Fabulous Beast rehearsing at Shawbrook.
Irish Times, 16th Sept, 2005
In 2003 a dance theatre company based in Co Longford provided the surprise hit of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Now Fabulous Beast return to the fray with an energetic, violent, full-blooded version of the ancient legent of the Tain Bo Cuailnge. Belinda McKeon talks to dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan about unleashing the beast.
PHILIP DAWSON, one half of the team behind the renowed Shawbrook Dance Theatre in Legan, Co Longford, remembers a day in early summer of this year, watching the face of the dancer and choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan as the pair surveyed a building on the Shawbrook grounds. The building was a hay shed, the traces of agriculture still clear to see, since Shawbrook was, until very recently, a working farm as well as the literal home of Philip and Anica Dawson and the creative home of the many young dancers who pass through the theatre and its school every year.
Dawson doesn't use the word "dubious" as he describes the reaction to this structure of Keegan-Dolan and the other members of his company, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, originally set up in 1997. But it's clear that there were some nerves at Shawbrook that day.
Within a worryingly short space of time, this place without even any walls to speak of had to become a large-scale, flexible rehearsal room for Fabulous Beast's new production. The company was eager to get to work on the piece, an exploration of the ancient legend of the Táin Bó Cuailnge; audiences at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) meanwhile, would be eager to see the results, memories of Fabulous Beast's previous production - Giselle, the undisputed hit of the 2003 festival - still fresh in their minds. The new piece needed a space in which to grow.
And, just a few weeks later, it has. The company is in situ, rehearsing all day in the new space, sleeping by night in the dormitories usually occupied by young students, and eating together the generous meals prepared by the Dawsons and their helpers.
The former barn is now a studio, a space just as sophisticated as the other converted sheds and outhouses around the peaceful grounds of Shawbrook; Dawson turned it around with the same gusto with which he has turned a byre into a dormitory for residing students, and with which he is currently turning a milking parlour into a sauna and pool for muscles aching from hours of training and practice. And the new piece is not so much coming together as stomping its way there, bellowing itself into being. The place - not just the rehearsal room, but the midlands terrain in which it, and Shawbrook, are set - could hardly be more fitting for the piece Keegan-Dolan, its author, has called The Bull.
Keegan-Dolan, himself from this part of Co Longford - near Edgeworthstown, the birthplace of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and on the border with Westmeath - had long held a notion of creating a work based on the Táin, the tale of Queen Maeve's jealous and catastrophic pursuit of Ulster's prize bull. When, after the success of Giselle, former DTF director Fergus Linehan and the Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE), London commissioned another work, he found himself wondering whether to approach the story regarded by many as having been fully and definitively told by the 1969 translation of Thomas Kinsella, accompanied by the brush drawings of Louis le Brocquy; both artists are now as bound up with the legend as is Maeve herself, or as, indeed, is the coveted beast.
But two chance sightings as Keegan-Dolan was riding his motorbike along the road from Mullingar made up his mind. "I was thinking about the piece," he says, "and didn't I see a big, brown limousin bull in the field. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I saw the sign. For the Táin Trail [ a tourist trail through areas and sites mentioned in the legend] and I thought, I'm going to do the Táin. That's it."
That, in a sense, was Keegan-Dolan's last moment alone with the idea; from the moment it began to journey towards realisation, it became the property, the focus, the endeavour, of the company. Unusually for a director, Keegan-Dolan will not talk about the piece without having as many members of the company as possible to join in the conversation. The result, for the outsider attempting to glimpse into their world, can be baffling, even frustrating. After four weeks spent living and creating together in such close confinement, the 14-member group speak about the production in a type of shorthand, and mere elucidation of the structure of The Bull, of the way in which this production reimagines the Táin narrative - though it is not, Keegan-Dolan insists, primarily a version of the Táin - is slow in coming. Mainly, the performers want to talk about the experience of working together in a range of disciplines - acting, dancing, singing, music, rhythm - and about each person's speciality is shared with and, within the piece, taken on for a time by the others.
"The group is exceptional," says Keegan-Dolan. "It's a really interesting group of people. You have an Irish percussionist. A piano-playing, acting composer from Rome. An actor from Norwich. An actress from the west of Ireland. A dancer-actor from Bratislava. A counter-tenor from Naples, an actor from Cork, a dancer from France ... very eclectic. And nobody is good at just one thing, there are no categories. The dancers are singing, the singers are dancing, the actors are dancing, the drummers are dancing ..."
But what exactly are they drumming, dancing, singing and acting? Keegan-Dolan is loathe to reveal the details, but from the scraps of information he will concede, The Bull looks likely to glow with the same sort of humour and dynamism - and, likely too, given the calibre of the performers, with the same degree of beauty and intelligence - as did Giselle. But comparisons are limiting, and unfair; enough to say that the setting is once more the midlands, the era a modern one, and the situation seething with dark emotion. And, perhaps, that all but two of the cast from Giselle appear in The Bull, along with six other performers.
Though Keegan-Dolan sounds most excited by the possibilities opened up by the involvement in the piece of rhythm artists such as the percussionist Robbie Harris and the dancer Colin Dunne, he has created, too, a strong cast of characters. They live out the story of the Táin in starkly - and, by the sounds of it, bleakly hilarious - contemporary terms. The Maeve in The Bull is Maeve Fogarty, doyenne of one of the two families whose struggle is at the centre of the piece. Maeve, to be played by Olwen Fouéré, has a husband and two children. She and her husband also have the services of one Miroslav Kont, a hired hitman from the Czech Republic, while Maeve has the somewhat more different services of a lover, Fergus O'Rourke. "Because," explains Keegan-Dolan, "Maeve has money invested in a musical called Celtic Bitch, in which Fergus is the lead dancer". Deliciously, the role of Fergus will be played by Dunne, well known as a former lead in Riverdance, who has been leading the cast through their strides in Irish dancing for the past number of weeks.
Muscling up to the Fogarty family, ostensibly over the matter of a bull, will be the Cullens: old Mr Cullen, his brothers Donnie and Big Bernie, his son and his son's librarian lover. In the mix, too, will be a Nigerian priest and Morrigan, the goddess of death. On a mundane level, the conflict between the families is easy to grasp; it comes down to money and social standing. "The Fogartys are nouveau riche who've come up to the city," explains Keegan-Dolan. "They live in a five-bedroom mansion with underfloor heating. Whereas the Cullens have stayed old school. They're plasterers and they just live in a two-bedroom cottage and all ... live together." (The laughter that greets the last comment suggests that perversity may be alive and well in the Cullen household, but that's just a wild guess.)
It's easy now to see why Keegan-Dolan insists so vehemently that what he and the company are putting together is not "the Táin". This, refreshingly, sounds like no Táin studied by past or present generations of Leaving Cert students, or followed by readers of the Lady Gregory or even the Kinsella translation. If it is not a revision, then it is, in less loaded language, definitely a looking-again; a looking again at the deepest currents running through the legend, currents previously ignored or downplayed for reasons of decorum or fear.
