Body language

Fergus Ó Conchuir was studying 'Dancing At Lughnasa' at Oxford when he decided to abandon words to set up a dance company. Brian Friel's play is naive, he now argues - dance is no more immediate than words

Brought up bilingual in the Ring Gaeltacht, I couldn't but develop a sensitivity to language. Knowing when and where to use what words, and knowing to whom to address them, were skills so soon acquired as to seem innate.That I should have ended up reading English literature at Oxford, though unexpected, was not entirely improbable.

Studying at Oscar Wilde's old college, Magdalen, I was acutely aware of the Irish reputation for linguistic facility and exuberance, and although I accepted the compliment in that caricature, I sensed there was something more for me to investigate. Fortunately, by the time I was researching 20th-century Irish drama, I was able to catch a glimpse of what that more might be.

Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement . . . Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.

In Brian Friel's play Dancing At Lughnasa, the unreliability of verbal communication is contrasted with moments of mute physical communion. This privileging of dance as an expression of emotion and energy that words cannot embody continues a tradition in Irish drama that includes the dance plays of W.B. Yeats and the work of Sean O'Casey.

It is a tradition that seems to serve dance well, discovering in it an Edenic wholeness untainted by the half-truths of language. Yet Ireland's predominant theatre tradition is profoundly language-driven. Even in Dancing At Lughnasa, all its talk of direct experience unmediated by words is just that: talk. It is only as if language ceded to the authority of movement, only as if words were redundant.

Dancing At Lughnasa nonetheless remains a work of great personal significance. It was during my MPhil research at Oxford that I decided my next step would be not to pursue a DPhil, as anticipated, but to begin training as a contemporary dancer.

Dancing At Lughnasa was one of the last works I studied. It was the first to which I referred in my first choreography, Caoineadh. Studying helped me to understand the work; creation put that intellectual comprehension into a context my body could express. At the time, I think I shared the play's naive assumption that dance would allow me access to a spontaneity of experience untroubled by the self-consciousness of an overactive intellect. I was dissatisfied with what the beckoning academic life seemed to promise, and learning to become as physically articulate as I was verbally proficient offered a challenge I was happy to embrace.

Language always operates with a kind of nostalgia for experience. We name things to hold onto their memory. With dance, I hoped I could exist in the moment, be present to myself and to others. Yet dance, too, is a series of traces, of images and physical experiences lived and immediately lost. Through notation and video, choreography can be recorded in a way that recovers something of its achievements, but these technologies, like language, operate with a nostalgia for the original generative experience.

In recognising these shared limitations of language and dance, I am not trying to advocate one or another as the superior artistic medium. My project is to draw words and movement into a close relationship that gives authority to neither. In practice, choreographing work that requires dancers to speak has the effect of foregrounding their humanity, of reminding spectators that these capable bodies are not only attractive shapes organised into pleasing patterns, but also aspects of sentient and thoughtful people with an independent agency that belies the apparent vulnerability of their mute art.

The result is not always comfortable; not for me, not for dancers, not for audiences. Audiences don't necessarily want to accept the humanity of the idealised bodies they perceive dancers to be. They miss the balm of prettiness. Dancers don't always feel comfortable performing beyond their customary skills base, and I don't always know how best to integrate these traditionally separate realms. Yet I believe the goal is worthy.

Corp Feasa, my newly formed company, whose name means body of knowledge, advances this journey in that it has allowed me to assemble a group of performers whose articulacy as dancers is complemented by a broader range of performance skills and creative inquisitiveness. Vespers, our recent choreography, combines dance, song, spoken word and video projection in a synthesis that I hope audiences find unexpected and stimulating.

Drawing on dramatic precursors in Jean Genet's The Maids and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, there is no question but that my academic training still informs and illuminates my practice as a choreographer. The important thing about Vespers, however, is that it takes the fruits of that training and examines them in this new context of dance; and that dance is itself renewed by contact with these different and challenging elements.

It is not easy to master these different ways of expression, to reconcile words and movement, but bilingualism is my heritage, and it is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that I will continue to try.

Vespers is at the Institute for Choreography and Dance, Firkin Crane, Cork, on Friday