When the Moon Spun Round: Fidget Feet turn Yeats’s poems for children into a stage show

In the middle of the south Co Clare countryside, in the lovely village of Clonlara, there’s lots going on as Fidget Feet and Ceol Connected pull their new show together in the local sports hall.

Right beside me what looks like an oversized corkscrew hangs from the ceiling; mid-air, Tara Dunne and Oran Leong are working out an intricate sequence involving gentle twirling and intermingling around the twists of the corkscrew as it spins.

Further away, Keylor Rojas Fernandez, Naomhan Joyce and José Portillo are setting up the complex aerial tech – silks, more corkscrews (they’re called spirals) and trapeze, plus their heavy metal chains, winches and generator. Portillo gently positions one of the costumes, a long, ribboned coat on a hanger, delicately tucking its fronds underneath.

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To the side, a bunch of Soar Ups – dance graduates whom Fidget Feet is training in aerial skills – are taking turns to ascend silks hanging from the ceiling, curling their legs around, stretching horizontally, as Sara Granda instructs.

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In the middle, performers – aerial dancers, musicians, a singer – from When the Moon Spun Round work through a scene with the production’s director, Chantal McCormick. There are giant balls of wool, one on a dancer’s back, others rolling around, as the performers playfully move and roll and crawl, in a feline way, for a section based on the WB Yeats poem The Cat and the Moon.

This place – Clonlara’s Leisure Athletic and Sports Society – is also a temporary base, before Fidget Feet moves back to its home in nearby Gilloge, which is almost ready after a long refit (helped by €700,000 from Limerick City and County Council and the Department of Arts). The Irish Aerial Creation Centre, which is just across the river Shannon from the University of Limerick, is Ireland’s only purpose-fitted space for aerial arts, where they create work and train aerialists.

This new show, which had a first run at Siamsa Tíre in Tralee, in February, and is back for a tour this month and next, is billed as an aerial-dance and traditional-music production for young audiences that has been inspired by Yeats’s poems for children, but that doesn’t do justice to the amalgam of performance and creative styles involved. It’s also a bigger show than usual – venues need at least 7 metres of height to accommodate the steel bar, triangle, spirals and winches.

Later in the rehearsal, the cast and crew get into position to run the final scene, an exhilarating and wildly varied section that involves aerial performance and acrobatics, contemporary dance, Irish dancing, live whistle and fiddle (in rehearsal, Tara Dunne mimes the fiddle while twirling on the spiral on high), projections, an original soundtrack melding musical styles, and Olwen Fouéré’s melodic voiceover of Yeats’s poetry.

Fidget Feet’s Yeats connection began in 2012, at the suggestion of Marie O’Byrne, then director of Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo, when they made Second Coming, a show for adults mixing Irish traditional music and aerial dance for the first time. The poet was “one of the first Irish people to work with contemporary dancers in Ireland”, McCormick points out.

She came across an edition of Yeats’s poems for children, edited by Noreen Doody and illustrated by Shona Shirley Macdonald, in Sligo. “We fell in love with the book. We would create aerial scenes, dance scenes, finding ways to bring in music, and just playing with ideas without any stress of what the end results might be,” McCormick says of the process through which she and her Fidget Feet co-founder (and husband), the musician and media artist Jym Daly, began to create the show.

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The production’s score is by Thomas Johnston, who, as well as also performing in When the Moon Spun Round, is artistic director of Ceol Connected. The Monaghan-based company produces shows and experiences for children inspired by traditional arts, plus the Tradoodle traditional arts festival. “Myself and Jym had the broad shape and the feeling and the energy and the fundamentals of the score of the entire piece, and then other musicians come along. We say it’s aerial dance and traditional music, but it doesn’t quite capture it,” he says.

The poems are the jumping-off point. The show uses “very few words, but enough to give the audience tools to understand the world we’re creating”, McCormick says. “We don’t want to tell the audience what they’re seeing or what to think. It’s more about, let the dance dance you, and open your heart and feel and express and enjoy.”

