A pooling of talent and pools of blood

The Arts: When a dancer, director and composer met at a quiet arts retreat, it triggered a hybrid work that drew on all their creativity, writes Belinda McKeon.

They had come to the quiet of Co Monaghan to work on separate projects, but the energy of the place in which they found themselves drew them together. Last year, dancer and choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir, director Jason Byrne and composer Julie Feeney spent two weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for artists at Annaghmakerrig with 10 other artists, as part of an intensive residency created by the Dublin Fringe Festival to encourage the growth of new ideas and partnerships in Irish theatre.

Around the vast space of Guthrie's old house, around its library and its dining table, its studios and its gardens, around its blue lake, the energies started flowing from the very first day, sparking exchanges and collaborations that promised to yield fruit well beyond the fortnight.

Ó Conchúir, London-based but with more than 10 years' experience working in Ireland, both as a performer and a choreographer, started the residency thinking over the idea for a dance creation that had come to him recently as he meditated at the end of a yoga session. "I saw, in a kind of long shot, this sack hanging from a tree in the distance," he explains, "and immediately then I had a close-up vision of being inside the sack. And I came up with the idea of this creature, in the sack, who wasn't ready to be born yet."

With this image of hiding from birth came the promising embryo of something larger, something fully-formed; from that sighting would grow a piece of work to challenge even the highly fluid boundaries of Ó Conchúir's aesthetic. Cosán Dearg, which opens at the Project later this week, is the result of that first spark, a hybrid of dance and theatre performed by Ó Conchúir and the renowned South African-born dancer Bernadette Iglich, directed and designed by Byrne and with music by Feeney.

For all involved, the journey has been a learning curve, right from the moment when Byrne encountered Ó Conchúir rehearsing ideas by himself in one of Annaghmakerrig's studio buildings.

"I'd started working on some solo material based on the idea I'd had," he remembers, "and because I was doing a solo, I wanted someone to video it so that I could see it from the outside. And Jason was passing, and I knew he could do that. And then he started to engage with it and we started to work on it together."

Byrne's own aesthetic, as artistic director of the innovative Dublin company Loose Canon, is rooted in a commitment to the art of the performer.

Since the establishment of the company in 1996, he and his ensemble of actors have pushed to new limits the physical and vocal conventions of theatre, with a grind of daily training and a vast repertoire of work both newly and starkly imagined, including superb productions of The Duchess of Malfi and last year's H, nominated for an Irish Times/ESB Theatre Award.

As a director, Byrne redefines the notions of probing and envisioning, searching so resolutely and intensely for his performers' truths that in his hands they come to know themselves and their art anew. So when he stumbled upon Ó Conchúir as the dancer strove to find the core of his new idea, his time at Annaghmakerrig began to take on a more definite shape. And so, too, did the new performance ideas on which he had recently begun to work.

"I had just done a workshop production of Medea with [ the dancer] Rebecca Walter," says Byrne. "That was an interesting process for me because it was the first time I sort of began to engage with a performer who wasn't an actor. And so, it was just another opportunity, it was entirely gratuitous . . . I started to try and see if there was some sort of common language between myself and Fearghus. To talk to him and try to understand his material using my own experience from Loose Canon - the physical work I had been doing with the actors - and to find a common ground. And what I said to him was that I would build him an environment. That was the start."

By an environment, Byrne meant a way to place and physically realise Ó Conchúir's idea. The traces of his own work on Loose Canon's Medea were still fresh in his mind, and the world he had created for that piece was still the world he inhabited as a director. For those who saw the workshop production of Medea in the Project Cube last year, that world was most strikingly and most memorably a world of viscera, of fleshly reality - a world of blood. Byrne, by his own admission, was going through something of a fixation with the bodily fluid.

"I stopped working with a designer four years ago, when I did Macbeth," he says. "And I started to get a bit more obsessed with props or costumes that developed significance for me because they had been used over, recycled. And in Medea, I had discovered a recipe for blood. So when Fearghus mentioned the sack, I said, oh, maybe we should fill it with blood."

So they did, and the small audience of artists and mentors who gathered at Annaghmakerrig a week later to view the first result of this collaboration - Feeney, by this stage, was also on board with her compositions - were greeted with the extraordinary sight of a sack suspended from a rafter, containing Ó Conchúir and a great amount of extremely realistic blood. The image is unforgettable, and remains a core element in the finished work - Cosán Dearg.

Not that the work is ever finished. The creators and performers are loath to discuss the work in any terms that suggest that it has a completed shape or texture, that there is anything as simple as a story or a narrative readily attached to its flow. The word "about" - as in, what this piece is about - in this context would be to miss the point of the project very badly. Ó Conchúir and his collaborators want to talk about the piece, and want to articulate their relationship to it in concrete terms. What they don't want to do is to pretend that it is concrete.

"Though Fearghus's choreography is something similar to a script," explains Byrne, "I think it's important to be clear that with a script, there's a set of parameters which are much more concerned with outside meaning - in terms of narrative, in terms of conveying information which is about the construction of a very particular type of drama. And following rules, and a very precise result."

With Cosán Dearg, however, there are no such rules. As Ó Conchúir puts it, the story emerges from the piece as it is performed in any given space by himself and Iglich. It does not belong to the piece, and it evolves differently from one occasion to the next. And it's a tough thing to ask questions about.

"Because this is dance, because it's movement that has emerged from a particular preoccupation for Fearghus," says Byrne, "personal, private associations, we don't discuss those, because we don't want to nail down meaning. So the process then becomes about being faithful and loyal to these forms which he has created, and then trying to find out how they can spark something off, so it's like a series of controlled explosions. From day to day. And because they're controlled, because we're hotwiring the structure, sometimes the explosions don't go off."

Is that a crisis? "Only if you're thinking in a particular way. But we're trying not to think in that way."

This notion of the piece itself as a sort of womb or cocoon for its own development is inspiring to Iglich, who admired Ó Conchúir enough to become involved with the project even before she had an idea of its form. "Usually I'm a terrible one for wanting to know about the piece, but I chose not to this time," she says. "Partly it was the idea of working with a director at the same time as with Fearghus; I knew that would be so unusual and challenging, the approach to the space that they would take. But I wanted to be guided only by the physical language they created. If I was told any of the story, ornarrative, or the image, I felt I would impose something on it myself."

Staying in the dark was, for Iglich, the only way to avoid such a process of projection. "I think it's the nature of the movement of the two of us that tells a story," she says. "It's bodies in space making shapes, and drawing on a language that comes from deep within Fearghus. And that opens it up for audiences to make meaning for themselves. Whether it resonates with them personally, or whether they see it in terms of man and woman, creature and other creature, I can't say. But I find it very exciting, that triggering of something new from moment to moment."

* Cosán Dearg is at Project, Dublin, from Wed-Sat