Joanna Banks arrives like a typical dancer, early and well prepared. With her hair swirled into its usual twist, and wearing a black turtleneck, slim black pants and shoes that support her supple feet, she wastes no time recounting how she came to work with the choreographer Philip Connaughton, whose work Trojans is being staged by Luail, Ireland’s national dance company, later this month.
Banks, who will turn 86 during the show’s run, calls on her razor-sharp memory to highlight the touchstones in Ireland’s dance history that have led to this moment in her career. Between being coached by Ninette de Valois at the Royal Ballet School, in London, and travelling the world with Dead Centre Theatre Company’s internationally acclaimed production Lippy, Banks has become one of Ireland’s dance legends. Her role in Trojans is testament to her fearlessness as well as her allure as a performer.
“Joanna is just so iconic for me,” says Connaughton, who first met Banks when he was a young dance student. “She’s the ultimate artist. So when I thought about Trojans I thought, ‘She needs to be in this,’ and also, ‘I need to see her dancing on stage.’ Just like I want to see a Picasso, I want to see her dancing. Because I value her as an artist. Because she is Joanna Banks.”
For Luail’s eight dancers, who are in the early parts of their careers, the year or two they have been with the company may feel like a lifetime, but Banks, who was born in Chiswick, in London, in 1940, began dancing before any of them, and almost certainly their parents too, were born. And she is still as committed as these younger cast members.
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“I’m making sure that I keep myself in shape, because I don’t want to rock into the studio and let anybody down,” she says. “Philip approached me after lockdown and said, ‘I’m hoping to do this piece called Trojans. It’s based on the Greek legend Aeneid. I have a role that I would really like you to do and I want to create it on you.’”
Trojans premiered in 2023 at Cork Midsummer Festival, staged by Company Philip Connaughton. Based on Virgil’s epic poem, it explores themes such as war, migration and identity. Banks plays the role of Juno, who wields her strength and power to the detriment of those around her. It’s a far cry from her early days studying ballet in London.
“The very first time I ever danced in a theatre, way before I went to the Royal Ballet School, I had a local teacher and she gave charity dancing displays. This would have been back in about 1945, just after the end of the second World War. And the first time we went into a theatre it was a pretty auditorium, a little miniature gem of a theatre – which unfortunately is now a supermarket – and I remember feeling odd.
“I didn’t understand that it was nerves. I got into my pretty costume, and then I got into this amazingly accommodating, friendly, dark space with lights. And it was like Alice going through the looking glass, like I had come home. I had found my space, and what I wanted. I knew the magic was there.”
When Banks enrolled at the Royal Ballet School, de Valois, who was born in Co Wicklow, was also building what would become one of the world’s best-known dance companies. De Valois later handpicked Banks to join the Royal Ballet, launching a career that also included performing with Ballet Rambert, Bavarian State Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, among others.
“A dancer’s career has ups and downs. I remember one of the bad patches when my mother said, ‘If for any reason you decide that you don’t want to do this, then walk away from it.’ But I found it impossible to walk away.”
During her time with Ballet Rambert, England’s oldest existing dance company, it underwent a shake-up following its post-second World War success. The repertoire shifted to contemporary, and the company’s growing pains created havoc behind the scenes.
“A lot of us were left in a very serious situation with no work. And if I hadn’t really wanted to do it, I would have walked away at that point. It actually led to working with what was called Ballet Caravan that later became London Ballet Theatre.
“And that was a wonderful experience. I mean, we toured all over Germany, Switzerland, France. And it was fun. There was just about enough money to feed yourself and send a postcard home to your parents to say, ‘I’m sort of alive.’ But that taught me a lot. And I’m still in touch with a couple of dancers that shared that, because we were so close.”
Banks arrived in Cork in 1974, joining Irish National Ballet, under the direction of Joan-Denise Moriarty. That group travelled across the country, bringing ballet to audiences that otherwise would not have seen it. The company folded in the 1980s because of Arts Council cuts.
Earning a living through dance was no small feat in 1990s Ireland. After years of performing with Roy Galvin, presenting pas de deux around the country, and also dancing with her late husband, John Regan, in Theatre Omnibus, a touring company, Banks retired from the stage at the age of 48 to teach. By then she had moved to Dublin.
“I had set up the College of Dance, and I was working full time on that, teaching the senior ballet class every day. I was doing all the administration, everything. It was full on.”
Its graduates have gone on to perform with companies in England and across Europe. Some have returned to Ireland to choreograph and teach. Despite Banks’s commitment to the college, John Scott, director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre, enticed her back to the stage with his 1996 production of Macalla.
“I took an awful lot of persuading,” she says. “I think he bought me a second glass of wine or something. And I wound up saying yes. But as soon as I got home I went into major panic.”
Her hesitation might have come from knowing how bold Scott’s choreographic choices can be. In Macalla, which was a hit, Banks not only descended a spiral staircase in high-heeled boots but also rolled around the floor of the Royal Hibernian Academy stuffed into a shopping trolley.
Banks – whom American academics regularly approach when they visit Ireland to learn more about dance here – gained notoriety for this transition to contemporary dance. Directors took notice. In 2013 Bush Moukarzel, Dead Centre’s artistic director, cast her in Lippy, his dark, original drama about three sisters and an aunt who enter a suicide pact.
“At this point in my career I was getting increasingly crippled. I could scarcely walk, but I was playing an old lady who gets killed off anyway. So it really didn’t matter. But the point was I loved the role in Lippy. And then it sort of rocketed to be a major success, and we took it all over the world, basically.”
Numerous awards, a worldwide pandemic and two hip replacements later, Banks felt her performing days were over. Until Connaughton came calling.
“Joanna has always been part of my dancing life,” Connaughton says. “She’s not an artist who sits in the past and is nostalgic about the amazing career she has. She’s an artist who’s thinking about tomorrow. That is so important in today’s society that thinks, after a certain age, suddenly you’re no longer valid.
“But in her body she condenses a whole history of information that she can pull out at the drop of a hat. And she’s always forward thinking. I think if people could be a little bit more like that, we’d be in a much better place.”
Back in the studio, at the Digital Hub in Dublin, Banks exudes energy and elegance during an afternoon rehearsal for Trojans. Luail’s dancers envelop her into a formation they have been working out. As they turn and tumble in choreography that suggests a human chariot, they then lift Banks into the air above their heads, so that her stately profile glides above the stage.
[ From the archive: Fintan O’Toole on Lippy’s explosive theatrical experimentOpens in new window ]
This brief moment of the dance exemplifies the way she has risen above turmoil and continues to entertain audiences, magnificently.
“Hopefully I can contribute something in the fact that, as an older performer, the youngest ones might learn something from working with me,” Banks says. “I mean, they will be doing the active killer dancing. But it’s not all about that. Trojans is a wonderful new challenge. And at my age you don’t necessarily expect new challenges.”
Trojans is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, March 26th-April 4th; Black Box, Galway, April 10th-11th; and Island Arts Centre, Lisburn, April 29th-30th
