Capturing the energy of a dynamic element

Water covers more than 70 per cent of the earth's surface, not counting the more than one billion cubic kilometres in its atmosphere. A healthy fraction of it rains down on us in our Irish climate, as well as surrounding our island on all sides. The first living beings crawled out of the oceans; the human body's water content - between 45 and 70 percent, depending on age and body fat - still attests to our liquid beginnings, writes Christine Madden

With constant reminders of this ubiquitous element, it's astonishing not that Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick have been inspired by water for their new piece, WaterMark, but that it has taken 16 years for them to take it on with their company, Dance Theatre of Ireland.

"We always work with things that are intangible," says Yurick. As a Matter of Fact was their choreographic response to information overload in the 21st century, and Prism explored the range of colours in refracted light. This time, it's "the connection with the element of water inside us", that informs the production. "People have moving experiences when standing by the sea. It's quite mesmerising."

Soon after they began collecting imagery and information for the creation of their new piece, water and its terrible power began intruding into the news in awe- and horror-inspiring ways. The earth shuddered under the Indian Ocean, and water transmitted the force of the quake in a tsunami, laying waste to vast areas of Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. A swirl of storms over the Caribbean travelled west and slammed into New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina, causing havoc and irreparable destruction.

"It reminded us that water's not all pretty and flowy," says Connor. "And we have references in the piece to drought, death and violence." Yet for all the cruel effects of these natural disasters, their power retains an overwhelming majesty. "Someone sent us pictures of Hurricane Katrina, and they were stunning. It was incredible, beautiful, powerful, the images of the clouds moving in."

Closer to home, Connor and Yurick have spent much of their creative time observing the changing moods of the Irish Sea. The deceptive yielding appearance of the water against the hard outline of the rocky coast led to the piece's title, in which the mark or trace that water leaves figures as heavily as the element itself. "If you look at the coastline, there's a clear stain where the tide has come in and out year after year," says Connor. "The piece isn't about water only, but also its stain, its imprint."

The initial impulse for WaterMark derived from a seminal book, Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, by Theodor Schwenk. Yurick reverently holds out the book to show me the pictures of movement and flux. Connor indicates a specific sentence they have underlined: "Boundary surfaces, with their rhythmical processes, are birthplaces of living things." This friction point of forms, energies and elements provides the key to WaterMark.

"Wave forms come about because of the meeting of two different energies," explains Connor. Two important aspects of the piece, and insights into choreography, derive from this physical behaviour. When dancers asked to make a "phrase", or movement sequence, pair up and put their phrases together, "that's when it starts to cook", he says. "When you bring people together - and it's not always about love - you get accidental correspondences and near risks."

The other association focuses on our personal physical boundaries. The result can become explosive, even physically dangerous, as well as flowing and graceful. The momentum of the piece not only wrenches the dancers around the stage, but also crashes them into each other, slaps them to the floor and flings them into the air. In a duet during the piece, one dancer is tugged away from another, then whipped into a new position as though she were an underwater frond, writhing in a vicious tide. Like water, which "is particularly able to move in a multiplicity of directions", as Connor illustrates, the variety of design elements that make up the finished piece also explore multiplicity to create the "sensitive chaos" of the whole.

Sound design by Linda O'Keeffe combines the music of Rory Pierce and David Yoken into what she terms "sound sculptures". Odd to think of fluid music as something with rigid mass and form for this piece in particular, but the overall effect works something like a fountain, an intangible structure supporting the mercurial play of sound. "There's a sense of water in all the music," says Yurick, "in the way it sounds, its continuity, its infinity."

Leaving the stage bare, the production design relies on "a wall of water", she explains. "We wanted to have some real water on stage, but also to have some more abstract uses of it." To further emphasise motion, a video projection designed by Suzanne Mooney plays across the streaming surface of the water-wall.

The final, and for Yurick, most crucial element of the piece remains the dancers. As usual, the corps for their piece is composed of many nationalities, and Yurick's abiding insight from working with them revealed that "imagination is everything. They're all very good dancers, and they opened their imaginations to us. It's very apparent in their work."

The concept of mutability, constant change of form with enduring content, and its execution in WaterMark, are ideally suited to the art of contemporary dance. "I like that word evanescent," says Connor. "Dance is like that. Unlike other art forms, it's always on the verge of disappearing. Dance disappears as it is performed; that's the only way it exists."

As with watercolour painting, the piece seeks to work artfully with the accidental. "We improvise to see what happens, so it works but has an element of risk," says Connor. This extends beyond the creative to the rough physical element of the piece. "We're trying to get the dynamic of the way waves crash and move off. The dancers have to come close to each other moving fast and hard."

"And there is an element of risk in the way we work," Yurick adds. "The sound, the music, the dance, the visuals - trusting in the integrity of those ingredients to hit home powerfully." She hammers her fist into the other open hand for emphasis. "What I like about it is that you don't necessarily know where it's going every moment," she says. "We wanted to preserve the mystery of this language of movement."

It's a challenging, slightly scary prospect, trying to harness the unpredictable, but it's what makes art exciting - and when it works, profound.

WaterMark opens tomorrow at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire (until Nov 12), then tours Nov 17-30