It's a cabaret that looks at the darker side of life, but The Murder Ballads manages to leaven the subject through some very black humour, discoversChristine Madden
Murder isn't generally something you'd want to sing and dance about. All the more challenging a subject, then, for Finola Cronin, dancer and choreographer-in-residence at UCD. Her new piece, The Murder Ballads, a cabaret commissioned by this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival, treats the darker side of humanity with the murky, scurrilous wit you'd expect from this genre.
This first piece of Cronin's to be performed in Ireland draws from her experience and career as a dancer and choreographer. Before returning in 1995 to do an MA in theatre studies at UCD, Cronin steeped herself in the Tanztheater strand of dance with Vivienne Newport in Frankfurt and Pina Bausch in Wuppertal. Cronin worked with the world-renowned Bausch for 10 years, and still gets "called back" to do the occasional piece.
Creating a piece in the Tanztheater manner of Bausch calls upon all participants to be both painstaking yet utterly free with their imaginations. This method of composition - which appears murderously difficult from the outside - relies heavily on an artistic essential: the ability to give rein to your medium, to let it evolve, to work with the accidental and make the accidental work for you. Put together bit by bit, a production develops with the principals, moulding itself to them and drawing from their strengths and idiosyncrasies to become highly personalised.
"One of the predominant elements of Tanztheater is the process, another is the look of it," explains Cronin during a break in rehearsal. "Tanztheater emphasises the theatricality of dance, its eloquence, its emotional expressiveness." Saturated with meaning, the dance communicates with the audience. "The narrative is in the movement, in the action," Cronin says.
To make the most of the venue, Nero's nightclub in Ciaran Street, Cronin came up with the idea of doing a cabaret using Caryl Churchill's play The Lives of the Great Poisoners as a starting point. Churchill's script revolves around Medea (ancient Greece), Madame de Brinvilliers (17th-century France) and Dr Crippen (Edwardian London). "I was looking at that mix, and then got the idea of the gothic, which ties in well with Dr Crippen and Edwardian England. I could use the Great Poisoners as an avenue to access that world."
To help her to link these diverse characters with sinister wit, she assembled her players - dancers Ríonach Ní Néill and Ester O'Brolchain, singer Camille O'Sullivan and musician Sam Jackson - to get input and feedback on the subject. O'Sullivan and Jackson recommended listening to the songs of Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey and Nick Cave (whose Murder Ballads gave the piece its name). "When I started listening to the album, I thought, 'God, this stuff is so dark', and so topical, with all the things we hear happening to children these days," says Cronin. But, not wanting to go down such a very bleak road, she found a way around it. "I'm looking at the 'murder of innocence'. You can see it all around you, how kids are brought up - or 'dragged up' - these days."
With ideas, inspiration and players in place, Cronin sets about nurturing her disparate elements, allowing things to grow and develop, rather than constructing her piece systematically. Like a painter working with water-colour, Cronin allows her media - the dancers, singer and musician - to follow their natural inclinations, to think into the growing piece until it sets together into a cohesive unity. "It has to do with the complexity of making dance. You need live bodies in a studio; they're your notes, your paints. When you ask them questions, they come up with something you'd never thought of. They use their own imagination and experience. You can't imprison them on a stage.
"A lot has to be about the evolution of it, looking to where people are at their best, and allowing them to create their own movement. If they do what comes naturally, that is what will look the best. It's a risk you take. It can be a huge problem. But there is a lot to be said for leaving things open. We don't tend to take that risk enough."
Performing a cabaret, a genre usually associated with 1930s Berlin - and rather exotic in Ireland - adds to the sense of risk. When asked how Irish audiences will find their way into the piece, Cronin admits, "Maybe it's a style people won't like. But people do take to cabaret."
Dancer Ní Néill, however, doesn't accept the idea that cabaret is so very new and alien. "One of the problems in Ireland is that we have artistic amnesia. We have no proper archiving or documentation of these things. I'd say what Agnes Bernelle was doing in the 1960s and 1970s was not very different from what we're doing now. But we have no way of knowing."
Ní Néill has been working with Cronin on and off since 1999: "If this were research and lab work, I'd be her guinea pig." She is well acquainted with this method of creating a piece. "It's much more demanding to work like this," she admits, than conventionally, when you receive your part and practise it.
"On top of all that rigour, you have to use your imagination and every dimension you can think of. You have to include aspects of story-telling and play-acting on top of technical demands. It's a full body-mind-spirit working process." After her stint in Kilkenny, Ní Néill will return for more of the same to her new position as a member of the Bremen Tanztheater.
Currently singing in another cabaret at Bewley's Café, Camille O'Sullivan, says: "Cabaret is up and coming in Ireland. The interest goes across a range of age groups. The notion doesn't only belong to the 1920s and 1930s. We make it more in tune to what's happening today".
As this is O'Sullivan's first dance venture, she is feeling her way into a different approach to the performance. "Going about unfolding the character of the songs in this production will be different than if I were just singing on my own. This takes something else out of me. Finola is really good at extracting these things. And each of us is partaking in dance, we're all stepping into each other's realm."
As the rehearsal continues, Cronin compares her playful narrative style to that of her dance contemporaries: "I'd be much more fragmented. I like things to be ambiguous". As she sits at a table in a lather of notes, Ní Néill is swishing across the wooden floor, staring into the unblinking eye of her dance partner: a videocamera.
"We're working with some very dark songs, musically as well as narratively dark," says Jackson. "You get that quirky feeling from them that things just aren't quite right." He will be playing live with an overdubbing of his own piano in the background. "It'll have a subtle, dark feel, almost as if the sound were coming from somewhere else, from a distance - which, in a way, it is."
As the accessories to the crime continue to act out their parts, the plot emerges, not to be concluded until their big night. Don't say you haven't been warned.
The Murder Ballads runs until tomorrow at Nero's, Kilkenny, at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Details: www.kilkennyarts.ie/056-52175. Camille O'Sullivan and Friends is at Bewley's Cafe, Grafton Street, Dublin, on Saturdays at 8.30 p.m. until September 7th. Tel: 086-8784001