Critical Correspondence

Correspondence from Wanda Gala at the University of Limerick #3

Colin Dunne: A Contemporary Perspective on Irish Dance

In 1996 New York dance critic, Marcia Siegel , in lieu of viewing an onslaught of big budget multicultural dance extravaganzas that season, reflected on her experience of Riverdance, as promoting, “tourism and political credibility” (1996:467). She ends her story in Hudson Review, Multicult-The Show, with the following sentiment concerning creativity, modernity and cultural representation in the performing arts:

“It seems to me, that if this genre is to be taken seriously; it has the energy not of enterprise but of discovery. Its performers don’t know what contemporary art is yet for their cultures. The issue of how and what to perform isn’t settled yet (1996:467).”

Siegel’s statement on enterprise reflects an aesthetic of Riverdance, that has been scholastically associated with the “powers, influences, and ideologies circulating in a wider social field (Kuhling 2008: 729). An aesthetic representing,” the creative culture of globalization, a fluidity that promises the transcendence of the limitations of global capitalism as a mode of production (Kuhling 2008:737).” In this way, “Riverdance was an attempt at positioning Ireland globally and culturally, representing a contemporary Irish identity to both the Irish themselves and to the world” (Foley 2001: 33).

Siegel’s theatrical critique was right on the money. However, her commentary also foreshadows the artistic and institutional expressions of Irish Step dance following the shows inception. Since then, the scholastic and artistic counterculture that Riverdance helped inspire (though in no way solely responsible for), favors what is human about the practice: what is personal, local, regional and inevitably, Irish. In order to access what is negotiated in the creation of a distinctly Irish contemporary art form, this article engages the notion of a “contemporary perspective on Irish dance”, as it applies to the dance work of Colin Dunne.

This discourse on Irish dance is composed of ethnographic and bibliographic data that focus on the current practices and perspectives of Dunne’s work. Examples and reviews of solo performance works are used, as are interviews with Dunne himself and Mary Nunan, a founding Artistic Director of Daghdha Dance Company and course director of MA in Contemporary Practice at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, under whom Dunne studied in 2001. Referenced will also be Irish dancer teacher Carmel McKenna.

These interviews will draw a perspective of how a traditional movement vocabulary becomes a tool for personalized or contemporary expression .

Colin Dunne, An Irish Dancer

Over the past decade Dunne’s career as an innovator of Irish step dance has challenged public perspectives on its performance as cultural artifact, personal expression and art. From his collaborative choreographies with Tariq Winston in 1995 (Trading Taps, Riverdance), Jean Butler in 1999 (Dancing on Dangerous Ground), to his current solo works; Dunne has pushed the boundaries of Irish dance, continually inventing new steps and ways of executing the craft. Twelve years after Siegal’s review, in which he was referred to as “a super dancer”, Dunne has immersed himself in a solo process of creating “new contexts for dance outside of the notion of ‘show’ (Mulrooney in Interview with Dunne 2006:).

Dunne’s current artistic work, though not yet penetrated into the broad demographic that Riverdance had, is still associated to his reputation as a solo virtuoso. (Seaver 2008, Monahan 2009). His history as a competitor (nine time World Champion) and identity as a top performer of the Irish step is continually reconstructed in the work he has come to develop in the past seven years.

Equally virtuosic, yet intimate and highly stylized, Dunne’s personalized form of Irish dance composition and performance has been categorized as experimental (Seaver 2008), offering ‘ a contemporary perspective of the art form’ .Through collaborating with ‘contemporary choreographers’ (which compliment his own processes) Dunne has expanded his repertoire and shifted perspectives towards Irish dance. Samples of such work can be found in his collaboration with Yoshiko Chuma, The Yellow Room, and Michael Keegan Dolan’s Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre on The Bull – which allotted him the nomination as best modern dancer by the UK Critics Circle National Dance Awards. His latest solo work, Out of Time, has been described as,

“ A performance that brings Irish dance into sharp alignment with experimental, contemporary practice, its entire agenda is to take a tradition largely viewed as inflexible and encourage it to try something new.”