"When I went back to it," says Keegan-Dolan, "I hadn't really an understanding of the story. I remembered Queen Maeve, and I remembered that she wanted a bull." That much was enough, he says, to interest him in making a piece; the "two really powerful archetypes" of the queen and the bull would have yielded plenty on their own. But then Keegan-Dolan returned to the Kinsella translation. "And I was really quite shocked at the violence in it. And then I became excited by the disparity between the version we're told as children and the version as translated."
He would have been much more attracted to the story as a child, he says, "if someone had told me the real story. It would have been fantastic. You know, all riding each other, killing each other ..."
Fouéré agrees; she finds "refreshing", she says, the fact that the action is spurred by a woman who is not just powerful but immensely and incessantly violent. "It's only fairly recently in Irish drama that women have been allowed to be monsters and to be human at the same time."
"Every generation," says Keegan-Dolan, "tries to make culture something you can take to the table rather than really what it is, which is often incredibly scary, threatening, challenging, stuff about what it is to be human. You know? So that's why I stuck with it."
Copyright Irish Times
Saturday 31 March 2007
INYD - National Youth Dance, lecture by Anica Louw
INYD Irish National Youth Dance
A lecture by Anica Louw
7th November
The only way I can feel personally successful as a dance educator, is if I can see a real link between dance education and professional dance.
Teenage students must also see and feel this link: a real bridge between them and the professional world, a world that is in their reach and not something they cannot imagine.
Every attempt I make in teaching and creating courses is to keep these goals and links clear.
How can I, as a dance educator, prepare students to audition successfully for 3rdlevel dance education colleges, prepare them to be on the road to become a dance artist, and to become an educated intelligent member of a healthy dance audience.
I could not teach dance or facilitated dance courses and be satisfied that they were taught posture, discipline, social behaviour, teamwork, dedication and so forth. Because in my heart I know that plenty of other disciplines like Taekwondoo, yoga, gymnastics, to name a few, can do all those things and more.
But what they cannot teach, is the art of dancing and dance making.
Story telling, music and folk dancing are completely part and parcel of what it is to be Irish. And therefor it is not surprising for Ireland to produce important choreographers? Choreographers who are well known in Europe and America (less so in Ireland!). When doors open magically for me by inexcusably dropping names like Michael Keegan Dolan, or Marguerite Donlon, any where in Europe, my chest grows with pride. They just happen to have Longford links as well!
So how does all this fit in with creating a youth dance ensemble? Well, perfectly:
These days it is crucial for teachers to recognise that choreographers take it for granted that dancers would contribute to the creative process of making a new dance piece. This dance making/ the ability to improvise must begin at an early stage to prepare them for professional life. More and more demands are made on dancers to contribute to the development of the dance movement and material. Dance students must be encouraged to be part of the creative process, able to change, to reinvent themselves, and not categorised.
This important part of a dancer’s education is called on when they do their audition for 3rdlevel education. It is also the most important ingredient that a company director looks for in a new potential dancer auditioning for a place in their dance company. ( use Sarah as example)
My students have been involved with European auditions where they were given an hour’s ballet class and 10 minutes of improvisation as the initial part of selection.
How on earth can the panel judge on that? (Especially as a lot of applicants would never have done ballet?!).
They choose people who are:
extremely musical,
who can follow and adapt quickly
who can remember movements,
who are supple all over,
who have a healthy degree of turnout,
who can turn, spin, jump and move,
who are working like blazes at the back of class and give it everything when asked to execute,
who is not afraid (rather go wrong than not try at all).
Apply all these points together to any ballet student and if they all fit, you have a probable candidate.
And in the improvisation session that follows all these things will be revealed, and to crown it all, the ability to make things up as you go, to respond instinctively to music and other people.
When you have past this stage you, are allowed to show your minute and a half prepared piece, where hopefully your artistry, style and performance come through.
This is what we try to teach and convey to The National Youth Dance Company.
In practical terms we do the following:
Four teachers teach at 16 residential weekends, which run from January to June. For strong technique we teach RAD vocational graded syllabi,
For dance style RAD Upper grades
For rhythm and musical theatre ISTD vocational graded syllabi,
and for strength, centering and endurance a Contemporary dance class.
The Contemporary teacher is usually the professional choreographer. She /he is also normally a well-known Irish choreographer and dancer.( This is where the important links start happening). In these workshops they learn to choreograph, improvise, contact improvisation and partnering.
For stage presence, stage personality, theatre skills, they take part in the backstage theatre dance awards.
They also get the opportunity to work with other professional artists creating the piece with them. ( examples)
They attend all visiting companies’ workshops and performances, thereby learning at first hand, the skills that are expected from them and repertoire from the company. The dancers sit down and chat to them. The students get the chance to ask important questions like: where did you study dance, how old were you etc.?
LD dance organises NYD to travel to see important companies performing in Dublin. For example their patron’s latest work Giselle, or Mark Morris and Rosas.
We are 6 years old, and have received gratefully a small Arts Council grant for the last two years. All the students that have auditioned for 3rd level places in the last 5 years have been successful.
A lecture by Anica Louw
7th November
The only way I can feel personally successful as a dance educator, is if I can see a real link between dance education and professional dance.
Teenage students must also see and feel this link: a real bridge between them and the professional world, a world that is in their reach and not something they cannot imagine.
Every attempt I make in teaching and creating courses is to keep these goals and links clear.
How can I, as a dance educator, prepare students to audition successfully for 3rdlevel dance education colleges, prepare them to be on the road to become a dance artist, and to become an educated intelligent member of a healthy dance audience.
I could not teach dance or facilitated dance courses and be satisfied that they were taught posture, discipline, social behaviour, teamwork, dedication and so forth. Because in my heart I know that plenty of other disciplines like Taekwondoo, yoga, gymnastics, to name a few, can do all those things and more.
But what they cannot teach, is the art of dancing and dance making.
Story telling, music and folk dancing are completely part and parcel of what it is to be Irish. And therefor it is not surprising for Ireland to produce important choreographers? Choreographers who are well known in Europe and America (less so in Ireland!). When doors open magically for me by inexcusably dropping names like Michael Keegan Dolan, or Marguerite Donlon, any where in Europe, my chest grows with pride. They just happen to have Longford links as well!
So how does all this fit in with creating a youth dance ensemble? Well, perfectly:
These days it is crucial for teachers to recognise that choreographers take it for granted that dancers would contribute to the creative process of making a new dance piece. This dance making/ the ability to improvise must begin at an early stage to prepare them for professional life. More and more demands are made on dancers to contribute to the development of the dance movement and material. Dance students must be encouraged to be part of the creative process, able to change, to reinvent themselves, and not categorised.
This important part of a dancer’s education is called on when they do their audition for 3rdlevel education. It is also the most important ingredient that a company director looks for in a new potential dancer auditioning for a place in their dance company. ( use Sarah as example)
My students have been involved with European auditions where they were given an hour’s ballet class and 10 minutes of improvisation as the initial part of selection.
