Luke Murphy: Cork choreographer ready to dive in at empty Metropole pool
Luke Murphy is movement director in Pool (No Water), at the Metropole Hotel for Cork Midsummer Festival. Picture: Chani Anderson
A childhood spent walking up and down the steepest incline in Cork stood Luke Murphy in good stead when he embarked on his chosen career — the family home of the dancer and choreographer looks out on to Bell’s Field at the top of Patrick’s Hill, a location which offers a panoramic view of the city and is now famous for featuring on the television show.
“I'm kind of built for it, it's like my whole body is formed around going up and down that hill,” he says.
Murphy is now based in the seaside town of Cobh but has spent a great deal of his time touring with Attic Projects, which he founded in 2015 and produces work across the platforms of dance, theatre, film and installation. When we speak, he is just back from New York, from a run of their most recent production, inspired by John B Keane’s
Before that, Murphy was on tour with the breakout hit that cemented his reputation as a creative polymath. He wrote, directed, choreographed and performed in the show, an exhilarating two-hander that felt genuinely groundbreaking in its approach to theatrical storytelling.
Murphy’s latest project is close to home in more ways than one, as he takes on the role of movement director in by Mark Ravenhill, an Everyman Theatre production in association with the Cork Midsummer Festival. It will be performed at the (now empty) swimming pool which was once part of the leisure centre at the city’s Metropole Hotel, just down the road from where Murphy grew up. It is a place with which he is very familiar.
“It is an amazing space. I was a member there when I was a teenager and I was still coming back there until I was in my late 20s.”
originally performed in 2006, is about a reunion of former art school students and is billed as an unflinching dissection of friendship, fame and ambition. In its blurring of boundaries between installation, physical theatre and live art, it sounds like it is right in Murphy’s particular wheelhouse. The setting will be integral to the production and how Murphy will approach the movement aspect.
“The space warrants some sort of dynamic energy. The original production had a lot of movement in it and it's robustly visual. I think about dance in a visual way, about the images that we're making and how the performers might be able to exist in this space in different ways.”
With Attic Projects, Murphy is accustomed to multi-tasking across all areas of a production and performance. He says it is a “lovely change of pace” to take more of a back seat on which is being directed by Des Kennedy, also artistic director of the Everyman.
“Within the producing of the show, you're normally wearing a few hats, just purely in getting the show up. To not have those responsibilities…it’s like ‘is there anything I should be doing?’ I feel like I'm not being asked to hold enough things at once right now. It's lovely. It's definitely healthier,” he says.
However, the pressure of combining so many roles also allows him to thrive, he says.
“Just purely as a choreographer, there are people with more inventive minds for movement than mine, as just a director, there’s people with more perceptive interrogation of texts, or better ways of working and getting the most out of actors, than me. I feel like it's actually holding all the things that makes what I do really distinctive.”
Although he is still taking on what many would consider hugely demanding physical roles in his work, Murphy has been aware of pivoting away from performance in recent years.
“I shifted the balance of my career about three years ago — up until about 2022, I was a performer who also made work. Now I’m a choreographer, a dance and theatre maker and I also perform.”
He turns down many offers to choreograph productions due to scheduling conflicts, which makes the fact that he is able to work on a show in Cork even more precious.
“I was delighted that it lined up, it's really nice to be making and doing work in Cork and to be involved in something that's so ambitious.
"I am really looking forward to this project. Des has put together a really interesting group of collaborators and an amazing cast. The material is beautiful, complicated, dark and also very redemptive, I think it will be very special.”
- Pool (No Water) by Mark Ravenhill will be performed at the swimming pool at St Patrick’s Quay, underneath the Metropole Hotel, from June 12- 27, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. everymancork.com
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