Junk bonds

FRINGE: Kilmainham Gaol is to be the setting for a show by identical twins Jessica and Megan Kennedy of Junk Ensemble, writes SARA KEATING

INTERVIEWING IDENTICAL TWINS when you have no visual cues by which to identify them is confusing. Dancers Jessica and Megan Kennedy interrupt each other and finish each other sentences, so you can never be sure who is speaking.

This is part of the natural dynamic that the sisters share after seven years working together with their company Junk Ensemble, whose latest show, Bird with boy, opens at Kilmainham Gaol on September 12th as part of the Absolut Fringe festival.

“People are fascinated with the fact that we are identical, because we all like symmetry: two things that look alike and behave alike as bodies. But these battles between us always occur when we are rehearsing a show. They are part of the creative dynamic. The advantage is that because we know each other so well, we can work very quickly,” Jessica says, before Megan takes over: “Also, we like to involve a lot of different people in our shows – designers, musicians – and the collaborative process ensures a more temperate rehearsal room.

Bird with boyis Junk Ensemble's most ambitious work to date and for the first time the Kennedys will not be performing in their own work. "It's time to see what we do with an outsider's eye," Megan says.

The show features a cast of three professional dancers, six young boy dancers, and two musicians, who will guide the audience through a six-room installation in the basement of Kilmainham Gaol. For the Kennedys, the site is integral to their conception of the dance piece. As Megan explains: “What we were interested in doing was playing with the idea of unnatural or premature endings. Obviously we are working with children, so the idea of childhood ending too early or innocence interrupted is one thing, but there are other more abstract concepts that work with the theme visually – train tracks or a diving board; things that could keep going on forever but don’t.”

Megan interrupts: “It’s about freedom, too – who controls the ending – and that links into the history and space of the jail. And it also forms part of the movement context. It provides the starting point for the dance itself, but also, because it’s about disruption, the end.”

The austere basement space at Kilmainham Gaol has provided Junk Ensemble with one of the greatest challenges for making its piece. “We haven’t yet had the chance to rehearse in the space,” Megan says, “and from our experience using other non-theatre spaces, we know that the entire piece tends to change in a new environment.”

At the same time, it is an exciting opportunity “to make a familiar space entirely new”, as Jessica puts it. “We are using six rooms, and in collaboration with visual artist Jo Timmons and visual designers David Fagan and Valerie Reid, we are trying to create a series of different atmospheres in each of them, using the particular architecture of the space – its stone floors, gravel yards – to create a particular aesthetic that is crucial to the overall piece.” Perhaps it is to do with their peripatetic background – they have migrated between Pennsylvania, Dublin, New York, Edinburgh and London for their education and practice – but Junk Ensemble’s previous seven shows have been tied to the conception of place and have been performed, for the most part, outside of traditional theatre spaces.

"Even when we worked in the Project Cube with Five Ways to Drownlast year," Megan says, "we wanted to get away from the square dimensions of the black-box space and show the theatre in a new way."

Jessica says working outside the theatre “is a way to bring people to places they have never been before or to show familiar places in a new way. It’s introducing them to art in a new way, and sometimes bringing audiences who wouldn’t usually come to a dance show, too.”

However, with site-specific work it can be tricky to control the environment in which you are working, as the Kennedys know. The Rain Party,their 2007 show in the courtyard of the Cultivate Building in Temple Bar, had to be moved to the garden of Christ Church Cathedral after a resident "who lived in one of the apartments above, sabotaged the show", by throwing glasses and vases down on the performers, and playing Oasis so loudly that the dancers couldn't hear the music. They had to cancel several shows before changing venue. As Megan jokes: "It is hard to dance with bleeding feet."

“We have a lot of weather horror stories too,” Jessica interjects, “but with The Rain Party at least we were prepared for it, as the piece was actually built around it, but that doesn’t make trench foot any more pleasant.”

The real beauty about working in non-theatre spaces, they agree, is how adaptable the spaces are and how it ensures that their work is always evolving. Megan says, before they run back into rehearsal, “people always ask about how we manage to tour the work, when the shows are so dependent on a particular environment, but that’s the most exciting part for us. In a different space, in a different country, at a different festival, every performance has a different effect.”

Bird with boyis at Kilmainham Gaol from September 12th-20th