How on earth can the panel judge on that? (Especially as a lot of applicants would never have done ballet?!).
They choose people who are:
extremely musical,
who can follow and adapt quickly
who can remember movements,
who are supple all over,
who have a healthy degree of turnout,
who can turn, spin, jump and move,
who are working like blazes at the back of class and give it everything when asked to execute,
who is not afraid (rather go wrong than not try at all).
Apply all these points together to any ballet student and if they all fit, you have a probable candidate.
And in the improvisation session that follows all these things will be revealed, and to crown it all, the ability to make things up as you go, to respond instinctively to music and other people.
When you have past this stage you, are allowed to show your minute and a half prepared piece, where hopefully your artistry, style and performance come through.
This is what we try to teach and convey to The National Youth Dance Company.
In practical terms we do the following:
Four teachers teach at 16 residential weekends, which run from January to June. For strong technique we teach RAD vocational graded syllabi,
For dance style RAD Upper grades
For rhythm and musical theatre ISTD vocational graded syllabi,
and for strength, centering and endurance a Contemporary dance class.
The Contemporary teacher is usually the professional choreographer. She /he is also normally a well-known Irish choreographer and dancer.( This is where the important links start happening). In these workshops they learn to choreograph, improvise, contact improvisation and partnering.
For stage presence, stage personality, theatre skills, they take part in the backstage theatre dance awards.
They also get the opportunity to work with other professional artists creating the piece with them. ( examples)
They attend all visiting companies’ workshops and performances, thereby learning at first hand, the skills that are expected from them and repertoire from the company. The dancers sit down and chat to them. The students get the chance to ask important questions like: where did you study dance, how old were you etc.?
LD dance organises NYD to travel to see important companies performing in Dublin. For example their patron’s latest work Giselle, or Mark Morris and Rosas.
We are 6 years old, and have received gratefully a small Arts Council grant for the last two years. All the students that have auditioned for 3rd level places in the last 5 years have been successful.
Shawbrook in the Eighties by Diana Theodores
Shawbrook in the Eighties,
an extract from: Report - Dance Critic in Ireland by Diana Theodores
First published in: Dance Chronicle, 1996
A day after returning from the sacred vegetarian rites on Innishrath it did not seem strange to receive a call from a woman with an Afrikaans accent from County Longford asking if I would come to a ballet recital on her dairy farm in Lenamore; she was quick to add that she was an avid reader of my dance column. Visions of bovine ballerinas had me in fits of giggles as I left the next day. Eamonn, the photographer, was to follow.
What greeted me upon arrival at the farm was a populace swanning around in summery gala finery, drinks in hand, taped music filling loudspeakers and lulling the cows, and a gorgeous little barn theatre containing sprung maple floors, a hydraulic-winched tiered seating system, full theatre lighting, and a herd of fledgling ballerinas seated on bales of hay, warming up near the barbecue fire for the performance. “Shawbrook” Ballet Farm was opened June 19, 1987, by Anica Dawson and her dairy farmer husband, Phillip. According to Anica, it all started when she watched the Rose of Tralee contest on television and thought that the foreign contestants looked so poised compared with the Irish girls parading down the aisle, whom she thought looked dreadful. Her analysis was that they needed ballet training. With poise as her purpose she went hauling her piano around in her husband’s cattle trailer (he was secretary of the Friesian Breeder’s Club) and setting up ballet classes in any available hall in Longford. I ran a long color supplement feature piece on “Shawbrook,” liberally accompanied by Eamonn’s photographs.
The piece helped to launch the venture and today it is the home of a well-established Ballet International Summer School, with one hundred students, dormitories, visiting teachers, and R.A.D. ballet training throughout the year.
an extract from: Report - Dance Critic in Ireland by Diana Theodores
First published in: Dance Chronicle, 1996
A day after returning from the sacred vegetarian rites on Innishrath it did not seem strange to receive a call from a woman with an Afrikaans accent from County Longford asking if I would come to a ballet recital on her dairy farm in Lenamore; she was quick to add that she was an avid reader of my dance column. Visions of bovine ballerinas had me in fits of giggles as I left the next day. Eamonn, the photographer, was to follow.
What greeted me upon arrival at the farm was a populace swanning around in summery gala finery, drinks in hand, taped music filling loudspeakers and lulling the cows, and a gorgeous little barn theatre containing sprung maple floors, a hydraulic-winched tiered seating system, full theatre lighting, and a herd of fledgling ballerinas seated on bales of hay, warming up near the barbecue fire for the performance. “Shawbrook” Ballet Farm was opened June 19, 1987, by Anica Dawson and her dairy farmer husband, Phillip. According to Anica, it all started when she watched the Rose of Tralee contest on television and thought that the foreign contestants looked so poised compared with the Irish girls parading down the aisle, whom she thought looked dreadful. Her analysis was that they needed ballet training. With poise as her purpose she went hauling her piano around in her husband’s cattle trailer (he was secretary of the Friesian Breeder’s Club) and setting up ballet classes in any available hall in Longford. I ran a long color supplement feature piece on “Shawbrook,” liberally accompanied by Eamonn’s photographs.
The piece helped to launch the venture and today it is the home of a well-established Ballet International Summer School, with one hundred students, dormitories, visiting teachers, and R.A.D. ballet training throughout the year.
Shawbrook Show 1999. Article - Irish Times
8 APRIL 1999
Out of Africa and in to BallymahonLongford students' show tells the personal story of a journey from South Africa to LongfordBy SEAN MAC CONNELL
The sounds of ethnic African music will be heard in Ballymahon, Co Longford for three days next month when the Transition Year students of the Mercy Secondary School stage a show called My Journey.
The show was written and will be produced by South African-born Anica Louw, who is the artist in residence at the school near her own ballet school and theatre.
All the Transition Year students will be involved in the production, designing the sets, the tickets and all the administration.
Earlier this week, Anica explained that she had always wanted to tell what it was like to grow up as a white person in South Africa.
"It was one of the most isolated places in the world and we were denied outside contact with the real world. There was no television or other external influences," she said.
"We were also very regimented. That is why in the show all the whites are dressed in stiff and starched uniforms, the uniforms we used to wear," she said.
"The contrast between that starched and scrubbed look and the easy, colourful way the Africans dressed was astonishing and sticks with me to this day," she said.
Anica lived in South Africa and studied theatre at college and taught Afrikaans. She met her future husband, Philip Dawson, when he visited South Africa.
In the mid-1970s her thirst to learn about the rest of the world sent her on a voyage of discovery and 20 years ago she came to visit Philip in Dublin and married and settled here.
Philip runs a dairy farm in Leagan, Co Longford, and it was there Anica set up her ballet school and theatre where she teaches people from all over the country and abroad at the Shawbrook School of Ballet.
"I decided to take a short time out and it was during that time I decided to write My Journey. It is autobiographical but I think people will enjoy it," she said.