Fidget Feet, which is celebrating its 25th birthday, has created and toured 35 shows: indoor, outdoor, on cranes, vertical dance performances around Irish landmarks, shows for young audiences, community work and professional development.

McCormick, who is from Ballybofey, Co Donegal, has no dance or music in her background, “but my mum and dad said from the age of two, ‘She’s going to be a dancer.’” She trained at the London Contemporary Dance School, booking Fidget Feet’s first tour during lunchbreaks. With Scarabeus Aerial Theatre she went to an outdoor festival in Germany that “blew my frickin’ mind. I was, like, ‘Finally, I have found my tribe!’ In street arts back then you’d have contemporary-dance companies, stilt-walking, theatre, everything just brought to the street, and using all art forms to create a show.”

She trained with Circus Base. “At that point there was no aerial dance. It was traditional circus people, and dancers learning a bit of circus. There was a few of us that were trying to figure out, what is this art form? How can we mix our contemporary-dance training and traditional-circus aerial training?”

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In 1998 she and seven other dancers and circus performers toured Ireland in a red van with their first show, Tumble Weed. At the time, in funding applications, McCormick had to explain what aerial dance theatre was. People “didn’t understand what we were talking about”. They applied for Arts Council dance funding, unsuccessfully, but local authorities supported them. After circus was recognised as an art form, in 2004, Fidget Feet was eligible for Arts Council funding as a contemporary circus company; all the same, what they do straddles much more.

“We’re called Fidget Feet because we can’t sit still, and we’ll use any art form needed to get a message or a story across. But we tick the box of circus because we’re the first aerial circus company in Ireland.”

McCormick says that “the threads for Fidget Feet” basing itself in this part of Ireland were very much Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin’s, and his vision”. The Irish Aerial Creation Centre and the company as they are currently wouldn’t exist without him, she says, as the late composer invited Fidget Feet to take up residency at the University of Limerick’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, which he founded.

“Without that invisible thread we wouldn’t have Tara,” McCormick adds. Or Hannah Scully, a contemporary dancer, or Oran Leong, who has a background in traditional dance; they’re both graduates of the academy, where they learned aerial with Fidget Feet. The threads also incorporate people such as the dancer Vitor Bassi in this show and those training on Soar Up.

Rosie Stebbing, who took part in Soar Up last year, first trained with McCormick when she was 13, at Anica Louw’s Shawbrook dance centre, then trained professionally in contemporary dance in the Netherlands. For aerial work “it’s helpful to come from a dance background, because you have the body awareness and flexibility, awareness of your lines and space. But it’s a whole other muscle group and type of strength, which is really new,” she says. This is her first tour as a dance graduate, and “it’s such a lovely dynamic, such a great group of people, the performers, the creative team, the riggers and tech team. It really feels like a special little family.”

When the Moon Spun Round was also shaped by early young audiences. “My daughter Yolandi, she’s eight,” says McCormick. “She was our little assistant choreographer, and she was saying, ‘What would happen when the moon would turn round?’ She’d also say, ‘There’s too much blub-blub dancing’ – contemporary dancing. But there’s also the costume, sets and lights, and we pulled in the meaning and story behind the ‘blub-blub’ dancing.

“If it’s just blub-blub dancing for no reason, it’s hard for a young audience to connect. Contemporary dance is beautiful, and to get kids to really be in it you have to move things along quite fast, to keep their attention, but you still want them to get the contemporary dance. It all says something that I think the audience, if they don’t know with their head, can feel in their hearts.”

When the Moon Spun Round, for ages six-plus and their adults, is at Draíocht, Blanchardstown, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, on Friday, September 22nd, and Saturday, September 23rd; An Grianán, Letterkenny, from Thursday, September 28th, to Sunday, September 30th; Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick, as part of Bualadh Bos Children’s Festival, on Thursday, October 5th, and Friday, October 6th; Civic Theatre, Tallaght, on Tuesday, October 10th, and Wednesday, October 11th; and Black Box, Galway, as part of Baboró International Arts Festival for Children, from Saturday, October 14th, until Tuesday, October 17th