Through the practical engagement of a ‘contemporary practitioner’ , Dunne ‘deconstructs’ his ‘traditional roots’ and offers us insight into, ‘… why he is who he is, and how he is where he is (Seaver 2008).’ Though a personalized engagement with movement material is an often a process involved in the act of performance (or creation of a composition itself), what is noteworthy is how Dunne engages with a traditional movement vocabulary as raw material for manipulation. Dunne utilizes Irish Step as would a conceptual artist (Mulrooney 2006:237). As a visual artist works with a material to create an expression, Dunne crafts personalized movement expressions from a bounty of Irish step dance motifs and arrangements. The Irish traditional step dance vocabulary has great historical and cultural implications. Rather than serve as a vehicle for the expression of these notions, he manipulates their function to support his own. In turn, creating a highly personalized yet culturally specific, dance expression. Catherine Foley in her paper, Negotiating Boundaries in Irish Step Dance Performance Practice, refers to this as a renegotiation of the ‘rules and aesthetic practices of Irish step dance”. Hence, provoking discourse regarding notions of what is individual in the traditional.

I come from…

In 2001 Colin Dunne completed a Master’s in Contemporary Dance Performance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick. This experience in addition to working with Chuma and Dolan, helped shape a new perspective on performing and creating Irish dance.10 Up until the point of doing his Masters in Contemporary Dance Performance at University of Limerick, Dunne said he would’ve relied purely on instinct in making choreographic choices. “I suppose the good thing now, is that when instinct fails there is more of a sense of methodology, a sense of the toolbox, or some sort of craft.”

During our interview, when asked to locate him self in the grand scheme of performing arts practices, Dunne conveyed that it’s tricky because he is known as a traditional Irish dancer, so it is a very easy label to use, yet problematic because, “The words traditional and Irish are really loaded…(and) I don’t call myself a contemporary dancer…” More so he views both Irish and contemporary as part of his DNA, he has access to them both, and both inform his practice. So when asked to describe how one would define or classify his work, Dunne answered he himself does it, “ as factually as possible.”

“ I come from traditional Irish dance and in the past six/seven years I have been working from the point of view of a contemporary dance practice or a contemporary performance practice. And the work is really a negotiation of these two realms.”

The Negotiation

Irish step dance, though performed in groups in ceili dances is primarily a solo art genre (Foley 2001:35). Though the work that Dunne sets on himself is primarily solo, and in line with that aspect of the tradition, his reasoning for that choice is quite personal:

“I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but in hindsight it was a natural act of after doing Riverdance and Dancing on Dangerous Ground… it was a natural gravitation back towards solitude, in terms of a practice…. As a child, as a teenager, I would go into a studio and practice just for hours, playing around for hours, because I really enjoyed that. And I suppose through doing the larger shows I lost a bit of a connection to that- Your whole ownership of it (the dance) changes, it’s more public- I lost at bit of that connection with it, so this felt like it was going back to something more personal.”

The assessment of the affectivity or aesthetics of Irish step dance can be a personal or public affair, as in competition. The affectivity of an Irish step dance relates to the rules and aesthetics of competition: assessments based on the timing, comportment, execution and quality of step (Foley 2004:190). It is these rules and aesthetics that are being mediated through Dunne’s creative explorations and dance compositions. His methodological treatment of the Irish vocabulary is one that is fueled by concepts. “The starting point is, ‘ what is the idea?’ What is the idea, and what do I need to use in order to formulate that idea,” says Dunne. This negotiation takes place between the research, collaboration and improvisatory actions that inform the actual performance.

Dunne expressed that the choice to improvise in his latest show brought a quality of lightness to the product on stage. Yet merely using the term improvisation is problematic, in that it exists in many cultures, and is executed in many different ways. Dunne’s approaches to improvisation could be classified as coming from two practices: one with, and another without, hard shoes.Out of a practice of working rhymically in hard shoes, Dunne became accustomed to treating the shoes as a percussive instrument. From this practice grew a broader improvisational practice. “In the way a drummer does not choreograph his right hand or left foot,” Dunne would improvise, and from this practice developed a distinct method of improvisation from himself.

