There was a time in late 1995 when, as editor of Dance News Ireland magazine, I had to cover 18 new dance productions in 14 weeks. Heady days. Although even our modest operation wasn't exactly stretched to the limit by this level of activity, I do remember a palpable excitement that extended beyond our office to the rest of the dance community and onwards to the wider public. Dance was beginning to be noticed and audiences throughout the country at last had access to a range of performers and styles.
If you slide your eye now to the end of this piece, you will notice that there is no addendum in italics outlining dates, times and booking information. Features such as this one usually wrap themselves around a new production or tour, but such has been the downturn in fortunes for dance in the past three years that there his not even one new dance production in the dance world to report. So why has the buzz gone from dance? What happened to those great times at the end of 1995?
Producers have, for whatever reason, lost faith in dance. Three years ago reviewers were travelling to arts festivals throughout Ireland to report on dance. The festivals, in turn, were producing dance to be hip ... whereas before they might produce it to feel virtuous. A mix of Irish and foreign acts was being blended into programmes without disturbing the overall feel of the festival. Dublin Theatre Festival's large-scale Momix and Wim Vanderkebus could easily fit in with their spectacular, highly visual offerings, while Galway Arts Festival could serve up the hippie aesthetic of the Second Hand Dance Company from the United States, who used discarded objects found in the locality as props. Now, dance is no longer hip - and since nobody needs to feel virtuous anymore, dancers see themselves being replaced by writers reading from published paperback novels.
It's not just the number of performances that has declined, although Arts Council touring grants have enabled more touring by certain Irish companies. More critically, the number of different productions has decreased. And this is not all. Youth dance activity and dance-in-education initiatives are at an all-time low, numbers attending dance training schools have decreased and there no longer seems to be any vibrant independent dance scene. What has caused this decline? Fingers will point in all directions; at the Arts Council, at dance companies for the standard of their work, at the media for losing interest, or at the dance community for not consolidating itself during the good times. A combination of several factors is most likely but what is most worrying right now is a lack of initiative and co-operation in addressing these problems.
Of course there are those who are making meaningful contributions to the dance environment. Although its dance calendar is a lot emptier these days, the Project Arts Centre has installed dancer and choreographer Paul Johnson as artist-in-residence giving him his raw materials (time and space) to develop his work. More importantly the Firkin Crane in Cork is producing a very necessary blend of residencies and performances with self-produced projects and outreach work. Director Mary Brady is a member of the new Arts Council and will surely be in a position to develop this programme further. But to make a maximum impact, this work should be happening alongside a healthy performing schedule throughout the country, not instead of it.
If a lack of diversity is a problem, then the outgoing Arts Council's Three (later Five) Year Plan must take its share of the blame. The courage and imagination the council displayed when addressing the problems within other art forms was sadly lacking in its dance policy. As previous councils had done, it sought to develop dance by making major changes, with little concern for existing work. This obsession with starting anew is the single most common trait in dance in Ireland.
The dance community, as Mary Brady memorably noted at a forum in 1997, is in a constant state of loss and recovery. There is a curious unwillingness to evolve practises organically, but rather each difficulty is addressed by scrapping existing work and starting again. The annoying, yet common, metaphor of a clean slate for dance to evolve couldn't be more inaccurate. A more apposite metaphor would be an old school desk on which occupants have carved their names. Older ones may be less visible but are still part of the overall picture.
The culture of loss and recovery has its roots in the Arts Council's decision in 1989 to axe Irish National Ballet (then in receipt of almost 90 per cent of the dance budget) and to disperse the money among other companies. Since then, the dance community has felt vulnerable to sudden changes in funding policy, a position confounded by its dependence on the council as principal funder.
This uneasy relationship was evident in the formulation of the Three/Five Year Plan. When the Arts Council set up a Working Party to inform its dance policy before writing the plan, dancers objected that they were not represented and that plans were being made without their input. The Arts Council felt, quite rightly, that it would be difficult to have a client who was in receipt of grant aid (as nearly all practising dancers were) sitting on a board that was recommending funding policies. What added to this climate of suspicion were public statements by members of the council sitting on the Working Party recommending the setting up of a national ballet company in the middle of this process of consultation.
On publication, the Three/Five Year Plan proved a major disappointment. The council was to guarantee funding to just three companies for the duration of the plan. Dismissively regarded as an experiment that will be monitored closely by the council for the duration of the plan, the intention was to choose one of these companies to form a full-time company.
