`When you start experiencing turbulence on a plane, and you think it's going to crash, that's when your life flashes before your eyes," says Irish choreographer John Scott. He is discussing the inspiration for his new dance piece, Rough Air, which is being performed by Irish Modern Dance Theatre in nine venues around the country (it premiered at Siamsa Tire in Tralee on Thursday and opens in the Space Upstairs in the Project in Dublin on Wednesday). Knowledge, believes Scott - as distinct from information, which saturates us in ever-increasing amounts - often comes from such queasy, jolting encounters with our own vulnerablity.
Choreographer, dancer and accomplished tenor, Scott (40) takes part in Rough Air himself, reciting a dance poem about bowing. Meanwhile, the other dancers whirl, twitch and stretch like machines gone slightly awry, exploring the clumsy yet determined ways humans try and fail. One dancer (Justine Doswell) keeps attempting a handstand, which she can only achieve with the help of fellow dancer James Hosty. Sometimes the dancers move in silence ("to the music of the heart", says Scott); otherwise they are accompanied by Mel Mercier's brooding, mechanistic score. Our hit-and-miss attempts to connect with others are explored in several dance duets which include punching and shoving - Scott loves vaudeville. Our disjointed relationship with our own bodies is revealed in the sequence where veteran ballerina Joanna Banks touches parts of her body, addressing them as "you". Only when the other dancers begin to touch her does she say "me". Scott explains: "Apparently, babies don't really feel they exist until somebody touches them." His inspirations come from a myriad of sources as various and offbeat as himself. A cauldron of energy, he leads me around the rehearsal space at the De Valois Dance Centre off Capel Street, displaying a Japanese print of a tiger, a series of pictures of victims of the Khmer Rouge, and a shot of two windblown figures at the end of a pier ("these are gestures to look at"). He is deeply influenced by both Nijinsky and Merce Cunningham, the famous American choreographer, now 80, whose company's performance at the Belfast Festival in 1997 "blew me away", says Scott. Scott's designer for Rough Air, Dutch painter Henk Schut, sits beside us, full of plans to paint the interior of the Project glaring white, with unsettling industrial lighting and a sequence of hanging chairs. Scott laughs: "We're notorious for turning spaces upside down."
"We" is the Irish Modern Dance Theatre, the company Scott founded 10 years ago, at a time when Irish dance was disappearing into oblivion: "It was like a dance genocide. The Arts Council withdrew funding and the Irish National Ballet, Dublin City Ballet and Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre all closed". Brother of theatre director, Michael Scott, and son of the Abbey's lighting designer, Lesley Scott, he was steeped in theatre from a young age, but when he saw a performance of The Green Table at the age of 12, he decided "this famous expressionist ballet was the most theatrical thing I'd ever seen". As a student in UCD, he had "made my own strange, dance-inspired theatre pieces", after which he "ran off" to train with the Living Theatre in France (founded by New Yorkers, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, who were interested in both poetry and visual art). A year later, he was back in Dublin, training to be a dancer with Dublin City Ballet. He has also studied with director Robert Wilson, choreographer/composer Meredith Monk and with with Fondation Royaumont in France: "I like to be international. Think Beckett". In 1991, after his own extensive work and study abroad, he felt Ireland was ready for international dance. He admits now that feeling may have been premature: "My brother Michael noticed during the 1980s that Irish critics couldn't understand modern dance. He knew that Irish audiences would respond well to overseas dance companies, but if he invited a big company in from France or Germany the show would be rubbished by the critics, and no one would go to see it". As recently as 1994, "the critics hated the challenging and highly-respected Belgian company Ultima Vez when it performed in Dublin".
His extensive training abroad means that he keeps up with what's happening. "It's vital to interact. I still feel I'm only beginning. I still take time to study with other choreographers. My work is all the better because of what I've seen abroad." In turn, Irish Modern Dance Theatre has received a positive reception on its travels: "When we brought our show Intimate Gold to New York last year, we got good reviews: the critics said we were refreshing and our Irish dancers were beautiful". Irish Modern Dance Theatre has toured in Bulgaria, Sweden and the US, and last year Scott was the only Irish choreographer to be nominated for the prestigious Prix de Bagnolet in France, an international prize. Scott has been involved in a number of collaborations, including one last Easter with photographer Chris Nash for an installation called Off the Wall, shown in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar. The show comprised projections of giant, colourful and occasionally mobile images of dancers performing moves choreographed by Scott. In one arresting image, dancers in flesh-coloured underwear seem to fly through the air: "We used the underwear to give them a cleaner line, but the audience were disappointed", chuckles Scott. "They would have preferred them in the nude."
These days, Scott is most interested in "tiny movements, which say so much more than throwing the legs around - it's just finding the guts to do that". Some of these movements in Rough Air were devised by the dancers themselves, such as when Justine Doswell puts her finger in the cleft of James Hosty's chin to bring his thrown back head to her level. Scott is looking for a deliberately "ragged" effect, where dancers sometimes dance offstage. The music was composed independently of the choreography and there is no slick streamlining: "Dancers are not beautiful, special creatures; they are real people".
A board member for the planned International Dance Festival of Ireland - pending Arts Council funding - Scott feels that Irish theatre, still predominantly text-based, can learn a lot from dance: "Dance is the future of theatre: it is showing us the way theatre should go".
Rough Air runs in the Space Upstairs in the Project for four nights from Wednesday, at 8 p.m. Then it travels to Limerick, Cork, Drogheda, Galway, Monaghan and Waterford. For bookings, tel: 01-8749616