Bolger's 'Agnes' invokes spirit of legendary Bernelle

Agnes Bernelle is remembered in Ireland as an artistic director of the Project Arts Centre, in its early days, but she played many more parts in an extraordinary life.

Her father, Rudolph Bernauer, was a librettist and impresario in pre-war Berlin, before fleeing Nazi persecution in 1936, when Bernelle was 13.

During the war, Bernelle broadcast black propaganda, as a DJ named Vicky, specialising in morale-sapping disinformation, which famously caused a U-Boat captain to surrender.

Bernelle’s first link to Ireland was via marriage to Desmond Leslie, a musician who assaulted journalist Bernard Levin live on television because of a bad review of a Bernelle performance. As a cabaret singer, Bernelle worked with Marc Almond, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits.

Bernelle later settled in Sandymount, Dublin, with her partner, the historian Maurice Craig. Her neighbours included the young David Bolger, who grew up on the street where she lived and went on to found CoisCeim Dance Theatre.

Now, Bolger has invoked the spirit of Bernelle in his new show, Agnes, which is playing this week, fittingly, at the Project in Dublin.

“It’s a very special show for me,” he says. “I remember her as this really theatrical woman. I went to her house several times and remember these photographs of her with Marlene Dietrich, on movie sets, or as an actor on the West End. When I was 12, she brought me to the Project Arts Centre, so that makes it extra special to be back.”

Bolger is aware that, 15 years since Bernelle’s death, there is a “whole generation who have never come across her,” he says.

But he says “I’ve met so many who were totally inspired by her, from Camille O’Sullivan to Gavin Friday”.

For both these audiences, Bolger says, “it’s a scary challenge. She was such a larger than life woman. You couldn’t believe half the stories about her. She was so out there and really lived her life fully. That’s what I’m trying to capture. We’re not dancing her life story, more getting the feeling of her personality.”

Bolger’s success is revealed in the show’s final tableau, where his dancers salute an empty chair — channelling and venerating the spirit of Bernelle, back at the Project again. It feels an earned gesture, Bolger having captured precisely the essence of Bernelle’s approach to cabaret. “She talks about the human conditions with a dry sense of humour,” he says. “It’s puts forward as entertainment, but is, in fact, a strong tool to talk about loneliness, heartbreak, love, what people do to one another. It’s not Jurys Irish cabaret.”

Bolger’s show is essentially a choreographed song cycle, based on Benrelle’s own recordings of classics like Kurt Weill’s ‘Mack the Knife’ and the ‘Bilbao Song’, ‘Broken Bicycles’, by Tom Waits, and songs by Daniel Cainer, and others. “What I’ve tried to do with the dancers,” he says, “who never met her, never heard the songs, is familiarise them. We read The Fun Palace [Bernelle’s autobiography], we researched all the songs she’d sing, and listened to the recordings. We worked on the phrasing — how she delivered lyrics, her rhythmic patterns of delivery, to get a sense of her rhythm.”

* Agnes is at the Project Arts Centre until Saturday; projectartscentre.ie.