Ever since she was a child growing up in Trinidad and eagerly attending ballet classes, Catherine Nunes (38) has had a "passion" for dance. As the person who has pushed the longest for the new International Dance Festival for Ireland, she has had her loyalty stretched to the limit.
It may seem like a bolt from the blue - the announcement last week of a new contemporary dance festival - but Nunes first mooted the idea back in 1996. "Ireland has lacked the wider context for contemporary dance that is there in the US and Europe," says Nunes. "Dance for most Irish people means either ballet or Irish dancing. Contemporary dance is different - dancers perform in bare feet, they dance to contemporary music, they explore the body and how it moves in a new way. Each choreographer seeks his or her own vocabulary of music."
Nunes, whose mother was Irish, went to Mount Anville boarding-school in Dublin during her teens. It was a time of frustration because for five of those six formative years - a crucial time in the evolution of any dancer - she was denied dance lessons.
"I couldn't go to ballet classes because we weren't allowed out of the school. In sixth year, Dublin Contemporary Dance [under the directorship of Joan Davis] offered dance classes in the school. I went to those classes, and when I started my degree in English and French at TCD, I attended their classes in Molesworth Street." She also did mime classes with Vincent O'Neill, who ran the Irish Mime Company. After graduating from TCD in 1984, she spent time at The Place dance school in London, and then went to New York - "where I did the aspirational artist thing, waitressing to pay for dance classes". In 1987 she took a postgraduate diploma at the Laban Centre in London, a contemporary dance school. She then did some performing and teaching, maintaining contact with Ireland, where she did a choreography and music course at Digges Lane and gave a talk in 1993 at one of the New Music, New Dance festivals. Her topic? International dance festivals, of course. She landed the job as festival director of Newcastle Dance, a contemporary dance festival co-ordinated by Dance Umbrella. "It was a massive challenge, a baptism by fire," she recalls. She learned to juggle the various skills of marketing, programming and fund-raising, liaising with major names in the field, such as Merce Cunningham and Lucinda Childs. She worked on two festivals in Newcastle (1992 and 1994).
In 1993 (the Newcastle Festival is biannual), she was appointed associate director of Dance Umbrella's Festival in London, one of the world's premier dance festivals, in existence for over 20 years. "Val Bourne OBE, artistic director of the festival, asked me to come on board as she was taking up another post for a year," recalls Nunes. The Dance Umbrella Festival in London "has had a seminal influence on contemporary British dance". With the idea of creating a similar festival in Ireland, which might have a similar effect on Irish dance, she moved to Dublin with her daughter, Maia. "At that stage I had worked on two Newcastle festivals and two London festivals and had established contacts and international links which all helped to inform my knowledge." Her central criterion for programming was "quality work", whether or not she personally liked it.
Creating an international dance festival for Ireland seemed "an obvious idea". "I knew that new work was going on in Ireland but there was no international festival on the scale I was used to." She was aware of several ongoing festivals - including New Music, New Dance and Dancefest; - which sought to present Irish dance companies alongside smallscale appearances by companies from abroad. "These festivals took place from the late 1980s until 1996 and because of them, the building blocks were already there for an international dance festival," says Nunes.
Backed by the Association of Professional Dancers, with funding from the Arts Council, she presented the Arts Council with a feasibility study in January, 1998. "My main conclusion was that an international dance festival could, if visible enough, have a significant influence on Irish contemporary dance and could boost public appreciation of and confidence in this art form." She compares the potential impact of an international dance festival on Irish dance with the impact on Irish visual art made by the ROSC exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s. "There will be an underpinning of masterclasses and community work," she says, "and also collaborations with practitioners of other art forms, especially visual art." There were tortuous delays while the Arts Council was working on its Arts Plan and the dance community took time to coordinate a required letter of support for Nunes's study. When the seal of approval came from the latter, Nunes formed an adhoc steering committee, which evolved into a Festival Board of Directors: Fiach MacConghail (former artistic director of Project and cultural director of Expo 2000 in Hanover), Val Bourne of Dance Umbrella, Anna Cutler (artistic director of Young at Art, an international children's festival in Belfast), film-maker Alan Gilsenan, Janice McAdam (director of Public Affairs at Project), Mary Nunan (founder and former artistic director of Daghdha Danc Company) and choreographer John Scott.
BEFORE the committee became an official board, however, Nunes had to contend with a rejection from the Arts Council in 1999. Following an appeal and meetings with Arts Council members, however, "they changed their minds, we got a research and development grant, and last November we submitted an application to hold the dance festival on the basis of that work".
The allocation of £433,000 by the Arts Council is heartening news, but other fund-raising will have to make up the estimated £740,000 needed to fund the festival. International contemporary dance stars, such as Mark Morris and Pina Bausch - both of whom are being approached to bring their companies to the festival - don't come cheap. "The festival will not just be about international performances," Nunes adds. "There will be a role for Irish dance companies also, and the meeting ground the festival creates for them to have contact with visiting companies will create all sorts of opportunities. The repercussions for Irish dance and cultural life in general will be huge."