Arc Lights

I guess I should consider it a positive sign it’s taken me so long to find words for Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s FALL AND RECOVER. I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours returning again and again to programme notes and memory, desperate to find something to grab hold of, to push off from…some kind of hook on which to hang some words.

In fact, it wasn’t until about an hour ago I noticed the quotation by the work’s creator John Scott, of Doris Humphrey, originator of the technique that lent the piece its name: ‘Dance occurs in the frightening moment between falling and recovering by the arc swept by a body moving between equilibrium and uncontrol.’ For Scott, this is analogous to the experience of those who have survived torture.

It’s a moving parallel, and an apt one.

Performed with unassuming poise and intent, the piece begins with words in flood…in conversation, in remembrance. That these are the words of another place, another tongue means nothing. Somehow, at this instant, it’s as if Babel never fell. I just…get it. I recognise that face, infused by story; I’m at ease with this voice as it segueways into song, before falling back again into the easy rhythm of daily life. And in the space of a few moments – and I still don’t quite know how it happened - I found my own voice in the shared idiom of a shared humanity.

With the rest of the company joining, they fell to marking out a past upon the papered floor, sketching windows, doors as they recreated homes…or perhaps more fell demesnes….all soon ripped asunder, a whirlwind of action tearing the very ground out from under the feet of those on-stage. Then began, it seemed, the movement work proper. The press of body to wall, hand to hand, as emanations of life after life described in motion a fragmented and fragmenting world. Bodies separated from, yet reaching out to each other – in breath; in glance; in the gestures and steps of homes far from this one. Images shocked and transfixed the mind - of lined up bodies, backed up then falling slumped…bar one, a seeming lone remembrancer. Or a thousand hands reaching up for some kind of rescue or resolution. But beyond all else, and perhaps this is the most wonderful and surprising of things about this work, was the thundering pulse of life joyously lived. It flashed upon the stage. It blazed out in the sway and stomp and reach of one dancer to another. And it was a good passion, beautiful because not some counterfeit. In the dancers’ performances I glimpsed instances of a genuine - a glorious - exhilaration.

Even when moving as one body - in a gyring line, say - Scott ensures that the distinctiveness of each performer is present. There is no excessive concern for synchronous motion, or the pretence of gestural sameness. A profound shared awareness, yes, yet one that never subsumes in full each individual. Scott’s choreography is, in a way, a geometry, one that describes precisely rather than dogmatically the intricately interwoven forms our humanity assumes.

But that’s how it is in Scott’s work, it seems. The same principle might be observed in how Eamon Fox’s beautiful lighting scheme or Rossa Ó Snodaigh superb musical accompaniment are integrated into the entire production. Similarly, as a spectator, you never feel the slightest hint of prescriptivity concerning what conclusions ought be drawn from what you witness. And yet it’s a testament to the strength of Scott’s choreography that, despite this, you leave the theatre imbued with a sense that this is not ‘victim art’. No. It is art that directs us to something that transcends identities…while yet affirming the dignity of one’s identity.

So what about that quote? Well, it wasn’t so much the quote itself as that one word: ‘arc’. See, I was looking for some image to express the effect of FALL AND RECOVER on me…and that handed it to me.

Arc lights.

Now, the principle behind them is quite simple - the ‘arc’ is the result of the electrical breakdown of a gas between two electrodes, through which a current is flowing. An arc is a source of prodigious heat and light, capable of vaporising most things. Quite destructive things, really. Yet I couldn’t help feeling how it somehow fitted.

Because in the final minutes of FALL AND RECOVER each performer traces, in salt, the outline of their bodies, prone upon a dark floor, as if offering some small testament to their having been here. Then...they leave. And leave only traces - of the mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters who just seconds before had been. Now it was as if all that they were - their songs, their words, their expressions – lay reduced to a faint outline of salt, as if some fire had rendered them down to some bitter residue. As if they’d been burned clean away in the savage, unforgiving wrath of a life’s holocaust.

It was perhaps the darkest point in the entire work.

But my God…the light. The light.