Choreography that gets to the core of our being
OVER the course of the next month, the work of distinguished Irish choreographer Liz Roche will grace both stages of the national theatre.
Roche is a collaborator on the Abbey Theatre’s upcoming new production of King Lear. Before then, however, her own show, Body & Forgetting, which debuted at last year’s Dublin Dance Festival, begins a run at the Peacock, and then embarks on a national tour.
Roche left home at 17 to pursue her training in contemporary dance abroad. Following her tuition in London, her growing repute helped her become a significant figure in European dance circles in the 1990s, before returning to Ireland and setting up her own company, Rex Levitates, now just called the Liz Roche Company.
In addition to producing her own work, Roche has also acquired an impressive résumé as a choreographer for theatre and opera. On King Lear she is collaborating with director Selina Cartmell, with whom she has worked in the past.
“Selina has a very physical approach to theatre,” says Roche. “She starts with what’s on the page and then very quickly thinks about how to integrate that with the physicality of the scene.
“She creates a language of physical movement so that the audience can come in and immediately understand the world the drama is set in. Often that world is a slightly more heightened one.”
Roche’s own piece seems no less provocative. Body and Forgetting centres on a dance performance but it also incorporates a film (directed by Alan Gilsenan) and live music from Roche’s brother, Denis, a highly regarded composer in his own right.
“I really wanted the audience to feel appreciation of live performance,” says Roche. “You always get drawn to the film, of course, but the hope is that at some point you realise that there are live bodies onstage doing this right now. I wanted the film there to help create that heightened sense that we’re alive.”
The show is concerned with themes of embodiment and that weird dichotomy that we can all experience between our inner ‘selves’ and our outer bodies.
“I wanted to explore this sense that the body really is separate,” says Roche. “If you’re ill or if something happens to you, all of a sudden you’re lying there inside this body. Suddenly, this thing that does everything you want is a prison. It won’t heal quickly enough. And you’re outside of it, looking on it.”
Roche also began to wonder about what the body forgets.
“I’m used to being able to reach for things and doing what I want physically,” she says. “I can pick up my kids. I can do all those things. If you need me to run I can run. So what happens if you lose that? It might not happen at all. But it’s the thought of losing that.”
Such thoughts occur to us all, but are perhaps especially sharp for those with a special attunement to their bodies, such as dancers.
“That happens you very young when you’re a dancer,” says Roche. “By the time you’re 28 you’re just like ‘Oh God, this is really starting to hurt’.”
Still only in her late thirties, Roche says the latter with a laugh, yet she’s also unafraid to meet the colder reality of age and mortality head on.
“I keep thinking of those lines by Thomas Kinsella ‘I fold my towel with what grace I can / Not young, and not renewable, but man’.
Maybe that’s the end of the piece. This is all we are. There is a hope in that, because people are persevering and still looking to make a connection. But when I look at the piece I think where can it go? It can only say that this is something that is happening to everybody.”
Maybe in the end, we can only be the creatures we are is a fact worth remembering every now and again.
*Body and Forgetting runs at: the Peacock Jan 28–Feb 2; Backstage, Longford, on Feb 13; The Model, Sligo, on Feb 16; Firkin Crane, Cork, on Feb 18; and Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, on Feb 20
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