At the start of Fabulous Beast’s
performance of Rian, a man brings a
large harp to the fore of the stage, and sings while three others dance around
it, motioning towards the harp as though embracing it. Set against a luminous green backdrop, the
scene evokes an Irish flag, wherein the embrace of the harp overtly represents
embracing the Irish nation. Such a
vividly symbolic image could easily be the opening to a work that rehashed
hackneyed Irish dance steps and music in the name of preserving tradition. Instead, Rian
blends vibrant music that is recognizably Irish with original contemporary
modern dance and a multi-national cast, creating a work that both celebrates
and questions tradition.
The
write-up for Rian in the Cork
Midsummer Festival program claims the piece is a “journey to explore the
tension and harmony between Irish traditional music and modern dance” (8), a
theme further emphasized by choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan in a post-show
discussion. The interplay between
tension and harmony is visible even before the dancing begins. The ruling aesthetic of Rian is circular, but the stage at the Cork Opera House is a
proscenium, which is a very rectangular format, and tends to demarcate a very
clear separation between audience and performers. The set, designed by Sabine Dargent, appears
minimal, consisting of a semi-circular green back wall with a ledge in front of
it, surrounding main part of the stage.
Those who are not dancing at any given moment are seated in chairs on
the ledge. The audience, though they are
on the other side of the proscenium arch, completes the semi-circle of
performers sitting onstage, giving the impression of theater in the round. The
lighting is warm and aids the circular format in creating a welcoming and
inclusive atmosphere. Thus the stage
itself becomes a site of tension between the medium of the rectangular
proscenium and the circular set, as well as the harmony between performers and
audience that the set creates. The men
wear grey suits with white shirts and suspenders, while the women wear knee
length dresses in varying shades of green.
While none of the performers dress exactly alike, their general
simplicity and near-uniformity help them to build an ensemble that does not
distinguish between musician and dancer, and draws attention to the performance
rather than to the individual performers.
Perhaps
the most obvious tension staged in Rian
is between the music, which is Liam Ó Maonlaí’s original work but composed in
the style of traditional Irish folk music, and the sort of dance one would
expect to see accompanying such music. Traditional Irish dance involves upright
torsos, percussive stepping of the feet, and often very little facial expression. The dancers in Rian, however, used their entire bodies, moving sinuously,
sometimes against the tempo of the music, using all levels of the space from
the floor up, and sometimes smiling.
While such choreography is perhaps not new to modern dance, the
expectation is such that it would be jarring against jigs and reels played on
fiddles and accordions. Yet the result
of this unusual combination is the harmony that Keegan-Dolan and company are
aiming for—the dance is beautiful, sensual, joyful, and always fits the
music. In a post-show discussion,
Keegan-Dolan describes the choreography process as one in which the dancers
simply moved to the music as it suited them until they found recurring patterns
to choose from. In the finished
performance, the unexpectedness of the choreography makes it appear as if the
dancers are have never heard the music before and simply following their first
impulses, and indeed, allows the audience to feel as though they are
experiencing the traditional Irish music for the first time as well.
There
is also a tension between the “Irishness” of the music, reinforced by the green
of the costumes and the sets and by images like the embrace of the harp
mentioned above, and the physical bodies of the eight dancers themselves. The cast includes several Irish performers,
but also at least one Nigerian dancer, a Finnish dancer, a half-Indonesian
dancer, and an English dancer. On the
one hand, this may point to the fact that the Irish population is no longer a
single homogenous group of nearly identical ethnic origin (not that it ever
was, as a mix of ancestry from Celtic and pre-Celtic tribes, the Vikings, and
Anglo-Norman settlers), but includes immigrants of different ethnicities as
well. On the other hand, the non-Irish
performers were not necessarily immigrants, but were simply in the country to
dance for the show. In this context, I
think Keegan-Dolan is using non-Irish bodies to argue that the broader nature
of folk music like that performed onstage is such that, while every culture has
its own particular music, the drive to make music and dance is
international. The harmonious nature of
the international ensemble embodies this argument.
The
musicians sing most of the songs in Irish, but further tensions are exposed at
one moment in the performance they perform a song in English. A woman sings
from the point of view of a man who has just caught sight of his true
love. While she sings four female
dancers move slowly and gracefully in a synchronized formation. But when the singer describes the lover, an
idealized “rosy-cheeked” beauty with fair skin, a dark skinned dancer of
African descent leaves the group and dances by herself, still graceful but
moving counter to the others. It is
clear that she does not fit the description of the Irish beauty described in
the song, but it is equally clear that she, too, is beautiful, and before long
she is folded back into the group of women dancing onstage. The brief moment illuminating the Afro-Irish
dancer while detailing a more “traditional” kind of Irish beauty comments both
on the changing make-up of Irish society—it faces a rising immigrant
population, a large portion of which comes from Nigeria—and questions the
privileging of white standards of beauty within that culture.
Fabulous
Beast and Michael Keegan-Dolan use the theme of tensions and harmony to great
effect in Rian. They have created a piece that constantly
surprises in its exploration of tradition, of the Irish, and of the source of
dance itself. When, at the end of the
performance, they invited the audience to join the cast onstage for an encore, it
was a final, joyful expression of community and the belief that whatever your
traditions, folk is for everyone.
~Julia Price
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