She said the show starts with Anica, aged three, taking ballet classes from her teacher, Miss Broder. It charts the rest of her time in Africa during the troubled apartheid years.
"I used authentic African music which is wonderful and the boere musiek or farmers' music which I heard as a child. The students in Ballymahon love it," she said.
"I create a window on my former life and I want people to see how it was for me then as I grew up," she said.
Anica has seen many changes since she came to Ireland over 20 years ago and not all of them are to her liking.
"I came here for the relaxed pace of life, the friendly ways of the people and the lack of commercialism. It was a very safe country then," she said.
"I fear the Celtic Tiger has caught up with us and it has changed dramatically in the time I have been here," she said.
The show will be staged in the Backstage Theatre, Longford, on Monday 17th, Tuesday 18th and Wednesday 19th May. The telephone number of the theatre is 043-47888 and the school 090-232267.
© The Irish Times
Out of Africa and in to BallymahonLongford students' show tells the personal story of a journey from South Africa to LongfordBy SEAN MAC CONNELL
The sounds of ethnic African music will be heard in Ballymahon, Co Longford for three days next month when the Transition Year students of the Mercy Secondary School stage a show called My Journey.
The show was written and will be produced by South African-born Anica Louw, who is the artist in residence at the school near her own ballet school and theatre.
All the Transition Year students will be involved in the production, designing the sets, the tickets and all the administration.
Earlier this week, Anica explained that she had always wanted to tell what it was like to grow up as a white person in South Africa.
"It was one of the most isolated places in the world and we were denied outside contact with the real world. There was no television or other external influences," she said.
"We were also very regimented. That is why in the show all the whites are dressed in stiff and starched uniforms, the uniforms we used to wear," she said.
"The contrast between that starched and scrubbed look and the easy, colourful way the Africans dressed was astonishing and sticks with me to this day," she said.
Anica lived in South Africa and studied theatre at college and taught Afrikaans. She met her future husband, Philip Dawson, when he visited South Africa.
In the mid-1970s her thirst to learn about the rest of the world sent her on a voyage of discovery and 20 years ago she came to visit Philip in Dublin and married and settled here.
Philip runs a dairy farm in Leagan, Co Longford, and it was there Anica set up her ballet school and theatre where she teaches people from all over the country and abroad at the Shawbrook School of Ballet.
"I decided to take a short time out and it was during that time I decided to write My Journey. It is autobiographical but I think people will enjoy it," she said.
She said the show starts with Anica, aged three, taking ballet classes from her teacher, Miss Broder. It charts the rest of her time in Africa during the troubled apartheid years.
"I used authentic African music which is wonderful and the boere musiek or farmers' music which I heard as a child. The students in Ballymahon love it," she said.
"I create a window on my former life and I want people to see how it was for me then as I grew up," she said.
Anica has seen many changes since she came to Ireland over 20 years ago and not all of them are to her liking.
"I came here for the relaxed pace of life, the friendly ways of the people and the lack of commercialism. It was a very safe country then," she said.
"I fear the Celtic Tiger has caught up with us and it has changed dramatically in the time I have been here," she said.
The show will be staged in the Backstage Theatre, Longford, on Monday 17th, Tuesday 18th and Wednesday 19th May. The telephone number of the theatre is 043-47888 and the school 090-232267.
© The Irish Times
Shawbrook Review, Aug 2000 - Irish Times
August 15 2000
Longford/Berlin ConnectionBackstage Theatre, Longford
By CAROLYN SWIFT
On Saturday night a large and enthusiastic audience at the Backstage Theatre, Longford, had first sight of HugBarrog, a specially commissioned piece by Marguerite Donlon which will open the Berlin Dance Festival on September 5th. Shown as a work still in progress, it featured guest artist Anne-Marie Warburton from Berlin with Orla McFeely, Rebecca Reilly, Olwen Grindley and Lisa McLoughlin, backed by six students from the Shawbrook Summer School.
To a bluesy score by saxophonist Claas Willeke, who also ably compered the evening, and against film by photographer Oliver Moest projected on to five white hanging cloths, the piece extended the dancers, using almost every muscle in their bodies as they intermingled their limbs with the athleticism of wrestlers and the delicacy of weavers.
There was also much humour derived from a variety of physical greetings, including the old variety gag in which a single person portrays an embracing couple. Donlon herself, with Warburton, danced in Drumai, developed from rhythm-training for the ten Irish dancers who drummed on oil cans and a milk churn.
She is a beautiful dancer and, as she weaved and twined, it was possible to identify some of the vocabulary which informed her choreography for HugBarrog.
Further contributions were demonstrated in the Workshop Presentation which opened the programme.
Following a ballet class which continued while the audience arrived, the choreographer explained the alphabetical improvisation used to create the contorted body movement. We then saw how these were used, as well as a short solo from Different Directions, created by Donlon last spring. An interesting evening, showing continued improvement in Shawbrook Summer School standards.
© The Irish Times
Longford/Berlin ConnectionBackstage Theatre, Longford
By CAROLYN SWIFT
On Saturday night a large and enthusiastic audience at the Backstage Theatre, Longford, had first sight of HugBarrog, a specially commissioned piece by Marguerite Donlon which will open the Berlin Dance Festival on September 5th. Shown as a work still in progress, it featured guest artist Anne-Marie Warburton from Berlin with Orla McFeely, Rebecca Reilly, Olwen Grindley and Lisa McLoughlin, backed by six students from the Shawbrook Summer School.
To a bluesy score by saxophonist Claas Willeke, who also ably compered the evening, and against film by photographer Oliver Moest projected on to five white hanging cloths, the piece extended the dancers, using almost every muscle in their bodies as they intermingled their limbs with the athleticism of wrestlers and the delicacy of weavers.
There was also much humour derived from a variety of physical greetings, including the old variety gag in which a single person portrays an embracing couple. Donlon herself, with Warburton, danced in Drumai, developed from rhythm-training for the ten Irish dancers who drummed on oil cans and a milk churn.
She is a beautiful dancer and, as she weaved and twined, it was possible to identify some of the vocabulary which informed her choreography for HugBarrog.
Further contributions were demonstrated in the Workshop Presentation which opened the programme.
Following a ballet class which continued while the audience arrived, the choreographer explained the alphabetical improvisation used to create the contorted body movement. We then saw how these were used, as well as a short solo from Different Directions, created by Donlon last spring. An interesting evening, showing continued improvement in Shawbrook Summer School standards.
© The Irish Times
Shawbrook Review, Aug 1999 - Irish Times
Aug 17th 1999
Taking FlightBackstage Theatre, Longford
By CAROLYN SWIFT
On Saturday night, six athletic dancers of ABCD Company worked themselves up for takeoff at the Backstage Theatre, Longford. Singly and in pairs, to the sound of roaring engines, they climbed and dived, banked, looped the loop and flew in formation during Sharon Donaldson's Taking Flight, the silver trousers of the men and tops of the women glinting metallically like planes catching the sun. It was an attractive piece, though lacking shape and development.
