Swing: Dancing a path to stage success

Irish actor Steve Blount, one of the co-creators and stars of Swing, currently on at the Edinburgh Arts Festival, was at a house party about a decade ago when he first met his co-star Janet Moran.

"There was some great music going on,” he says. “We were in the kitchen. There wasn’t anybody dancing but I saw Janet moving and we had a dance, a fantastic dance. We had great fun.”

They met again properly about eight years later and, in the company of one of Swing’s other writers, Gavin Kostick, hatched a play with Fishamble Theatre Company where they could dance together. Peter Daly rowed in with help on the script, too: “Anything that made Peter laugh, we kept in.”

Since winning an award at last year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, Swing has wowed audiences in New York and Paris, and has toured Ireland. This month, it has a run at the prestigious dance venue, Dance Base, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“I’m an actor more than a dancer,” admits Blount, who played the head of the House of Karstark, Rickard Karstark, in the first season of the HBO series Game of Thrones. “I’m in Dance Base with all kinds of dancers from New Zealand, Taiwan, England. They’re all in there warming up. I’m floating around in amongst them, stretching. My mates are having great craic with that — me as a legit dancer.”

Part of Swing’s charm, of course, is that Blount and Moran is just a regular pair who rock up at an evening class of swing dancing. Joe is middle-aged. His marriage and the family print business have gone south. He’s trying to get a new start in horticulture. Moran’s character, Mae, is in a bit of a rut in her relationship with a boyfriend who remains off-stage, somewhere off in Peru on business.

Blount and Moran play the other characters in Swing, including the dance instructors. They change into character with a deft signal to the audience: “OK, change partner.” Some of the other dancers include a guy from the country who can’t dance, a prickly northern girl who’s unkind to beginners and a homesick Spanish girl. In their way, most are lonely hearts. A swing dance class provides the chance to meet someone, or, if nothing else, the chance to dance up close with somebody else.

“It’s a funny thing,” says Blount, “during the 1800s, the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and even a bit in the ’60s, everybody danced together. There was contact. There was communication.

“In the ’70s and ’80s, in one way, we found independence. Everybody was able to dance on his or her own. There was freedom of expression.

“Nobody would really comment on it, but it also robbed us of the art of balance with each other. Dance is a verbal communication without words. We missed that.

“It’s being able to communicate with somebody. We’re going to go this way. We’re going to this beat. We’re going to spin. We’re going to stop. You do all that without saying anything. And fellas can get close to girls. You’re straight through some barrier. It’s fun. People like it — it gets their blood going.”

Swing, which is part of Culture Ireland’s showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is at Dance Base, Edinburgh, until August 24. See fishamble.com