Dancing with Time

In 2009 I went to see Colin Dunne’s show Out of Time at the Barbican in London. Having known that Dunne had danced in Riverdance, and having watched him in the lead role as a ‘knees-fucked Irish dancer’ in Fabulous Beast Dance Company’s The Bull, I dragged my friend Joe Kelleher – an Irishman from Leeds – to see it. Joe was amazed to find himself there, but it was all great.  Dunne arrived onstage, said ‘thank you’ and proceeded to move into a deconstructed barefoot improvised performance of Irish step dance, which became a meditation on tradition, time and the ghosts that haunt performers and performance.  These ghosts emerged in many forms in Dunne’s work, not least through old clips from RTE footage of Irish dance from the 40s to the 70s, which were projected onto a white movable box onstage.  Dunne’s dancing conversed with these figures through gaps in time and technique, while simultaneously enacting the impossibility of accessing or speaking with this past.

Suddenly, my own personal ghost emerged in the slowed down and silent footage of a female audience member applauding a particularly energetic and large man dancing in a suit. It wasn’t so much her black bobbed hair or her horn-rimmed glasses, as the particular way in which she applauded: clapping delicately with the tips of her fingers somewhat absentmindedly, in a way that was deeply familiar from my childhood trips to the pantomime at the Gaeity, and later visits to the Abbey theatre. “I think I saw my mother in that footage,” I said afterwards, winning the brilliant response from Joe (who admittedly had just sat through an Irish dance show on my behalf and was midway through comparing it to Turkish television): “We all see our mothers in things like this Aoife”. “No I really think I saw my mother,” I said.

The problem is, I’m not sure if I did. Despite meeting Dunne (who also met my mother) and some forensic scrutiny of a dvd of Dunne’s performance, I’m still not sure if it was my mother.  She can’t remember if she was there or not, and says that 1972 is a complete blur. Maybe it was her. Her style of applause seems undeniable.  But, even if it wasn’t, the haunted nature of Dunne’s performance and my response to it – seeing in it an image of my mother three years before I was born – is telling of the larger sense in which watching performance is the experience of being “out of time” – the experience of a disjunction with the time of its traditions, its ancestry and its promises of fulfilment, of being to come, that is always suggested and always deferred.  Perhaps Joe was right: we do all see our mothers in our reaching past the performance that we watch, towards a future state of origin and ancestry?

As Dunne danced with the recorded sounds of his own steps, and provided the soundtrack to the feet of the footage of a headless female dance champion, his performance interrogated the desire and the injunction to match, to catch up with, to access, hold onto, acquire or meet a way of being, a way of doing, while simultaneously underlying its impossibility. Dunne’s training in a discipline of dance known as “Irish” presumed a relationship with ancestry and authenticity, which he as an individual dancer should labour to reproduce. However, the deferral within the dance, of an absolute space of authenticity or Irishness, made his reenactment one of futurity rather than origin: an attempt to reproduce and re-present an Irishness that had not yet come to fruition. Irish dance reproduces an Irishness that is always out of time, an Irishness that is anachronistic in its continual deferral and promise of future actualisation. Being out of time was an inevitability for the dancer and the audience and yet a striving against this condition seemed to be at the heart of the desire to dance in the first place. Dunne’s performance then, appeared as both a reenactment of a tradition, and a meditation on the impossibility of such an enactment. Dunne’s striving and failing to match the feet of his ghostly counterparts posed the question: how do you re-enact something that has not yet happened?

Dunne’s performance seemed to pose a further set of questions that I am also interested in asking.  For example, if you are to perform a set of gestures or tasks or actions that are described as “Irish”, as Dunne’s dance form is, then what sort of stuff is involved: what are the things you use in order to make this Irishness manifest or re-enact its promises? What do you wear? How can this re-enactment be embodied and why this sort of embodiment with these sorts of bodies, rather than other kinds? Where do you perform this sort of gesture with this kind of dress and these kinds of bodies, and how is your location produced by your enactment? If this body, this landscape, this gesture, this object makes a claim to or for Irishness, how is this claim made, with what persuasive arts, and forms of rhetoric? And who is being persuaded?  Or perhaps they are not: after all, we might ask two questions of this rhetoric in relation to performing Irishness: is it pleasurable and why is everyone fighting over it?  Indeed, is the pleasure possibly related to the fighting –is the fighting itself pleasurable?  And, if this sort of act or enactment or reenactment is making a claim to be Irish – and is doing so alongside lots of other competing claims to Irishness - why do every single one of them appear to get it wrong (at least according to the people fighting over the fact that it is wrong, and seeming to enjoy the fight more than act itself)?  Finally, we might ask of Dunne’s performance, which we have moved away from, who are the ghosts that haunt these enactments, and fights, and why do they haunt them so keenly?

In a public interview with Karen Fricker at the Synge Summer School, Dunne posed a further question which had evidently influenced the composition of his performance: how do you make Irish dance when you are no longer invested in the idea of “Irishness”? Dunne’s dance style differed, then, from that in the television footage, not only stylistically, but in the relationship between content and form.  While the footage of the decapitated dancer showed an enactment that seemed to be invested in a form of mimesis, of imitation, Dunne’s performance seemed to want to enact the gestures without operating as a copy. But, as we have seen, the action or the ideal that the headless dancer copied, is one that has not yet happened, is imagined by the performance as a future yet to be achieved. Dunne’s performance then seemed out of time by looking backwards to a tradition he no longer fully occupied without gesturing towards a future space in which that action or ideal might be achieved or take place. Once an investment in Irishness is evacuated from the gestures of Irishness, the anachronism of the form seems to be removed, the dance is no longer disjunctive, but present. Perhaps that was its pleasure?

http://www.colindunne.com/