TONIGHT, in the Firkin Crane in Cork, Paul Johnson's ManDance company gives a one off showing of the curiously affecting 45 minute piece it unveiled at the Project last year, Beautiful Tomorrow. Featuring Johnson himself and dancers Paris Payne and Danny Thompson (a one time champion amateur boxer), is played to an original score for voice and piano by Eugene Murphy.
Johnson's quietly frank choreography puckers together a number of contemporary vocabularies he picked up at the Laban Centre in London in the early 1980s mainly contact improvisation, which uses shared and counterpoised weight to propel movement. Johnson's own signature style is dreamily body conscious, sometimes almost minimalist; eschewing stunts and broad effects for an exact, meditative exploration of the solo male body, or male male interactions; from shyly cooperative routines to aggressive body language. Yogic and dance theatrical, it's conceived, says Johnson, "to hone everything down to specific dramatic gestures, which mean different things to different people".
The ManDance concept came about during Johnson's stint as artist in residence at the Aberdeen Art Gallery, when he pulled together five male dancers to explore the potential of dance performance - one of the few areas of human endeavour undominated by men. His work steers clear of the physical attack of, say, some of Lloyd Newson's work for DV8, but it certainly goes beyond the conventional male dance performance role as muscle hoists for ballerinas. Johnson's first Irish choreographical outing in 1991 was a delicately eye opening duet with Jeffrey Fox, A Curious Misunderstanding, which travelled well. Since then, he has produced mainly solo pieces; most memorably Sweat, which addressed in a direct, yet deeply encoded, way, his response to deaths and funerals from HIV.
Though uncomfortable with labelling of his work, Johnson is conscious of pushing back boundaries in terms of contact between men onstage. When I thought he was over estimating the effect of a very abstract, almost sculptural dance statement, my incredulity darkened as I read the Belfast Telegraph cutting, which fanned fundamentalist flames by printing large the comments of Jim Rodgers, Belfast cite councillor, that Sweat was "sick and degenerate".
But of course, such vociferous soundings off make good selling points. The optimism of Beautiful Tomorrow - "definitely turning a corner" - sees Johnson's choreography scaling up nicely again, and there are two more ManDance pieces in the ether. Hopefully, they'll unveil more of the promise and confidence of the piece you can see tonight.