To celebrate the 15th Shawbrook Summer School, LD Dance brought ABCD from Leeds, and Donaldson choreographed a piece for the 10 dancers from Shawbrook's Course E, whose showcase opened the programme. Called What Came Be- fore Will Come Again and set to the music of Sacred Spirit and Artcore, it seemed to inspire this year's students to respond brilliantly to the challenges the piece presented. Indeed, the general standard was higher than any previous Shawbrook Showcase I have seen, and Anica Louw and Philip Dawson of LD Dance deserve congratulations for this achievement.
The students were well served by all their choreographers. Extracts from ballet master Niall McMahon's Celtic Mood to Bill Whelan's Damhsa san Amhan, which opened with a delightful duet by Sarah Reynolds and Robert Jackson (the sole professional in the cast), fully extended the dancers, as has not always been the case in past showcases. So, too, did jazz teacher Eric Carpenter's O, to TILT's Seduction of Orpheus, enabling the dancers to demonstrate ability and versatility. They were also fortunate to have as experienced an accompanist as Shaun Holmes.
© The Irish Times
Taking FlightBackstage Theatre, Longford
By CAROLYN SWIFT
On Saturday night, six athletic dancers of ABCD Company worked themselves up for takeoff at the Backstage Theatre, Longford. Singly and in pairs, to the sound of roaring engines, they climbed and dived, banked, looped the loop and flew in formation during Sharon Donaldson's Taking Flight, the silver trousers of the men and tops of the women glinting metallically like planes catching the sun. It was an attractive piece, though lacking shape and development.
To celebrate the 15th Shawbrook Summer School, LD Dance brought ABCD from Leeds, and Donaldson choreographed a piece for the 10 dancers from Shawbrook's Course E, whose showcase opened the programme. Called What Came Be- fore Will Come Again and set to the music of Sacred Spirit and Artcore, it seemed to inspire this year's students to respond brilliantly to the challenges the piece presented. Indeed, the general standard was higher than any previous Shawbrook Showcase I have seen, and Anica Louw and Philip Dawson of LD Dance deserve congratulations for this achievement.
The students were well served by all their choreographers. Extracts from ballet master Niall McMahon's Celtic Mood to Bill Whelan's Damhsa san Amhan, which opened with a delightful duet by Sarah Reynolds and Robert Jackson (the sole professional in the cast), fully extended the dancers, as has not always been the case in past showcases. So, too, did jazz teacher Eric Carpenter's O, to TILT's Seduction of Orpheus, enabling the dancers to demonstrate ability and versatility. They were also fortunate to have as experienced an accompanist as Shaun Holmes.
© The Irish Times
Shawbrook Review, Aug 1998. Irish Times
Shawbrook ShowcaseBackstage Theatre, Longford
By CAROLYN SWIFT
19 Aug 1998
On Saturday at the Backstage Theatre, Longford, for the third year running, Anica Louw presented the results of her week-long Arts Council-sponsored Choreographic-Composer Workshop for young Irish professional and graduate dancers. Once again this revealed the wealth of dancing potential which sadly has little or no outlet for its talents.
The ambitious objective of the Workshop is to produce a new work within a week, which this year resulted in a contemporary piece by Amanda Gough, Touched, to a percussion score performed live on stage by composer Gary Hammond. The nine dancers suggested sculptural forms in groups of three or singly, with attractively-danced solos by Lise McLoughlin and Rionach Ni Neill. The latter also gave a fine performance of the interesting and demanding solo by Daniel Larieu to Stravinsky's Violin Concerto Aria No.2: Pour L'Instant, an Homage to Nijinsky. She was less successful as choreographer of Solo For Frances to the music of Plague Monkeys, though Frances McKee worked well in it and it could improve with further work as, like all the original pieces, it was created in a week.A fourth contemporary piece was Sue Hawksley's Windeater to music by Vershki da Koreshki. For the full group, it seemed to lack motivation and shape, while the only piece in which ballet figured was an embarrassing attempt at satire by Stuart Beckett to Nat King Cole's Let There Be Love.
Irish Times Copyright
By CAROLYN SWIFT
19 Aug 1998
On Saturday at the Backstage Theatre, Longford, for the third year running, Anica Louw presented the results of her week-long Arts Council-sponsored Choreographic-Composer Workshop for young Irish professional and graduate dancers. Once again this revealed the wealth of dancing potential which sadly has little or no outlet for its talents.
The ambitious objective of the Workshop is to produce a new work within a week, which this year resulted in a contemporary piece by Amanda Gough, Touched, to a percussion score performed live on stage by composer Gary Hammond. The nine dancers suggested sculptural forms in groups of three or singly, with attractively-danced solos by Lise McLoughlin and Rionach Ni Neill. The latter also gave a fine performance of the interesting and demanding solo by Daniel Larieu to Stravinsky's Violin Concerto Aria No.2: Pour L'Instant, an Homage to Nijinsky. She was less successful as choreographer of Solo For Frances to the music of Plague Monkeys, though Frances McKee worked well in it and it could improve with further work as, like all the original pieces, it was created in a week.A fourth contemporary piece was Sue Hawksley's Windeater to music by Vershki da Koreshki. For the full group, it seemed to lack motivation and shape, while the only piece in which ballet figured was an embarrassing attempt at satire by Stuart Beckett to Nat King Cole's Let There Be Love.
Irish Times Copyright
August 1996 Choreographic Workshop in Backstage and Shawbrook. Irish Times
Choreographic Workshop Backstage Theatre, Longford
By CAROLYN SWIFT
THE performance developed during a five day Arts Council sponsored work shop at the Shawbrook Summer School, seen at the Backstage Theatre in Longford last Saturday night, proved Ireland could have a creditable permanent dance company if someone of the calibre of Shawbrook director Anica Louw assembled it with Arts Council funding.
Supported by one boy from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, 10 girls who trained in Ireland, but are mostly completing dance training in England, Germany or Russia (helped by Arts Council bursaries), achieved in five days a higher standard than several dance companies currently receiving Arts Council funding. And only the splendid Orla McFeeley, the White Cat in last year's UK tour of Cats, is as yet professional.
The introductory class included ballet and contemporary dance for, though the dancers had specialised in one or other dance style, all had trained in both, essential for a company in a small country. Next came a light hearted pas de deu, An Excerpt from Paul Nyman's film score for The Piano, choreographed and danced by contemporary dance teacher Clare Belgion. She was more than adequately partnered by Jonathan Poole, who also showed choreographic talent in his well danced solo to Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough. This was followed by Swan Connection, a delightful satire for full cast of Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Little Swans by ballet mistress Gina Long.
The excellent workshop piece itself, The Prophecy, by choreographer Sonia Rafferty, to exciting music by her husband, Philip Chambon, was led by the Pina Bausch trained student, Olwen Grindley, and clearly showed the strength of the company. The fine accompanist for class and performance was Shaun Holmes.
