Bringing the body to the big stage

The work of choreographer Liz Roche will feature on both stages at the national theatre in Dublin next month, writes SARA KEATING

The year has only begun but 2013 already looks very exciting from where choreographer Liz Roche is sitting in the bar of the Abbey Theatre, on a wet Thursday afternoon. Her meditative memory piece, Body and Forgetting, will be performed on the stage of the Peacock at the end of January, while she is also working with director Selina Cartmell on a new production of King Lear for the Abbey’s main stage.

The Abbey has always held a particular significance for Roche, who used to come to watch her older sister perform with the Dublin City Ballet at the Peacock when she was child.

“Jenny was just 13 but she was dancing with the big company, in shows like Don Quixote and Les Sylphides. When I think about it now, I don’t actually know how they managed to squeeze everybody on stage, but when you’re only eight you don’t notice things like that and to me there might have been a thousand people watching her.”

Her sister’s passion and early professionalisation had a big impact on the young Roche, who also trained at the Dublin City Ballet’s Blackrock-based school. She was drafted in for their seasonal productions too, dancing in Coppelia at the Olympia when she was in her early teens. “It was all very serious,” she remembers, “the rehearsals, the performances – and we would get off school for months to do it.”

But where her sister was “ballet-mad – she left school at 15 to train abroad – in the end I went the other way. I suppose I saw what she had to go through for ballet, and it was really hard core.

“Contemporary dance was a little bit more democratic. They didn’t want your heart and mind. They just wanted you to be committed.” And Roche could certainly offer commitment; she too left school to train in London at just 15.

“I suppose that probably sounds rather shocking now,” Roche admits, “but that is the age that you really need to throw everything you have into it if you want to be a dancer. When you are young you have that single-minded focus you need for training. You have time to experience a lot more and you can bounce back better, from any injuries or setbacks.”

It must surely have been difficult to be so young and away from home, but Roche says there was never any other expected trajectory for an aspiring dancer. “You always knew that you would have to go away to train,” she explains. “But you also knew that you would be closer to Europe and that is where the work was. When you were young the idea was that you stay abroad but as the years go by, you start to drift home, and then you want to stay home and to be able to make work close to your family and friends.”

Roche made that possible for herself when she founded Rex Levitates (now the Liz Roche Company) with her sister in 1999, but despite her success – and the ascending national and international profiles of companies such as Coiscéim and Fabulous Beast – not that much has changed for young Irish dancers hoping to hone their craft here.

“There are some training options here now,” she says, “but it’s still not the same as [the standard in] the UK or Europe. There was a real push for a number of years for having an academy for excellence or a conservatoire, but then it fell away. It’s a bit sad that people still have to go abroad and there are a lot of people who end up not dancing because training would mean going away and that costs money. Of course, there would be a much richer tradition of dance [in Ireland] if people could see performances regularly and go into training here.”

Roche’s fascination with the Abbey didn’t end with her childhood encounters at the Peacock. In fact, the first time she saw a professional dance production at the Abbey as an adult is seared into her memory too. It was 2002, the Dublin Dance Festival had just been launched and the great US choreographer Merce Cunningham was programmed to play on the theatre’s main stage.

“It was a really important moment for dance in Ireland,” she says, “that dance should be placed on the national stage. It was an acknowledgment of dance’s relationship to other art forms; how people move or don’t move is part of [all the performing art forms].”

Dance was not always so peripheral to the theatrical arts in Ireland. In fact the Abbey Theatre once housed its own ballet school, run by the prolific ballerina Ninette de Valois, who had an enormous influence on the work of the theatre’s then-director, WB Yeats; Yeats himself wrote a series of dance plays in the following years. Yet dance has been slow to become part of the broader narrative of Irish theatre, which has tended towards the literary; the privilege of text over the body.

This has gradually begun to change since the 1970s – from the early work of Thomas MacIntyre to the contemporary work of Corn Exchange – but even classic theatre these days boasts a better relationship with the moving body, as choreographers such as Roche or David Bolger, whose work was central to the recent production of The Dead, are drafted in to help bring depth to the physical movement of the production.

As Roche explains: “Sometimes you might just be brought in to create a three-minute dance. You are given the music and told what the dance has to do and that’s it.”

Increasingly, however, with directors like Cartmell, “who are really committed to the physicality of performance”, movement “becomes a part of the language of the play and you are helping to create a clarity for the audience as to what type of world the play is taking place in through the way that people move”.

The fact that she is working on King Lear is particularly significant for Roche; “I would have had to do King Lear for my Leaving Cert,” she says, “but I left before getting that far. So where everyone else in rehearsal is discussing character, I’m sitting there with tears in my eyes.” Tears in her eyes, but no regrets.

Body and Forgetting runs at the Peacock Theatre from January 28th to February 2nd. King Lear runs at the Abbey Theatre from February 6th until March 23rd.

Dancing on film

Roche’s piece Body and Forgetting is a collaboration with composer Denis Roche and film-maker Alan Gilsenan. Video work has become increasingly important toher.

“My work is probably best described as abstract rather than narrative,” she says. “Things happen in succession and for a reason but that isn’t always tangible, and that’s probably become more and more true of my most recent work.”

She has become attracted to video because “dance is moveable; just like all live performance there is the possibility of difference from night to night, depending on how the performers and the audience are feeling and how they come together on a particular night. Film offers a chance for preservation. [Film] offers a fixed point for me as a choreographer, a focus for the audience, and that allows us to be much freer with the [live dance].”