A second improvisatory practice relates to his process doing the Masters program at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance (IWA). In contemporary classes at the IWA he would be “ given a set improvisational tasks in working with a certain (movement) vocabulary” (Gala interview with Dunne 2009). This practice generated the movement vernacular that Dunne uses when he is not in shoes, yet started off “completely” as improvisation in the studio (Ibid).

“… it would have come about largely from just messing about. This thing started to emerge and I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know how to recreate it, I didn’t know if it had any value. I didn’t know if I was ever going to use it. I just kind of kept going with it” (Ibid).

The initial starting point for the movement came from step dance: in the legs, “ yet now it integrated a “a newly found weighty and release based quality”(Ibid). It is this quality and approach to executing the steps that has shifted Dunne’s aesthetic and technique. In a recent brief interview in Dance Magazine, Dunne commented on how training in modern dance allowed him to use less muscle, the impulses for movement, their kinetic foci have shifted. Instead of working with a great tension in the legs he “feels movement pass through his joints- to originate at the hips, for instance, and then down the leg.” (Dunne in interview with Siobhan Burke 2009). Though Dunne’s somatic perspective has shifted and compositional methods broadened, he feels at the end of the day, it still looks like Irish dance (Mulrooney 2006).

Interpretation

When recalling Ode to Socks, a solo improvisation performed as a part of Daghdha Performance Space’s show in 2006, Gravity and Grace, Dunne recalls the piece as ”geared to the context it was created for.”

In viewing the excerpt of Ode to Socks with Irish dancer, teacher and dance school mistress, Carmel McKenna notions of play came up, particularly between historically and culturally specific forms of executing movement. The variable play of these styles of executing Irish step dance motifs – a play of weight, rhythm ad phrasing, with a dynamic range of pedestrian laxity to virtuosic professionalism – seemed to convey to McKenna, Dunnes challenge to the forms structures and tradition. Such a suggestive contrast may be seen in the first minute of the excerpt, in which Dunne intercepts a motif of batters with a ‘cut’. McKenna says that in contemporary competition culture the cut would be characterized by having the foot cut across the thigh of the supporting leg and up to the hand. No gap would be shown between the thighs in its execution. He initially performs ‘correct’ contemporary competition variation of this step, but sustains this posture in landing. In this posture, leg still crossed across the thigh, he allows the thigh to open. McKenna identifies this action, allowing a gap between his thighs to be shown, as a style of ‘cut’ belonging to 1980s competition dance culture. In the space between these two movements, spanning all of three seconds, McKenna views a cultural commentary conveying values of what was once considered correct in contrast to current aesthetics. This short series of movements physicalizes an ever shifting tradition, contrary to a notion of traditional dance as a fixed cultural artifact. Throughout the work Dunne plays with subtle variations of movements in this manner, a three count pelvic trust (a variation of the three count rhythm of the step preceding it), or the execution of ‘threes’ (as McKenna put it) performed like a child who has not yet mastered the step. This was conveyed to McKenna by Dunne’s light and loose interpretation of the step (in the likeness of kind of a gallop).

In yet another segment McKenna views Dunne as parodying the shapes of Irish dancers; the way they prepare themselves for performance by exaggerating the rolling back of their shoulders, exaggeration of the comportment of the chest, shaking his feet intensely, swinging the arms to slap himself. In this interpretation, a ’parody’ of backstage behavior recontextualizes what is considered dance. These movements contextualize performance as informal and playful, communicating gesticular and contextual colloquialisms not seen on stages themselves. This sense of play and transparency in performance is characteristic of Dunne’s performances, while McKenna’s observations convey a cultural perception of the Irish dance vocabulary as it relates to her experience of the form.

In compliment yet contrast to McKenna’s perceptions, post-modern dance artist Mary Nunan, Course Director of the MA in Contemporary Dance Performance at the Univeristy of Limerick and founding artistic director of Daghdha Dance Company also comments on Dunne’s sense of play in Ode to Socks. She expresses that how one interprets the dance is very much informed by our knowledge of his improvisation on a particular movement vernacular. Nunan says that, working with an identifiable, culturally specific movement vocabulary,“… gives you parameters for looking, because you actually see it as steps related to or elements of Irish traditional dance…it gives you an anchor as a viewer…” Perhaps it is in this structuring that we may start to understand how Dunne fulfills his quest to find “what he calls the ‘essence’ of Irish dance” (Burke 2009).