© The Irish Times
By CAROLYN SWIFT
THE performance developed during a five day Arts Council sponsored work shop at the Shawbrook Summer School, seen at the Backstage Theatre in Longford last Saturday night, proved Ireland could have a creditable permanent dance company if someone of the calibre of Shawbrook director Anica Louw assembled it with Arts Council funding.
Supported by one boy from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, 10 girls who trained in Ireland, but are mostly completing dance training in England, Germany or Russia (helped by Arts Council bursaries), achieved in five days a higher standard than several dance companies currently receiving Arts Council funding. And only the splendid Orla McFeeley, the White Cat in last year's UK tour of Cats, is as yet professional.
The introductory class included ballet and contemporary dance for, though the dancers had specialised in one or other dance style, all had trained in both, essential for a company in a small country. Next came a light hearted pas de deu, An Excerpt from Paul Nyman's film score for The Piano, choreographed and danced by contemporary dance teacher Clare Belgion. She was more than adequately partnered by Jonathan Poole, who also showed choreographic talent in his well danced solo to Sheryl Crow's Strong Enough. This was followed by Swan Connection, a delightful satire for full cast of Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Little Swans by ballet mistress Gina Long.
The excellent workshop piece itself, The Prophecy, by choreographer Sonia Rafferty, to exciting music by her husband, Philip Chambon, was led by the Pina Bausch trained student, Olwen Grindley, and clearly showed the strength of the company. The fine accompanist for class and performance was Shaun Holmes.
© The Irish Times
Longford Festival of Dance - Irish Times, 31 March 2005
Everyone's a player
Thursday, March 31, 2005
When Mona Considine, general manager of Longford's Backstage Theatre, went to the Barabbas production of Hurl in 2003, she and her colleague Janice Belton turned to one another in disbelief. For, immortalised onstage, amid the cut and thrust of a multi-ethnic hurling competition, was the memorably-named GAA club from which the Backstage had originally sprung. Longford's Backstage Theatre (aka the Slashers) grew from an alliance with the local GAA, writes Belinda McKeon.
"They were the Slashers," remembers Considine. 'We nearly fell off our seats. And we asked Raymond [Keane, artistic director of Barabbas] why he hadn't told us beforehand. And he laughed and said "Ah, I thought it'd be nice as a surprise!"' But in retrospect, the nod to the Midlands sportsmen made sense to Considine.
"You'd know where the idea came from," she smiles. "The theatre companies love the name Slashers. The ones who come regularly never say they're coming to Backstage, they always say they're coming to Slashers. So we might as well give in gracefully, I think."
Name-calling aside, the collaboration on which the Backstage is built rarely fails to raise eyebrows among visitors even today, 10 years after it opened to a mixture of local excitement and scepticism, not least from the then-chairman of the GAA, Jack Boothman, who admitted at the opening ceremony that he had thought the joint venture akin to "taking a bungee jump without the rope" when it was first mooted.
If nothing else, it makes for an unusual architectural prospect; mirror images of one another, the club and the theatre inhabit twin halves of the same long, low building, set along the road into Longford town and backing out onto the fields where Slashers' sporting dreams are lived and lost; many evenings, the wall of the Backstage auditorium separates two audiences, two sets of performers - and two separate dramas. The dressing rooms for teams and thespians are only doors apart, making for some interesting chemistry, and the bar space and grounds are shared by patrons of both organisations.
Logistically, this "commonage", as Peter Kilemade, chairman of the board of directors, puts it, proved useful to the fledgling theatre, helping out with at least some of the daunting overheads faced by every regional theatre. But there's no denying that the alliance met with some resistance in its early years, from die-hard fans of both camps who wanted their home ground to be very much their own. And the prejudice of a wider arts community, which considers the idea of a theatre linked with a GAA club as at best comical, at worst drearily parochial, can be difficult to dispel - until, that is, the members of said community visit the theatre for themselves.
"Because it's a GAA club, people - both companies and audiences - think they're going to be coming into a hall sometimes," admits Considine. "They don't expect to be coming into a professional space."
"Their faces light up," adds Belton, who likes to stand at the back of the handsome 212-seater auditorium, with an art gallery - which, in 1999, exhibited a number of Picasso drawings alongside works from local artists - at its entrance, and spy the reactions. "It's a great feeling for us," she says.
Belton, a teenager when Backstage first opened, says that it was only when she toured the local region as a performer with youth and amateur groups that she saw the Longford venue with objective eyes. "I took it for granted; I thought every theatre in the country was like this," she says. "I really had my eyes opened when I went around the others."
Her testimony is backed by professional theatre companies, from Barabbas to Druid and Red Kettle, who over the years have written to Considine, and to her predecessor (up to 1999) as general manager, Jane Hughes, to praise the quality of the venue and the warmth of the welcome. "I couldn't lay claim to that," says Considine of the latter, for which Hughes, now working in the arts in Galway, is still spoken of among theatre professionals. "It was part of Backstage since the word go. That's been part of it, and you look after your companies that come in, because it's their home for the next few days."
For the Backstage Theatre Group, the amateur company which preceded the theatre and from whose activities its genesis came, this building has been home for a long time - 22 years, to be precise. The function room of the GAA club served as the group's studio and performance space from the early 1980s on, becoming a sort of pub theatre for a time every year. The Backstage group made the most of the space - smoke, lights, theatre in the round, an intimate atmosphere brought new perspectives on drama to local audiences - but the limitations were frustrating; with a disco every Friday night, the full set would have to be struck, only to be put up again the next day, and Michael Jennings, club manager of Slashers, can still remember the holes drilled all over his maple floors.
Sitting on one of the beer kegs which then acted as a base for the stage floor, he wondered aloud one night in 1990 whether it would be possible to extend the function room to include a permanent stage area, possibly even with the extravagance of a single dressing room. Jennings shared his idea with players both in the theatre group and in the GAA complex, and, to his surprise, it took off.
Naturally, the fact that a Longford native, Albert Reynolds, held the office of Taoiseach over the next couple of years did no harm to the project either. But the scale of what emerged was unexpected. There were already some standalone theatres in the locality - the Shawbrook Dance Theatre, established in nearby Legan in 1978, and the Bog Lane theatre in Ballymahon - but the prospect of a full-size, professional venue seemed a long way off. And yet, here it was.
Anica Louw, director of the Shawbrook, remembers the excitement of the Backstage group at the possibility of what they called a "real theatre".
"I think on research it was discovered that there was that gap in the market, that there was a need for such a venue in the midlands region," adds Considine. "And the Arts Council was very interested in someone taking up that mantle. I think they realised that to do something on a smaller scale would have been a wasted opportunity, really."
For a time as the theatre went up, its staff had their offices in Portakabins, and came to work in Wellingtons, and even after the building site had become a gleaming new venue, there were teething problems to be sorted out; with three groups - Longford Slashers, the Backstage group, and the theatre administration - jostling for position at the helm, issues of hierarchy took some time to go away, hints Paul Higgins, chairman of the amateur group.