The pressure on the three companies to win the prize of becoming the only full-time company was heightened by the council's further wish that Irish dance should develop a distinctive character. This distinctive character or distinctive style is constantly referred to in the plan, as is the wish to lay the foundations for a distinctive indigenous theatre dance, informed by the already rich cultural heritage of traditional music and dance. These sentiments are nothing new, but rather a rehash of the council's last policy statement on dance, The Dancer And The Dance report (1985) by Peter Brinson.
Whatever one feels about these ideals, such a public dismissal and rejection of the style or character of existing work was regrettable and added to dancers' uneasiness with the council. Mentioning these ideals whilst waggling the carrot of becoming a full-time company was doubly unfair.
Although the council deserves praise for increasing the overall level of funding for dance, it has regarded money as the only antidote for the deficiencies in the entire dance infrastructure. Money is no substitute for policy and in the end the outcome of the experiment was easy to predict - the destruction of a vibrant independent dance scene and an overall environment that led to entrenchment rather than innovation from those companies guaranteed funding.
This entrenchment has manifested itself in various ways. The choreographic craft evident in the most recent productions of two of those guaranteed funding, Dance Theatre of Ireland (Tombs) and Irish Modern Dance Theatre (Real Pearls), shows little development in the past five years. Though neither has succumbed to trying to find the Arts Council's desired distinctive style, they have been slow to develop a style that has clarity in content coupled with an expressive palette of movement. Instead, we see an over-reliance on image and gesture at the expense of expressive movement, a trait that has crept into the creative psyche of both companies.
It can be argued that the use of image and gesture at the expense of pure movement is desirable in order to develop a dance audience, particularly within an arts climate such as ours, with its strong theatrical and narrative base. Dance, however, connects performer and viewer in a much more immediate way. DTI quoted Ruth St Denis in their programme for Tombs: "I see the dance as being used as a means of communication between soul and soul - to express what is too deep, too fine for words." Neither DTI nor IMDT seems to trust these sentiments; they smother the movement with theatricality.
Dramatists and directors, however, are more trusting. In Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa the sisters erupt into dance in order to express precisely what is too deep, too fine for words. This pivotal moment is heightened because words are dispensed with and we witness the sisters' pain and joy through our first language - movement.
Not surprisingly, those choreographers that have existed on the Arts Council's blind spot and are unpressured to conform tend to have a clear movement vocabulary. Paul Johnsons Beautiful Tomorrow, Jenny Roche's The Lady's Reward and Mary Nunan's Three Piece Suite are recent works which have showed a real concern with making the movement language match the subject. Elsewhere, David Bolger, choreographer for the film Dancing At Lughnasa, has been increasingly displaying a satisfying mix of pure movement and theatre in his works for Cois Ceim Dance Theatre.
Although the Arts Council would seem to hold the ultimate lever when formulating policy - money - dancers themselves have been slow to set their own agendas. The Association of Professional Dancers in Ireland, which represents dancers' interests, is frustratingly inconsistent in improving the dance infrastructure. The fact that there is no dance festival in Dublin this summer (for the first time in nearly 10 years) is due to the APDI's unwillingness to adjust itself to meet changing demands in the dance landscape. After two successful forums (in 1995 and 1997) and a feasibility study that was completed in January of this year, the APDI is still uncertain as to how its Dance Fest can expand to become a major international festival.
After producing Dance Fest for two years, the APDI feels it no longer wants to run a festival. Instead, it wants a new body to be set up to act as producer. Such indecision is frustrating and those who suffer most are dancers themselves. It is another example of the obsession with starting anew when confronted with change. To its credit, the association has progressed in its pursuit of a centre for dance in Dublin and a building on North King Street, currently owned by Dublin Corporation, is at present being quantified. This resource, being developed at a cost of £1 million, has come about through the co-operation of the association and the Arts Council.
Overall, if dance is to move forward then it must look back. There is little sense of history, even recent history, within the dance world. Companies are constantly creating new works, never revisiting old repertory. Today's audiences and young dancers may never see some great works created back in the 1980s and early 1990s. This is ironic, as there are some highly skilled producers - such as Dance Theatre of Ireland's Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick - working in dance right now. It would seem that acknowledging and celebrating the past would be a step towards shaking off this pattern of loss and recovery.
Returning to the time of 18 new productions in 14 weeks may seem a long way away. In a time of vigorous debate as to who creates arts policy - the minister, the Arts Council or the artists - it is clear to those working within dance that only they can create a empathetic environment for the entire profession. No more clean slates are needed, just sensitivity to changing needs.
Michael Seaver was editor of the now-defunct Dance News Ireland; he is a clarinettist with the National Concert Orchestra and has composed music for dance.
