzzy bleeps being played over the PA. The background music fades out as Stealing Sheep fade in with burbling keys and a roll of the floor tom. Immix’s brass section strike up an ambient, chirruping sequence and a man steps onto the catwalk. The man is choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir. His partner Aoife McAtamney will not be able to join him tonight. He strikes a pose to the left of the stage reminiscent of that of a life drawing model, knees bent, stretching his muscles. We wonder if McAtamney was supposed to be on the right-hand side of the inverted T. It doesn’t matter.

Stealing Sheep summon a kind of folky electronic drone, repetitive and rhythmic. Emily Lansley is playing a lap steel guitar, fiddling with various pedals for a treated sound, as drummer Lucy Mercer sings about moving a little bit into space that’s left behind. She could be singing to Ó Conchúir as he stretches into the main section of his catwalk, his movements jerky, swinging his legs high with his back to us. We stifle a chuckle thinking about Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks; this is more modern ballet than classic comedy.

The music becomes a proggy, sci-fi soundtrack with an insistent recurring phrase being played by Immix’s strings. Ó Conchúir is making wider shapes with his body, moving his hand just as insistently as the cellists to his right. The music strips right back and goes gently ambient. He’s making longer lines, his face agonised. Daniel Thorne on the saxophone counts in Michael Walsh’s oboe and Stealing Sheep edge their way into the creepy folk of ‘Evolve and Expand’ from this year’s Not Real album. The snail’s pace delivery of the opening line “They will cook you up and grind you down for glue and clay,” has left Ó Conchúir on the floor, looking up at the sky with his arms outstretched. The visuals have become a trippy triangular tunnel, all the colours of the spectrum.

He’s on the edge of the low stage, looking from one side to the other, from the experimental pop band to the experimental classical ensemble. A throbbing bass pulse comes in, weird, intimidating, dissonant rhythms. Rebecca Hawley sings into a distorted microphone the instruction to “Give it a go/You might like it,” and she’s right; Ó Conchúir begins to fling himself around to the flashing green visuals and rhythmic handclaps from both sides of the stage. As scratchy strings and spaghetti western guitar come in and the lights flash, his movements become more balletic, yoga stretches, triumphant leaps. The sound is bassy, heavy, more confident. Hawley yells again “You might like it!” and the brass meshes with the bass and the keys jig around as much as Ó Conchúir; he leaps into the air clipping his heels together and with grins of relief all round, it’s all over.

The sense of relief at a job well done is palpable from all collaborators. And that’s what this is: a genuine collaborative performance where no element is lesser than another, and without any one element the whole would not be the same. It makes you wonder what the piece would have been like had Aoife McAtamney not been ill, but not as much as it makes you wonder what Stealing Sheep’s follow up to Not Real will sound like. Hopefully further collaborations happen in the future, and not just on stage but within a wider creative field as this was a very special partnership between Liverpool Music Week and Liverpool Irish Festival. A complete success and an absolute joy.

Read the review at www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk

After our first two weeks of rehearsal on The Casement Project, there are some things I know and many more questions yet to be answered. It’s not a bad place to be in. After the confidence required to make a good proposal, this more humbling uncertainty feels like a better place from which to be creative.

We’ve already shown movement sketches to the participants in our Micro-rainbow workshops, to a variety of old friends who dropped in to the studio, to the Artist Development team at the Place, and to a paying public in the Touchwood series of scratch performances. Each of these encounters with others have taught me different things: it is one thing to share work with people with whom you have already established a relationship and with whom you’ve begun to build some kind of community. It is another to do that with people who are meeting the work for the first time. How do I ensure that their first encounter is one that draws them closer to the work and that invites them to get to know more about it?

One thing I do know after these openings of the early raw material is that I am fortunate to have such a compelling group of performers, whose individual distinctiveness is matched by a sensitivity to the others (performers and audience) with whom they are sharing the performance. Life experience made legible in their bodies and generously revealed is part of what makes them so special. While I know I have a job of crafting to do to shape with them the environment that an audience will encounter in the work, I am proud that already the heart of the work exists with them.