But the professional autonomy from the groups eventually manifested itself in the theatre's day-to-day business. Still, that there's a healthy tension is evinced by Considine, as she ponders the proximity of those dressing-rooms. "I'm telling you, the dancers especially would show them a thing or two about fitness if they got out on that pitch!"
The dancers she's referring to are the participants in the next fortnight's programme at the theatre, which will combine the National Dance Awards with productions from two major Irish companies - Ballet Ireland will present Alice, Dance Theatre of Ireland Between You and Me - and from the Donlon Dance Company, the German-based company of the Longford-born choreographer, Marguerite Donlon, to comprise a festival of dance of superb pedigree.
The event will be co-hosted with the Shawbrook Theatre, where Christopher K Morgan will present his solo work in Ireland for the first time; familiar to dance audiences from Fabulous Beast's 2003 piece Giselle, Morgan will perform his own piece, The Measure of Man in the Shawbrook Theatre this Saturday. It's quite a line-up - the sort of line-up that Louw feels Co Longford deserves.
"My big dream, 10 years ago, was that if you say 'Longford' to somebody in Dublin, they will say, oh, the dance place, like Wexford is the opera place."
And in truth, hers is not an unrealistic dream. Two of the finest choreographers to emerge from this country - Donlon, and the director and choreographer of Giselle, Michael Keegan-Dolan, are both Longford natives, both with a strong connection to Louw's acclaimed ballet school at the Shawbrook. Keegan-Dolan, having a close friend and collaborator who had trained there, took Giselle to the Shawbrook to rehearse and develop it; in fact, it was a singing session in a pub in the nearby townland of Maghera which gave Keegan-Dolan the song Where The Three Counties Meet, which made such a memorable - though hardly quaint - appearance.
Meanwhile, Donlon, now 38, was Louw's first pupil - in need of work, she took the young dancer on even though, at 15, she would generally have been regarded as much too old for training. The gamble worked out; having gone to England to complete her training, Donlon became the first female Irish dancer ever to be accepted into the London Festival Ballet, and became a member of the English National Ballet under Peter Schaufuss. She created her first piece of choreography in 1991 for the ballet of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which brought her to European attention, and commissions followed for major venues in Vienna, Basel, Stuttgart and Chicago.
In 2001 she was appointed director of the Saarländische Staatstheater in Saarbrücken, Germany, where her own company has drawn dancers from all over the world to work with her. "She is the only dancer to have come out of Ireland who has been a ballerina of principal status, as well as a choreographer well known all over Europe and a director of a state company," says Louw. "It's huge."
The Donlon Dance Company will perform three pieces as part of the Longford dance festival: Chocolate, We Three Sheep and the piece originally created for the Vienna State Ballet by Donlon, Taboo or Not. As with all of her work, it will mix physical innovation with a witty take on the cultural traditions from which Donlon's passion for dance grew - Louw claims that Donlon's 1995 piece, Celtic Touch (which was one of the first productions at the Backstage Theatre) was "the original Riverdance" with an added sense of humour.
"Her choreography, for me, is always very much about dance, but her being Irish there's always something anecdotal involved,' says Louw. "Her being Irish, she always uses Irish music somewhere and always Irish dancing, and she's always taking the mickey out of it. I think that's why she's so successful in Europe, because she's working with what I call real North European, cold, contemporary, modern people and she has broken boundaries there.
"The dancers she chooses are totally classically trained, rather than contemporary, and she mixes elements of theatre and dance, and puts humour in her pieces, which none of the North Europeans do. I've seen her perform in Berlin, and there were people standing in the rain for her, and you talk about venues, this was a shed, they had to bring their own chairs, and they stood there for hours, and I asked them why. And they said, because of Marguerite Donlon. And to me it's always been sad that Ireland doesn't know about that, and about her."
And she smiles, with all the pride of a teacher who intends to put that much right.
The Festival of Dance at Backstage Theatre (in association with Shawbrook's LD Dance Trust) runs from today to Apr 8. Donlon Dance Company's Taboo or Not will play at the Backstage tonight and tomorrow at 8.30pm; early booking is advised. Christopher K Morgan's The Measure of Man is at the Shawbrook Theatre, Legan, Co Longford, Sat 4pm
© 2005 The Irish Times
Thursday, March 31, 2005
When Mona Considine, general manager of Longford's Backstage Theatre, went to the Barabbas production of Hurl in 2003, she and her colleague Janice Belton turned to one another in disbelief. For, immortalised onstage, amid the cut and thrust of a multi-ethnic hurling competition, was the memorably-named GAA club from which the Backstage had originally sprung. Longford's Backstage Theatre (aka the Slashers) grew from an alliance with the local GAA, writes Belinda McKeon.
"They were the Slashers," remembers Considine. 'We nearly fell off our seats. And we asked Raymond [Keane, artistic director of Barabbas] why he hadn't told us beforehand. And he laughed and said "Ah, I thought it'd be nice as a surprise!"' But in retrospect, the nod to the Midlands sportsmen made sense to Considine.
"You'd know where the idea came from," she smiles. "The theatre companies love the name Slashers. The ones who come regularly never say they're coming to Backstage, they always say they're coming to Slashers. So we might as well give in gracefully, I think."
Name-calling aside, the collaboration on which the Backstage is built rarely fails to raise eyebrows among visitors even today, 10 years after it opened to a mixture of local excitement and scepticism, not least from the then-chairman of the GAA, Jack Boothman, who admitted at the opening ceremony that he had thought the joint venture akin to "taking a bungee jump without the rope" when it was first mooted.
If nothing else, it makes for an unusual architectural prospect; mirror images of one another, the club and the theatre inhabit twin halves of the same long, low building, set along the road into Longford town and backing out onto the fields where Slashers' sporting dreams are lived and lost; many evenings, the wall of the Backstage auditorium separates two audiences, two sets of performers - and two separate dramas. The dressing rooms for teams and thespians are only doors apart, making for some interesting chemistry, and the bar space and grounds are shared by patrons of both organisations.
Logistically, this "commonage", as Peter Kilemade, chairman of the board of directors, puts it, proved useful to the fledgling theatre, helping out with at least some of the daunting overheads faced by every regional theatre. But there's no denying that the alliance met with some resistance in its early years, from die-hard fans of both camps who wanted their home ground to be very much their own. And the prejudice of a wider arts community, which considers the idea of a theatre linked with a GAA club as at best comical, at worst drearily parochial, can be difficult to dispel - until, that is, the members of said community visit the theatre for themselves.
"Because it's a GAA club, people - both companies and audiences - think they're going to be coming into a hall sometimes," admits Considine. "They don't expect to be coming into a professional space."
"Their faces light up," adds Belton, who likes to stand at the back of the handsome 212-seater auditorium, with an art gallery - which, in 1999, exhibited a number of Picasso drawings alongside works from local artists - at its entrance, and spy the reactions. "It's a great feeling for us," she says.
