Dancing with a sense of déjà vu

The search for individual identity, the power of mythology and the struggle against tyranny loosely link two new dance pieces from celebrated Irish dance company Coiscéim, writes CHRISTINE MADDEN

OUTSIDE IT'S cold, but in CoisCéim's premises just off O'Connell Street, the atmosphere is warm and getting warmer. The dancers rehearse through sections of their upcoming double bill in the long, mirrored dance studio. In one corner, a gallery of photo-printer copies of pictures paper the wall. The images look ghostly: x-ray-like, sepia stills from the original l'Après-midi d'un fauneballet. They look and feel a bit like turn of the 20th century erotic postcards.

What’s happening on the dance floor bears a distinct resemblance to the images – the art nouveau lines, the sultry mood. Choreographer David Bolger, CoisCéim’s artistic director, recounts an anecdote about a prostitute in Japan standing in front of a businessman but separated from him by a pane of glass. Her one action is to press her naked breast against the glass ­– so close, yet so unattainable. This mounting sense of erotic longing through a simple but pregnant image bears a similarity to what he’s trying to achieve.

In mood, identity and movement, the first half of this double bill presents such a great contrast to the second, comparison is just short of impossible.

As You Are, dancer Muirne Bloomer's choreographic debut for CoisCéim, employs strong, athletic movement in exploring themes of individuality and imagination. Nevertheless, although these two pieces present two vastly disparate worlds – one restlessly vigorous and contemporary, the other languid and modernistic – both make the plea for self-expression and the struggle for individual identity in their different ways. "We didn't want to talk about it, but this is where we feel there is a crossover in the thematic structure of the evening," Bolger admits.

"Hopefully it's about seeing the two pieces together and making those connections yourself, because we wanted to make a double-bill that felt like a journey rather than two very opposing pieces that shouldn't happen together." The title As You Areplays a bit on the military order to relax (something of an oxymoron) but draws out a greater resonance with the concept of individualism. "It's about the imagination and the ability to believe, to believe in yourself," explains Bloomer, "and what ends up being stripped or gleaned." Bloomer's seven-year-old son Eoin provided an inspiration and starting point for the piece. "I'm always telling him to do as he's told, and he's always asking why, and I say, as you do, 'Just do it'." Yet another inspiration for her choreography was a documentary shown by the BBC in 2001 called The Five Steps to Tyranny, which described in disturbing detail just how a society can cross the line over to mass behaviour that supports the workings of fascism, totalitarianism and vicious dictatorships.

“One of the steps to tyranny was not questioning authority. That interests me. You should possibly be teaching your children to question authority and not just do as they’re told.” The piece opens with a section on superheroes (“Eoin loves superheroes”), which conveys another of Bloomer’s central themes, the strength and beauty of creativity, and the individual at play. This leads to an eventual sense of loss, when in human society, “that ends up getting squashed when you get older”, Bloomer says.

She uses the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man to express this, a sense of individual harmony and beauty that degenerates as society makes people conform and obey. The choreography depicts conformity as something machinistic and menacing – a warning that centrally controlled behaviour and action leads to a militaristic society. “My Vitruvian man ends up with a gun in his hand,” she explains. At the end of the piece, order disintegrates into aggression as dancers increasingly jolt themselves out of formation.

Both pieces, in fact, feature the idea of dancing out of ordered row and rank – in their own ways. When Vaslav Nijinsky created l'Apres-midi d'un faune, from which Bolger drew the inspiration for Faun, in 1912, he flew in the face of conventional and acceptable ballet practice at the time. The innovative producer Sergei Diaghilev had finagled him away from Russia to become a part of les Ballets Russes in 1909, which became one of the most celebrated ballet companies of all time and directed the development of dance to this day. Nijinsky, revered like a god of ballet at the beginning of the 20th century, performed in such shows as Giselle, Scheherezade, Petrushka and the Spectre de la Rose. The public were rapturous over his grace, skill and strength – not to mention his grand leaps, in which he seemed to hover indefinitely in the air, defying the force of gravity.

Nijinsky smashed this aesthetic with the first of two ground-breaking ballets (the second, The Rite of Spring, to Igor Stravinsky's revolutionary music, followed the next year). Nijinsky's famed grace became angular, and "he only does one jump", recounts Bolger. "He went completely the opposite way. He went, 'I'm not even going to jump for them, I'm only going to do one jump', and then he lands on flat feet. Bang. Down. It's so particular the way it's described." Nevertheless, Nijinskys finale caused the greatest furore. The genesis of l'Apres-midi d'un faunecame in the form of a symbolic, highly erotic poem by the French writer Stéphane Mallarmé, which French composer Claude Debussy set to music. The poem describes the sexual awakening of a faun, who arises one afternoon, drunk with sleep, and sees a group of nymphs, pursues them, but only succeeds in capturing the scarf one of them drops behind her in flight. In the end, in the absence of the nymphs, Nijinsky has the faun reclining along the scarf and performing masturbatory movements. "Filthy" and "bestial" were some of the insults spat at him by the press of the day.

Bolger is not the only contemporary artist to have been fascinated and inspired by Nijinsky, his innovative work and utter aplomb in breaking established artistic structures. In 1984, the iconic band Queen released a video to their song I Want to Break Free that gained them notoriety. As well as presenting band members prancing about in drag in a parody of the British soap Coronation Street, the video included a central section in which Freddie Mercury shaved off his moustache and poured himself into a faun costume for an erotic sequence that mimicked the Nijinsky original.

Music from Queen as well as Debussy turns up in Bolger's Faun, with Ivan Birthistle and Vincent Doherty providing the soundscape for Bloomer's As You Are. Dancers James Hosty, Robert Jackson, Eddie Kay, Megan Kennedy, Lisa McLoughlin and Emma O'Kane perform in both pieces – quite a feat for dancers to take part in two such diverse pieces within the same bill. "It's a chance to get to see the dancers in a different light, to have a relationship with them," explains Bolger. "You want to know the way they move, what makes them go, who they are, what they look like. Dance is about a body in space, but it's about a person in space as well." The six dancers, who "generated the movement – the piece wouldn't exist without them", Bloomer emphasises, get the chance to shine as individuals in a programme that pays homage to the individual in society, among other things. "I think there are a lot of layers in the piece," Bolger says. "It's six dancers looking back at that time 100 years ago. And what part does this play in our life, if any? And does myth exist in our life? Do we believe in myth, and what does myth teach us? If we stop believing in the faun, the faun doesn't exist anymore," he adds. "The faun loses his power, we stop thinking about him. In some way, we're all fauns."

As You Are/ Faunruns at the Project until January 23rd, then tours until Feb 13th to Galway, Thurles, Waterford, Cork, Longford, Dún Laoghaire, Portlaoise, Tallaght and Wexford