After an exhausting decade, Jean Butler is returning to the roots of her passion at a festival of world dance, writes Michael Seaver.
Just as dance forms evolve over time, dancers' bodies, in their idealised and realised forms, also change. One choreographer's style might demand a way of moving that imprints itself on the body. Melissa Hayden, who danced for George Balanchine for two decades, once remarked: "You make yourself a Balanchine ballerina by dancing his ballets. Your legs change, your body changes, you become a filly." Concentrating on one genre also leaves an imprint. Irish dancers, for example, have strong, articulate legs and good elevation but weaker, inflexible backs and torsos. The explosion of world cultures mean many of the distinctions are breaking down - and with them pure body types. The annual Tráth na gCos festival at the University of Limerick is one opportunity for dancers from around the world to share their heritage and their steps. Clogging collides with capoeira, swing with samba and the contemporary dance of Daghdha with the sean-nós dancing of Seosamh Ó Neachtáin.
This year there are also workshops on Irish-dance technique and choreography with Jean Butler. After years performing Riverdance and Dancing On Dangerous Ground she is artist-in-residence at the Irish World Music Centre and immersed in an MA in contemporary dance. Every day as she trains in a new technique she tackles the issue of the imprinted body. But rather than telling her body what to learn she is letting it absorb the new techniques in its own time. "To be honest when I came here I didn't exactly know what to expect. I didn't have a specific goal to change anything but decided to let it all come into my body and see what happened," she says. "I knew nothing about contemporary dance, and I'm finding it's like opening up this huge door to another world. On the one hand it's really exciting, but on the other I think, Why didn't I do this 10 years ago?"
Ten years ago, of course, she was embarking on the Riverdance adventure, which led to Dancing On Dangerous Ground with Colin Dunne. "After Dangerous Ground folded I took a break, but as a person and as an artist dance is what I knew best, so I wanted to reintroduce myself. But there is a solitude that comes from being a professional Irish dancer, whereas I needed interaction and wanted to explore different ways of movement to expand my dance vocabulary. I also really wanted to be a student again and not have the pressure of having to do something huge and commercial. This time was to be reflective, because the past 15 years have been all about output."
Dunne, who completed the MA in contemporary dance last year, suggested she might like the course, and after talking to Mary Nunan, a tutor there, she felt it would offer her the balance she wanted of tuition in a new technique alongside the freedom to apply it to her own movement reflections.
The new technique demanded not only adjusting physically but also embracing a philosophy that underpinned each movement and opened new ways of thinking. "Irish dancing is very presentational in style and there for the viewer's entertainment. I find contemporary dance technique more inward, although that's not to say it's inaccessible or exclusive. It's more like I can embody the movement rather than thinking about the steps."
As a professional dancer she is hardened by years of performing, yet in contemporary-dance classes she discovered weak spots and inevitably developed an injury - in her back. At this stage she was immersed in the climate of learning, and she used the restriction to distil her investigation into one area. "The notion of a centre is very important in contemporary dance, and because I was restricted in how much I could move I really concentrated on awakening and strengthening this place."
Martha Graham was the first choreographer to exploit the notion of centre; her technique was based on the principle of "contract and release". The contraction is initiated by sharply squeezing out the breath, which pulls the pelvis and body off balance. On inhaling the action of release begins at the base of the spine and continues through the back, restoring the body to its natural state. There was a kind of reversal of this in Butler's work Back In Five, a study that came out of her explorations while she was injured. At an informal presentation a few hours after this interview she asks the audience to leave the rows of seats and gather around the performing space for a better view. The music she chooses is a soundscape of the audience applauding and laughing, which usurps the convention of performance and calls for attention at a more immediate and participatory level.
She begins, as she has many performances, with her arms at her sides. The difference now is that she is lying on the ground, knees bent and torso giving in to gravity, poured flat on the ground. She very slowly contracts her centre, tilting her pelvis forward and peeling her back away from the floor, vertebra by vertebra. In spite of injury and years of non-use her back is completely articulate and controlled, and as she slowly swings her pelvis from left to right and, minutes later, her body rises to a standing position there is a palpable sense of a physical journey. Some movement is clearly based on class exercises, but what is compelling is not what is being done but the way it is being done. There is a clear sense of a body thinking its way through movement as opposed to moving to cerebral demand.
So what happens to this new knowledge? "The competitive world of Irish dancing is as it is and will always be that way. I think the competitive world has been affected by the professional shows. You can see influences of style directly related between Riverdance and Lord Of The Dance with competition styles and skills. I think in Irish dance there is that gap in the performance market. There's no small company working with dancers, although there are things bubbling under the surface like the work Colin is doing and some of the other ex-Riverdance dancers. I just hope we can all sit down and have a conference one day about our findings and where we see the future. It would be lovely if there was a platform for small performances that weren't just profit oriented but about the dance - to fill the gap, I suppose, so there is a step up to Riverdance and those type of shows."
In the meantime, workshops such as those at Tráth na gCos are important for sharing her reflective practice with others. "And I think that these workshops will be complementary to the work individual teachers are doing. Ballet dancers and contemporary dancers can go to all sorts of other classes throughout the world, but it's very difficult for Irish dancers to go to classes outside of their own teacher.
"I'm really looking forward to the choreography workshop, because it's almost like I've turned into this thinking dancer, whereas in Irish dancing you don't have to think that much. If you do it's very instinctual and not very deliberate. So to get these people into a room and say, right, we're going to dissect your reel step and turn it upside down and see what comes out - but it's all going to come from you - that will be fascinating."