One of the things I was concerned to test in this Choreodrome research was how the allusive, shifting, dynamic world I wanted to create in the movement, a world in which Casement’s life, afterlife and legacy might be set in motion rather than represented, could work with the radio play that I propose to use as the basis for the sound score. I am using the original BBC production of David Rudkin‘s play, Cries from Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin. The play was broadcast in 1973, having been delayed according to Rudkin because of sensitives in Anglo-Irish relations at the time. Its point of departure is the ‘repatriation’ in 1965 to Dublin of Casement’s bones, from the prison yard in Pentonville prison in London. It had been Casement’s wish to be buried in Antrim but such a re-burial wouldn’t have counted as a generous gesture that the British government wanted to make to the Irish Republic in advance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. The play is fragmentary and multi vocal, with characters ranging from Dr Crippen to Joan Bakewell. Rudkin read much of Casement’s archive, including his diaries, and noticing the different handwriting styles he found there, imagines a complex, fragmenting, shifting Casement. I’m using the play, because there is much in Rudkin’s approach that is sympathetic to my concern to put the body and its knowledge at the heart of the national narrative. Also the fact that it is a radio play, beautifully designed by the Radiophonic workshop, makes it suitable as a score, something to be listened to, rather than seen. And, with its period BBC and occasionally duff Irish accents, the excellent production nonetheless conveys something of a civilising colonial perspective, an authoritative voice whose authority I wish to complicate by bringing it alongside the dancing. There is perhaps homage and guile in the strategy, a strategy not unfamiliar in the history of Irish literature in English. It is the strategy of the colonised.

Finally, using Rudkin’s play reminds me that no matter how much original archival research that I do, our access to Casement is always mediated, and we construct our version of him in relation to a history of mediation as well as to our own context.

It was a relief to get in to the studio this week with some of The Casement Project dancers and to begin to explore in such articulate and creative bodies some of the ideas that I’ve been storing over the past two years. Fortunately an Arts Council Bursary two years ago and a residency at Dancehouse in Dublin meant that I’d been able to test some of the Casement ideas with Aoife McAtamney before I started writing the Ireland 2016 National Project application. That physical testing meant that I could trust that the ideas could make sense in bodies. However, it feels like a lot of words and intellectual brain processing were required to make the application a success. Now, it’s important to bring that processing back to bodies and to the particular knowledge and wisdom they possess.

It turns out Roger Casement was born on the September 1st, so it was an appropriate day to start rehearsals at The Place as part of this year’s Choreodrome. For the first week I was joined four of the six dancers who will be in the piece: Bernadette Iglich, Matthew Morris and Mikel Aristegui have danced in a number of my projects as well as choreographing Cure. I’ve danced with Philip Connaughton in work by Adrienne Browne and by Ríonach Ní Néill, as well as seeing him in the work of other Irish choreographers and more recently, his own magnificent Tardigrade. Having such a talented and experienced group of performers in the room is a privilege. However, it’s not just their creativity and skill that I rely on to create the work, but also their generosity of spirit.

That generosity and openness was particularly evident on Thursday when a group of LGBT refugees from Micro-Rainbow International joined us in the studio for a movement workshop. I’ve been singing in the Micro-Rainbow choir over the summer and getting to know the group. I wanted to invite them to experience something of my work and see what kind of community we could build from the exchange. On the day when the heart-breaking photograph of the drowned Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, appeared in newspapers around the world, it felt good to share joy, care and creativity with these refugees. Opening the rehearsal studio is a gift for us, helping us see the studio and our work from the perspective of people who are not jaded by over-familiarity with the art form. And their visit reminded us of the importance of joy. We’re looking back to the next workshop on Tuesday.

On Thursday, we went out of the studio, on a research visit to the British Library. With the help of Ellie Beedham, Senior Producer at The Place, I’ve been working with Dr Eva Del Rey (Curator, Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance) to find ways of connecting The Casement Project to The British Library’s holdings and archives. Her colleagues Joanna Norledge (Curator, Contemporary Performance and Creative Archives,) and Helen Melody, sourced original material for us about Casement and about David Rudkin, whose play Cries from Casement as his Bones are brought to Dublin, I’m using in the work. They showed us Cabinet Papers from July 1916, prepared to discuss whether Casement’s death sentence might be commuted. Also correspondence and papers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Clement K. Shorter, concerning their petition to the government to reprieve Casement, with responses from people like Yeats and HG Wells (whose answer to the request for help was ‘Absolutely not!’). We also saw David Rudkin’s notebooks containing his notes on reading The Black Diaries, as well as the script used in the original studio recording of his radio play at the BBC. Seeing Casement being interpreted in these official and artistic documents is very useful in my own project of engagement with his life and after-life.

As the year goes on, we’ll find ways to distill all of this rich material, but for now we will keep on gathering and dancing with the material we gather.