IN July 1992, Orla McFeely from Phibsboro, Dublin, danced the lead role of a teenage girl confronting the violence and addictions of the modern world in the Irish Youth Dance's Age of Anxiety. At that time I wrote: ". . . her beautiful turns and extensions, graceful arms, musical sense, assured walk and the intensity of her acting suggest she could one day lead an Irish ballet company".
No such company materialised but her work equally impressed the ballet's choreographer Terry John Bates, best known in Ireland as the Tony Award nominated choreographer of Dancing at Lughnasa. Soon she was dancing in London's West End, where he was staging Carmen at the Coliseum. She remained there for Princess Ida, directed by Ken Russell, before appearing as Puck with the British Youth Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Covent Garden Festival.
By using her as his assistant while staging Gypsy at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, however, Bates encouraged her interest in creating dance and soon she was choreographing for Sony trade shows and the musical Joan of Kent. She has just completed 18 months touring major British cities with the musical Cats, taking the leading female dance role of the White Cat, "so you can imagine how thrilled I am to be back in the Perfect State," she says, "after beings away so long."
Perfect State is a new work by Irish Modern Dance Theatre's artistic director John - Scott which fuses modern dance and a country or State where dreams, reality and desires co exist. Inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, diagrams from Gray's Anatomy and the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, it has an original score by Ciaran Farrell, using recorded violin and cello with live percussion by Rossa O Snodaigh, as well as a movement from one of the Brandenburg Concertos. Scott, using classical music for the first time, believes this to be his best work. Certainly he has excellent dancers in McFeely, Aisling Doyle and Laura Macken, while Jonathan Mitchell and Matthew Skilton, both new to Dublin, come highly recommended, Skilton having just finished partnering acclaimed French ballerina Sylvie Guillaume in Bolero.
. After previews last night and tonight, Perfect State opens a week's run at the Project on Monday, with school matinees on 16th, 17th and 18th, before visiting Drogheda on 23rd and Galway on 26th.