Tara Brandel is constantly stepping outside the box in performances

Ballydehob-born Tara Brandel explores personal issues in her performances, writes Ellie O’Byrne

TARA BRANDEL’S contemporary dance work boldly explores such personal themes as gender, bereavement and sexual orientation.

Her year-long residency in Uillinn, the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen, culminates in 25, a retrospective celebrating her 25-year career as a contemporary dancer and choreographer. It includes images, video and text from four distinct phases of her work, spanning time she has spent in London, Berlin, San Francisco and Cork.

Brandel, the co-founder of Croí Glan Integrated Dance Company, is unapologetically political in her work. “I’d rather people were making statements that were conscious rather than unconscious,” she says. “Ballet makes enormous political statements in how it represents gender and body types, for example. It isn’t necessarily overt, but there’s always a political statement in dance.”

Her upbringing in Ballydehob was unconventional; her parents were part of a wave of artists who moved to the idyllic setting, forming a bohemian enclave in rural Ireland in the 1960s and ’70s.

She moved to London in her late teens, where she studied at the Larbert Centre for Contemporary Dance, and where she came out. “I was part of a movement of lesbians who wanted to make ourselves visible and make space for ourselves in society, and my work was informed by that,” she says.

When Brandel’s father, crime fiction novelist Marc Brandel, committed suicide at 75 in 1994, she created a piece called Under Wear to explore his last moments.

Brandel will revive Under Wear for the performance that forms part of her retrospective. The one-woman show involves Brandel physically transforming herself, donning her father’s pyjamas and climbing into bed, as if by making herself as like him as possible she could understand and accept his decision.

“It’s the most complex piece I’ve made,” she says. “It’s really about me trying to come to terms with his decision, and understand where he must have been in those last few hours.”

When she returned from London following her father’s death, she realised that Ballydehob was an enclave of relative tolerance.

“People who started that whole potter and artist movement, like Maura Golden and her partner, who opened a potter’s studio in Ballydehob in the mid-60s, were part of a visible community of lesbian artists,” she says.

“A lot of them hung out in Levis’ bar which was run by my godmothers, Nell and Julia Levis.”

The recent marriage equality referendum result was still “hugely exciting and affirming, and deeply moving” for Brandel, and brought echoes of her life in San Francisco, where she lived from 1999 to 2006, where she produced work in response to an early bid for marriage equality there.

Brandel returned to Ballydehob from San Francisco, and met Rhona Coughlan, the disabled dancer with whom she founded Croí Glan.

She describes the foundation of the company as a natural progression for her, as she had always questioned the norms ascribed to dancers’ bodies in her work.

“The work I was making in the nineties, the dancers involved were all really strong, muscular, heavy-bodied women,” she says.

At 47, Brandel is still dancing extensively. “I’ve been dancing flat out all through my forties,” she says.

When we come back for her 50-year retrospective, what will we see? She laughs. “Oh, big, ritual pieces, with hundreds of people, about physical environment and community. That’s what I picture, anyway!”

25 runs until August 8 at Uillinn in Skibbereen. Tara Brandel will perform two solo pieces at the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen on August 1 as part of Skibbereen Arts Festival. Croí Glan will also perform a new work, Café, at the festival.