Sat, Oct 22, 2016

Butterflies and Bones review: blood and thunder

Butterflies and Bones

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

****

In the context of the remembering of 1916, in Ireland and the world, Butterflies and Bones is a dance theatre work shaped and sustained by the complex, heroic and contradictory life of Roger Casement: knight of the British Empire, outspoken international humanitarian, Antrim Protestant and rebel nationalist of his native Ireland. As each of the six lithe performers, four men and two women, quietly declares “I am Roger Casement” we are at the heart of Fearghus O’Conchúir’s mostly realised choreographic intent: to create a highly physical and visual performance where dance embodies and explores the multiple meanings of that life. This incorporates the symbolic, the gendered and the social aspects, then and now.

We begin at the end of a beginning: the exhumation of Casement’s body in Pentonville Prison for return to Ireland. O Conchúir’s recorded voice recounts the clinical uncovering of fragments of the quicklimed hanged body, with a disjointed list of ribs and vertebrae. On stage, an awkward solo is embraced into a healing ensemble phrase, featuring Mikel Aristegui, Theo Clinkard, Philip Connaughton, Bernadette Iglich, Matthew Morris and Liv O’Donoghue. The performance intimates the relentless parsing of Casement’s life, from vilified personal sexual history to emerging cultural nationalism, not in splinters but as a unified experience.

Dancers in T-shirts emblazoned with phrases from the ever contested Black Diaries, bring both visceral and delicate movement to cramped homosexual encounters, evoking both tenderness and urgent fulfilment. But, they move also to the different free-flowing grounded rhythms of the Congo or the Amazon, lands of heat and dust and exploited landscapes.

These are summoned by Ciaran O’Melia’s evocative lighting and simple staging and the outstanding sound design of Alma Kelliher. Later, as we move to the events of Easter 1916, her pacy design of single separated shots of the executed 1916 leaders is set against thundering artillery fire and we are immediately drawn to the fields of the Somme.

The dancers’ bodies and the staging all play transformative roles, most strikingly when Matthew Morris’s body bursts out of its clothing chrysalis into a mesmerising image of painted body art. Stacks of speakers are constantly shifted around, sometimes emanating sound but more often reconfigured as pieces of landscape, corners of concealment or mountainous piles of rocks.

Even the backdrop is whipped down to become a ship’s sail and in the final redemptive moments the floor of brown paper billows and falls, when lights on a horizon hold promise and dreams seem still alive.

In the discussion after our performance of Butterflies and Bones in Belfast, one of the audience members spoke about the different ‘climates’ she’d observed throughout the piece and the transformations of bodies that she recognised. Describing herself as a foreigner and therefore unfamiliar with the Casement history, she wanted to know what the different climates represented.   I responded that I didn’t ask the dancers to represent ideas or people. Instead I asked them to work at being present with the potential of transformation. I was looking, not for presence as a fixed essential being, but presence as an openness to what might be possible, a risk of being surprised, a presence that seems paradoxically to require of the performers a being centred so as to invite a creative decentredness that takes them beyond ‘themselves’.

Another audience member was moved by what she called the ‘gift’ of the dancers’ presence in the work. I had noticed her as we danced and it was clear that she was generously engaged with the performance throughout. So I think, the presence she felt was also a relation between us, audience and performers, that she enabled and welcomed.  And the choreography invites those relations between all involved in it and is at its strongest when those relations are palpable, as they were in Belfast.

The more I think about why I make work in the way I do, the more I realise that I am not really choreographing to place myself in a dance tradition. I am part of a particular dance training and aesthetic lineage that I value, but I’m not sure that I am engaged in a conversation with other experts about the development of that lineage. Instead, I’m trying to think through why dance matters in the world, maybe especially (though not exclusively) in the limited part of the world in which I grew up. So my work might be a call to people who are interested in what dancing and its work with and through bodies, can change, for them and for others. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate and applaud the refined expertise that’s developed in studios and shown on stages. But I am motivated by what that advanced R&D signifies/enables/predicts beyond its specialist confines.

With this in mind, I hope audiences recognise the performers on stage as fellow humans exploring their capacities and frailties in ways that remind us of what strange potential is available to all of us. I don’t want audiences to consider the performers as an alien species whose beautiful forms might be delightful but which have no relation to our common capacities.   And yet, I realise the work is complicated (like life) and occasionally (like life) uncomfortable. It’s also uncomfortable for me to acknowledge that I may not be contributing to the development of this art form that has transformed my life, nor am I providing many people with entertainment.   But what I’m doing is deliberate, and, for now, it’s what I’m compelled to do, grateful for the support of people and organisations who make it possible.

Belfast International Arts Festival asked me to write a blog post for their website.  This is what I wrote:

05 October 2016

When I think of the choreography of The Casement Project, I’m trying to pay attention not only to the energy and movement between dancers in a studio or on a stage.  I’m also thinking of where those stages are and where else The Casement Project can show up, whether that’s on a beach in Kerry, in the British Library in London, in a club in Kilkenny or in a studio in Dusseldorf.   This a choreography that happens across national boundaries and in different media.  Like Roger Casement, it’s a choreography that is mobile, multi-faceted and complicated!

Bringing The Casement Project to Northern Ireland was part of my plan from the beginning. Though he was born in Dublin, Casement’s family connections to Belfast, Ballymena and Ballycastle were strong and his travels, political and personal, brought him back often.  He wanted to be buried overlooking Murlough Bay but when his bones were eventually repatriated in 1965, the British Government made it a condition of their release that they be buried in the Republic.  Though Casement is renowned for his words – his reports denouncing human rights abuses in the Congo and in the Amazon, his poems, his letters, his diaries – his body, what it did and where it went, both in life and in death, has always been hugely political.  It’s for that reason that I’ve found Casement such an important resource for thinking about the body in this moment of centenary commemoration, one hundred years after the Easter Rising and one hundred years since the midpoint of WW1.

Butterflies and Bones doesn’t try to tell Casement’s story.  I value the liveness and surprising potential of bodies too much to try to tie them to a single narrative.  And by making work in this way, I’m asking an audience to get involved, to bring their own perspectives, imagination and perceptions so that we can build something new together.  Butterflies and Bones  draws on detailed research into the complexities of Casement’s legacy to address contemporary questions of who belongs in the collective body, whose bodies have rights, what bodies are kept at bay.  Casement’s international humanitarianism reminds us that we cannot think about the flourishing of a nation, without thinking of our responsibilities to those who exist beyond our borders.  Post-Brexit Northern Ireland feels like an important place to be engaging with these ideas.

The Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival is also an ideal context for us to performing in.  I’ve presented work in the festival twice before: once thanks to a commission from Maiden Voyage Dance Company and, more recently, a solo I danced called Cure.

This year’s programme has important and sustaining lines of kinship between Butterflies and Bones and some of the other events. There are obvious connections to The Fever: Roger Casement in Dark Places, especially since we’ve learnt so much from Colm Tóibín’s work on Casement and had the privilege of having Olwen Fouéré read Fintan O’Toole’s The Nightmare of Empire for our Wake for Roger Casement at Kilkenny Arts Festival earlier on this year.  But there are other kinships too: to the sweaty physicality of Jan Marten’s exciting Dog Days are Over and to the queer delight and challenge of Taylor Mac.  I hope audiences will feel these lines of kinship that foster a community through the festival and beyond.

Fearghus Ó Conchúir on Butterflies and Bones.

Thanks to Kilian Waters of Shoot to Kill Productions for editing the video and to everyone who danced with us on the day.