Circus, dance and theatre meet at the Junction

PEOPLE MAY BE raving about the hit TV series The Wire, but it’s nothing new in Clonmel, where the Clonmel Junction Festival has been thoroughly wired up for a number of years now with its pioneering presentations of aerial dance.

This year sees the unveiling of a double bill of new productions: Loved Up, a light-hearted, fast-footed fusion of hip-hop and aerial dance created by the London-based Ghanaian choreographer Vicki Amadume; and Edge, in which both aerial dancers and dancers who use wheelchairs will employ rock-climbing ropes and harness equipment to dance, quite literally, on the walls.

The festival’s artistic director, David Teevan, became fascinated by this rapidly developing art form when he brought NoFit State Circus to Ireland in 2006.

“What interests me is the place where circus, dance and theatre meet,” he says.

Which is, as you might imagine, a pretty elevated place: luckily the festival has the ideal venue to stage aerial dance, in the shape of a disused warehouse with massive wall and ceiling space.

Imagine the point at which those walls and ceiling meet: then string a rope along it. There you have the medium in which Croí Glan, an integrated dance company based in Cork, has been developing its new show.

“They’ve been in residence in Clonmel since the beginning of May,” says Teevan. “It’s an interesting style – they dance on the walls rather than in the air. The ropes allow the dancers to move up and down the wall as if it were the floor.

“So from the audience’s perspective you’ll be looking at three dance floors. One is the actual floor: the other two are the two walls of the corner facing you. So you have dance happening in three planes.”

If you still can’t imagine it, best check it out for yourself. With a music strand which includes gigs by Jerry Fish and the Mudbug Club and Mokoomba, plus the interactive experience of the Cafe Carte Blanche project, in which empty retail spaces in the town will be inhabited by a range of artists throughout the festival, Clonmel Junction has more than enough variety to keep both adults and kids entertained and intrigued.

“The great thing about Clonmel is that it’s a town small enough to transform,” says Teevan. “It failed to capitalise on the Celtic Tiger and build a theatre, as many regional towns have – so the remit of the festival is to provide a rich and varied programme that feeds and nourishes the town, from the experimental and challenging through to the more mainstream.

“We’re very lucky in that we have a fantastic audience here. People do cross the spectrum of the various performing arts, and make the journey with us.”

Clonmel Junction Festival runs from July 4th-12th