A sense of place in dance

Visitors to the Project Art Centre's Somewhere Near Vada exhibition will have had a good nose around the new theatre and gallery spaces in East Essex Street. But while Somewhere Near Vada was placed inside the raw unfinished building, Yoshiko Chuma's upcoming dance piece Reverse Psychology: In Gear, has been created specifically for the new building and promises another opportunity to have a nose around. The work is part of a series that Chuma has been working on called Reverse Psychology: Ten Thousand Steps, all investigating the concept in the title: saying one thing but meaning another.

Chuma is the newly-appointed artistic director of Daghdha Dance Company and has been an important figure on the New York dance scene for the past 20 years. Born in Japan, she moved to New York and was immediately caught up in the energy of the city: "My native language was useless so I needed other skills to communicate. I began to discover my gift for processing and observing visual stimuli and became interested in cinematic visual concepts.

"I was entranced by New York's chaotic energy, its dangerous streets, subway graffiti, filth, the crazy homeless people - it was all theatre for me. The line between reality and performance blurred."

Within a few months she began creating film and choreography, often merging the two in sprawling multi-media epics, and quickly became part of the Greenwich Village post-modern dance scene. Writing on one of these early works, the influential critic Marcia Siegel articulated the paradox - or reverse psychology - which still exists in Chuma's choreography: "Her work isn't haphazard. She uses found objects and ordinary movement, but she selects and shapes those things carefully. Grunginess and violence are achieved through the processes of art, not just left lying around underfoot waiting to be noticed."

She first became aware of the Project through her friend Paul Johnson, who was dancer-in-residence there, and she soon became intrigued by the building which was emerging from behind the green construction tarpaulin. When she was in Ireland in April after accepting the position of artistic director with Daghdha, she met the artistic director of Project, Kathy McArdle. "Kathy outlined the future plans for the Project, but as there was still heavy construction going on inside the building, I had to remain outside. She told me about how she wanted to introduce many `spaces' to the audience as performance venues; stairs, foyers, etc. and as she spoke I had the sense that I could be like a television camera's eye. I could span 360 degrees of an environment and then zoom into a small nook in the corner of a room. I was intrigued, but still only imagining because I hadn't seen the inside of the building yet.

"In May, I returned once again - and this time Kathy arranged for me to have special entry into the building despite the ongoing construction. I was led into the black cube space which Kathy told me she wanted to use for multi-media or performance art. As I walked around the black space, I imagined the seven-foot frame of a cube in the centre of the space with great light in the middle of it." These cubes feature in a lot of Chuma's work: "Since I began working with the seven-foot cubes, I've been amazed by how they affect any space within which they are placed and immediately create a space within a space. I have found that the movement within these cubes becomes even more three-dimensional and more separate from movement outside of the cubes. Putting the cube in the black cube space in Project is exciting because I'm interested in juxtaposition and reversal: what is space and what is not space."

The building remains central to the work, however, and hearing the stories and histories of Project from Paul Johnson and seeing the building completed on her visits, she acknowledges its influence on her continuing work: "This was the first time I had really seen a space completely evolve. I saw some of the renovation of Grand Central Station in New York City, but with the Project I put on the yellow hat and went into the dust."

There is a lack of site-specific and space-specific dancemaking in Ireland at present, probably due to the pressure to create tour-friendly works that will live on after the opening night. Hopefully Reverse Psychology: In Gear will help to reverse this trend. The importance is not lost on Yoshiko Chuma: "Reverse Psychology: Ten Thousand Steps, which I'll be working on and building upon throughout the next couple of years is a history of memory. But there is a history and memory to a space too, an evolution and an ongoing dialogue."

Reverse Psychology: In Gear runs at the Project on September 26th and September 27th at 8 p.m.