Belton, a teenager when Backstage first opened, says that it was only when she toured the local region as a performer with youth and amateur groups that she saw the Longford venue with objective eyes. "I took it for granted; I thought every theatre in the country was like this," she says. "I really had my eyes opened when I went around the others."
Her testimony is backed by professional theatre companies, from Barabbas to Druid and Red Kettle, who over the years have written to Considine, and to her predecessor (up to 1999) as general manager, Jane Hughes, to praise the quality of the venue and the warmth of the welcome. "I couldn't lay claim to that," says Considine of the latter, for which Hughes, now working in the arts in Galway, is still spoken of among theatre professionals. "It was part of Backstage since the word go. That's been part of it, and you look after your companies that come in, because it's their home for the next few days."
For the Backstage Theatre Group, the amateur company which preceded the theatre and from whose activities its genesis came, this building has been home for a long time - 22 years, to be precise. The function room of the GAA club served as the group's studio and performance space from the early 1980s on, becoming a sort of pub theatre for a time every year. The Backstage group made the most of the space - smoke, lights, theatre in the round, an intimate atmosphere brought new perspectives on drama to local audiences - but the limitations were frustrating; with a disco every Friday night, the full set would have to be struck, only to be put up again the next day, and Michael Jennings, club manager of Slashers, can still remember the holes drilled all over his maple floors.
Sitting on one of the beer kegs which then acted as a base for the stage floor, he wondered aloud one night in 1990 whether it would be possible to extend the function room to include a permanent stage area, possibly even with the extravagance of a single dressing room. Jennings shared his idea with players both in the theatre group and in the GAA complex, and, to his surprise, it took off.
Naturally, the fact that a Longford native, Albert Reynolds, held the office of Taoiseach over the next couple of years did no harm to the project either. But the scale of what emerged was unexpected. There were already some standalone theatres in the locality - the Shawbrook Dance Theatre, established in nearby Legan in 1978, and the Bog Lane theatre in Ballymahon - but the prospect of a full-size, professional venue seemed a long way off. And yet, here it was.
Anica Louw, director of the Shawbrook, remembers the excitement of the Backstage group at the possibility of what they called a "real theatre".
"I think on research it was discovered that there was that gap in the market, that there was a need for such a venue in the midlands region," adds Considine. "And the Arts Council was very interested in someone taking up that mantle. I think they realised that to do something on a smaller scale would have been a wasted opportunity, really."
For a time as the theatre went up, its staff had their offices in Portakabins, and came to work in Wellingtons, and even after the building site had become a gleaming new venue, there were teething problems to be sorted out; with three groups - Longford Slashers, the Backstage group, and the theatre administration - jostling for position at the helm, issues of hierarchy took some time to go away, hints Paul Higgins, chairman of the amateur group.
But the professional autonomy from the groups eventually manifested itself in the theatre's day-to-day business. Still, that there's a healthy tension is evinced by Considine, as she ponders the proximity of those dressing-rooms. "I'm telling you, the dancers especially would show them a thing or two about fitness if they got out on that pitch!"
The dancers she's referring to are the participants in the next fortnight's programme at the theatre, which will combine the National Dance Awards with productions from two major Irish companies - Ballet Ireland will present Alice, Dance Theatre of Ireland Between You and Me - and from the Donlon Dance Company, the German-based company of the Longford-born choreographer, Marguerite Donlon, to comprise a festival of dance of superb pedigree.
The event will be co-hosted with the Shawbrook Theatre, where Christopher K Morgan will present his solo work in Ireland for the first time; familiar to dance audiences from Fabulous Beast's 2003 piece Giselle, Morgan will perform his own piece, The Measure of Man in the Shawbrook Theatre this Saturday. It's quite a line-up - the sort of line-up that Louw feels Co Longford deserves.
"My big dream, 10 years ago, was that if you say 'Longford' to somebody in Dublin, they will say, oh, the dance place, like Wexford is the opera place."
And in truth, hers is not an unrealistic dream. Two of the finest choreographers to emerge from this country - Donlon, and the director and choreographer of Giselle, Michael Keegan-Dolan, are both Longford natives, both with a strong connection to Louw's acclaimed ballet school at the Shawbrook. Keegan-Dolan, having a close friend and collaborator who had trained there, took Giselle to the Shawbrook to rehearse and develop it; in fact, it was a singing session in a pub in the nearby townland of Maghera which gave Keegan-Dolan the song Where The Three Counties Meet, which made such a memorable - though hardly quaint - appearance.
Meanwhile, Donlon, now 38, was Louw's first pupil - in need of work, she took the young dancer on even though, at 15, she would generally have been regarded as much too old for training. The gamble worked out; having gone to England to complete her training, Donlon became the first female Irish dancer ever to be accepted into the London Festival Ballet, and became a member of the English National Ballet under Peter Schaufuss. She created her first piece of choreography in 1991 for the ballet of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which brought her to European attention, and commissions followed for major venues in Vienna, Basel, Stuttgart and Chicago.
In 2001 she was appointed director of the Saarländische Staatstheater in Saarbrücken, Germany, where her own company has drawn dancers from all over the world to work with her. "She is the only dancer to have come out of Ireland who has been a ballerina of principal status, as well as a choreographer well known all over Europe and a director of a state company," says Louw. "It's huge."
The Donlon Dance Company will perform three pieces as part of the Longford dance festival: Chocolate, We Three Sheep and the piece originally created for the Vienna State Ballet by Donlon, Taboo or Not. As with all of her work, it will mix physical innovation with a witty take on the cultural traditions from which Donlon's passion for dance grew - Louw claims that Donlon's 1995 piece, Celtic Touch (which was one of the first productions at the Backstage Theatre) was "the original Riverdance" with an added sense of humour.
"Her choreography, for me, is always very much about dance, but her being Irish there's always something anecdotal involved,' says Louw. "Her being Irish, she always uses Irish music somewhere and always Irish dancing, and she's always taking the mickey out of it. I think that's why she's so successful in Europe, because she's working with what I call real North European, cold, contemporary, modern people and she has broken boundaries there.
"The dancers she chooses are totally classically trained, rather than contemporary, and she mixes elements of theatre and dance, and puts humour in her pieces, which none of the North Europeans do. I've seen her perform in Berlin, and there were people standing in the rain for her, and you talk about venues, this was a shed, they had to bring their own chairs, and they stood there for hours, and I asked them why. And they said, because of Marguerite Donlon. And to me it's always been sad that Ireland doesn't know about that, and about her."
And she smiles, with all the pride of a teacher who intends to put that much right.
The Festival of Dance at Backstage Theatre (in association with Shawbrook's LD Dance Trust) runs from today to Apr 8. Donlon Dance Company's Taboo or Not will play at the Backstage tonight and tomorrow at 8.30pm; early booking is advised. Christopher K Morgan's The Measure of Man is at the Shawbrook Theatre, Legan, Co Longford, Sat 4pm
© 2005 The Irish Times
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)