A duet of bodies and dancing souls

WHEN JOHN SCOTT talks, a collage of thought, anecdotes, stories, lessons and references tumbles through his speech. He files and flicks through decades in seconds, discussing whether Picasso’s sketches were better in the 1920s or 1960s, mentioning Philip Glass being parodied in South Park, Earl Dax’s New York queer art party nights, the Salsonic Dance Company, Irish arts-funding cycles, and what kind of dance notations are the most complex. All this in the course of around a minute.

In between breaths he calls instructions out to the two dancers rehearsing in the studio he’s sitting in: “Keep that connection that you’re watching each other. And don’t be afraid to stop . . . That’s great how you’re communicating there . . . Get that pent up fury and anger with each other . . . Keep listening to each other . . . ”

Scott is the artistic director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre (IMDT), a company he founded 21 years ago. It is currently in the midst of Body Duet, which is performed by New Yorker Michelle Boulé and Irishman Philip Connaughton. Commissioned last year by the Kilkenny Arts Festival, it has also been performed in New York, illustrative of the international angles that IMDT has been working in recent history. But such success has been a long journey, with the company initially embryonic in a nation that tends to accommodate dance in rather conservative forms.

Then, Scott was an English literature student in UCD, presuming that he'd end up in theatre, considering his father was a lighting designer in the Abbey and his brother a theatre director. While he was at theatre "before I could even walk", he admits he "wasn't fully turned on" by the form. Aged 12, he saw The Green Tableby Kurt Jooss, but it would be a full decade later until Scott would begin studying dance. Enamoured by The Living Theatre, the pioneering American experimental theatre group he caught performing Prometheus in Dublin and a company he spent "a year running around France trying to join", his growing interest in dance coincided with Dublin City Ballet's call out for apprentice male dancers.

He began bribing dancers in Dublin City Ballet with chocolate to stay late to work on pieces he was developing. His confidence in the quality of the Irish dancers he rehearsed with led him to form IMDT.

Armed with a hunger to do something different in Ireland, and obsessing over videos of Meredith Monk and Trisha Brown, he applied to the Arts Council and got a grant – “enough to get me into trouble” – in 1991. “It was a shock for all of us, the first time I was able to pay everybody [the dancers]. It wasn’t for another two years I was able to pay myself.”

Since then, Scott's work – including Fall And Recover, In This Moment, Actions,and Make, I Mean– has toured internationally. But he didn't just stick with the female "kicky" dancers or shirtless virtuoso male dancers of his ballet beginnings. His 1995 work Macalla, performed as an installation piece at the Royal Hibernian Academy, was a mixture of actors, dancers, "non-trained bodies" and Joanna Banks, who came out of retirement to take part.

“This palette was very inspiring and very enabling,” Scott says, remembering the diverse age range and body type of the dancers. In 2003, after studying with Meredith Monk, Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson, Scott received an email from Spirasi, a Dublin-based centre that cares for victims of torture, looking for choreographers to work with survivors through the medium of dance.

“There was this group of about 10 people of different sizes, different ages, different colours, but all of them with the most beautiful eyes and most intense spirit. I was very nervous about what I was going to do.”

Scott’s non-narrative approach worked in asking torture survivors to show him gestures of something they did years ago. “Someone lay on the floor and said: ‘This is how I was tortured.’ Someone else mimed her work as a farmer. Someone else acted out running for a bus. Someone else did a thing where he just waved . . . He said: ‘That was the last thing I did before my mother was killed, I waved at her. I went away to the hills to the sheep and I came back and she was dead and buried by sundown.’”

After a small performance, Scott returned week after week to hold workshops; "It became a very rich creative space." He asked them if they wanted to work on a piece, which became Fall And Recover.

"So many things are more possible now than they were 21 years ago," Scott reflects, referring to upcoming tours and with Body Duetset to be performed in Ramallah in Palestine. "We have a recession. We're working with less money . . . But despite the straightening circumstances, the work seems to be delivering a good signal," he smiles, "I am, maybe, infuriatingly optimistic."