Democratic dance with the audience as partner

Many novels are started, fewer are finished. The bane of the aspiring novelist, or any artist, is the inertia caused by inactivity. Leave a novel, painting, symphony or dance unattended for any period of time and chances are it will never reach completion.

Liv O’Donoghue is unperturbed by these kinds of disruptions to her productive rhythm. The combination of a busy career as a dancer, work with theatre companies and irregular funding means that her own choreography can be left on the back burner for months on end. But her commitment to those dances is undiminished. If anything, they seem to benefit from the downtime.

Some, such as Hear Me Sing Your Song, can become more thoughtful and refined, while others, such as With Raised Arms, can fly off in a tangent to become another creation completely. Both works are part of a double bill at Project Arts Centre and they share O'Donoghue's informal artistic credo that her dances are "about people rather than crafting something beautiful".

Writing about Coiscéim Dance Theatre in this paper back in 1997, Fintan O’Toole was “struck by how unusual a vibrant, self-confident, joyous dance company still seems in contemporary Irish culture”. Not any more.

Openness to outside opinions 

A couple of generations of talented Irish choreographers have emerged since then, and the latest,

which includes O’Donoghue, is supremely confident in craft and ambition. There’s not a hint of swagger in that confidence; rather it is displayed through open-palmed humility and openness to outside opinions and influences.

“It’s important to democratise the whole creative process,” says O’Donoghue. “We constantly invite people into rehearsals or open up feedback from audiences. We want to create a sense of community around each piece.”

Community is at the heart of Hear Me Sing Your Song, created with dancers Clare Brzezicki, Maria Nilsson Waller and musicians Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Bryan O'Connell. O'Donoghue's Norwegian-Irish heritage was the springboard for questions about identity and belonging. "I have a Norwegian mother and an Irish father, so these different heritages are feeding into myself and my brothers. We have weird hybrid traditions, and sometimes I feel like I don't belong in either place, Norway or Ireland. So where do I belong? Do people create my home or a place?"

For Hear Me Sing Your Song, she decided to construct an imaginary place that had no history or identity. "What if you dropped people into this space? What kind of community would evolve? Would the people fit together? Would they create a kinship?"

Off to Marie Byrd Land

Working with a diverse cast from different nationalities led to a fruitful research period. Each brought various viewpoints, and Maria Waller Nilsson had even choreographed a work, Last Land, about Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica and the desert area of Bir Tawil in eastern Africa. These are the last two places as yet unclaimed by any nation: real versions of O'Donoghue's imagined place.

“It has always felt like a personal work, because of the content and initial conception, but now it really belongs to the group. Also I don’t often choreograph a piece that I’m not in, so I’m more of an outsider.”

The group of four performers can never relax, as every night their performance will get snagged by the presence of an outsider on stage. This cameo role is played by a different person every night.

“I wanted to create an unsettling presence on the stage,” says O’Donoghue.

On the afternoon of each performance, this new member will be introduced to the cast and given instructions on how they might or might not interact. But are they really outsiders?

“Oh, yes,” she says. “I haven’t met some of them yet. It’s exciting and terrifying. Some have been chosen through chance meetings, or through workshops we have taught, or just been recommended. The only remit is that they can’t be dancers, but have been on the stage before in some capacity. And obviously they have to want to do it.”

O’Donoghue has grown less interested in ideas around the ethereality of dance and more interested in broader issues that resonate throughout society. “I did a research project in Italy a few years ago that brought choreographers together to address issues around age. I was really confronted with making dances that have a consequence rather than crafting something beautiful.”

In turn she has confronted audiences with themselves rather than providing escapism from themselves. In With Raised Arms this has led to a change from a gently interrogative solo based on paintings by Egon Schiele to a sometimes brutal duet, where O'Donoghue is physically manipulated by a Coppelius-like O'Connell.

It was produced in association with Dance Ireland and Firkin Crane, and was first developed during a residency in TanzQuartier in Vienna in 2012. It featured as a work-in-progress at last year's Dublin Dance Festival, where it was a beguiling meditation on self-determination. In the intervening time to its next performance last January at Firkin Crane, however, O'Donoghue was drawn back to Schiele's position as an artist.

“Schiele was a radical, and he challenged the status quo. So I questioned myself as an artist and as a woman in Ireland now. What am I confronting? The piece is now completely different because of that basic question. A lot of the original movement is still there, but the dance has become less about Schiele and more about me as an artist and woman. I particularly wanted to address choice and inaction.

“Quite early on in the process I stripped myself of choice, so Bryan becomes like a puppet master. As you watch you can’t escape the fact that I am a woman and Bryan is a man. The audience then becomes like society observing.”

Research outside Ireland

Throughout the interview, residencies in various European countries are mentioned. This networking, largely facilitated through Dance Ireland, has helped O’Donoghue and her contemporaries to present and research their work outside Ireland. “This is hugely important, both as a way to make work happen, but also in terms of inspiration through viewing other work and talking with fellow artists.”

It has also led to the realisation that standards at home match those in other European countries. More importantly, these residencies have allowed more artists and audiences to feed into her highly democratic process. Audiences might be slow to enter into dialogue, but working with different types of people as performers has helped open that conversation.

“Responses that I would get by working with non-dancers have been more human, rather than the more technical dancer-type opinion. But I’m not abandoning dancers. It’s just that I’m interested in people and what they bring to the studio, rather than dancers as blank canvases that I can shape and move at a whim.”

Hear Me Sing Your Song/With Raised Arms is at Project Arts Centre, July 10-12. projectartscentre.ie