Colin Dunne and Irish Step Dance

“The step dance performance ranges from informal to formal contexts, from informal to formal dress, from age groups of five to eighty, from improvisatory performances to set repertories, and from spatially confined to theatrically lavish stage performances. Within all these forms lie existing perceptions of Irish step dance that are located in, and speak from, a specific history and place” (Foley 2001:35).

The definition of Irish step dance covers a broad configuration of methodological, theoretical, aesthetic and social precepts that classify the dance form. And though Foley referring to traditional Irish dance forms, it is a definition, which is inclusive of the dances of Colin Dunne.

As it would have been in tradition of the traveling dance master in the beginning of the 20th century (Cullinane 1987:25), Dunne’s work today, is identified by the distinct quality and characteristics of his steps as they associated with his person- his style, his work, his dance.

If this is the case, what is a ‘contemporary perspective on Irish dance’? Is it a personalized perspective, or has it always been personal? Can it be objectively defined? Is it determined by a locality, a discipline, a community, a culture? And by what culture? A culture of post-modern or traditional dance artists within Ireland? Or by whom it is performed for? Is it the artist or audience that determines how indefinably Irish the dance really is?

In the end it is easy to say that this research into the notion of contemporaneity in Irish dance has brought up more questions than answers. But it does bring us back to how Dunne locates himself as functionally as possible- as an Irish dance artist who utilizes contemporary dance methodologies versus a contemporary Irish dance artist. In retrospect, to speculate an answer to Siegel’s critique on the issue of knowing what contemporary art is in Ireland, Dunne’s example shows us that a contemporary expression is basically one that is valuable to the individual, to their experience, in their perceived present… one step at a time.

To View or Read More about Colin Dunne’s Work Visit: http://www.colindunne.com/

Bibliography

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Crawley, P. (2009)Reinventing the Reel. Irish Times. Saturday, January 31. Available online at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0131/1232923378006.html [accessed 11.03.09]

Cullinane, J. (1987) Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing. Published by John Cullinane.

Foley, C. (2001)Perceptions of Irish Step Dance: National, Global, and Local. Dance Research Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1. (Summer), pp. 34-45. Available at http://links.jstor.org /sici?sici=0149- 7677%28200122%2933%3A 1%3C34%3APOISDN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z [accessed 13.3.09]

Foley, C. (2008) ‘Negotiating Boundaries in Irish Step Dance Performance Practice: Colin Dunne and Piano One’, in Proceeding of the 23rd ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology, Monghidoro (Bologna), Italy, 2004, Zagreb, Croatia: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, pp.190-193.

Kuhling, C., Kavanagh, D. and Kieran Keohane (2008) ‘Dance-work: Images of Organization in Irish Dance’ in Organization 15; 725. Available online at

http://org.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/5/725 [accessed 19.04.09]

Mulrooney, Deidre R. (2003) Colin Dunne: deconstructing Irish Dance- Interview-Biography. Dance Magazine. November. New York, NY.

Mulrooney, Deidre.(2006) ‘Colin Dunne’ from Irish Moves: An Illustrated History of Dance and Physical Theatre in Ireland. Dublin: The Liffey Press.

Seaver, Michael. (2008) Irish Times. Tuesday, February 5. Available online at http://www.colindunne.com/oot_review.php [accessed 16.03.09]

Monahan, Michael. (2009) ‘Review: Colin Dunne at the Barbican in London.’ The Telegraph,19 Feb. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/markmonahan /4698056/Colin-Dunne-at-the-Barbican-in-London-review.html [accessed 16.03.09]

Siegel, Marcia.B. (1996) Multicult: The Show .The Hudson Review, Vol. 49, No. 3 .Autumn. The Hudson Review, Inc. pp. 463-467. Available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3852522. [accessed 14/03/2009 09:20]