Dark days need ceremony

I met Andrew for the first time in London in 2013 and after having the opportunity to share a very brief collaboration we soon realized that we wanted to continue what we had started. Ideas have evolved since our early conversations, but one seed remained throughout: that we were setting out to create a dance concert. As we progressed it became clear that there was an energetic journey that interested us both. Very simply one that began stifled and ended in a state of pleasure.  We were interested in the words classical and hardcore. We toyed with the word joy, but quickly understood that “joy” is a haphazard (and fleeting) state to inhabit musically and physically.

Dancehall has grown out of my wish to reconnect the primacy of the dancing body with the psyche and to explore the influences that society and its conventions (religious, political and ideological) has had on our body’s rapport with the world.

The title Dancehall, is a nod to Ireland’s still operational Public Dancehalls Act, which was introduced in 1935 in an attempt to censor and govern Ireland’s social scene out of fear that unsupervised dances coupled with the imported music du jour would lead to sexual immorality and loose morals ["orgies of dissipation, which in the present state of legislation the police are powerless to prevent."].

One of the early influences was Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made me Hardcore, a film of collaged footage of UK dance culture from the northern-soul parties up to the rave scene of the nineties. What struck me was the beauty and virtuosity of the untrained and uninhibited body in an atmosphere driven by music, alongside the sense of community. 

This show is about the essential connection to the Self. It’s about triumphing over logic and reason and body power. It’s around the notions of muting the logic, a tantrum of the subconscious, an homage to and triumph of the body and a fascination with inexplicable unseen forces, both internal and external, which are much greater than us.

Our springboard was the tension between the external world and it’s forces that shape us and our behavior; and our internal desires. I was interested in the dichotomy between obedience and rebellion on a physical level. This led to the eternally fascinating opposition between order and chaos that exists simultaneously within all of us. The former being linked to reason and logic, typically associated with the male versus the earthly impulses of the self, associated with the female. An Apollonian/ Dionysian conflict.  Dancehall is an attempt to present a vision of both of these elements and transformation from one to the other. Order is upheld by rules and conventions, which in the first half of this work is driven by the score in its austerity and minimalism, and represented by the ritualized physical behavior of the dancers. Chaos or disorder is concerned with our carnal and primal nature.

Emma Martin, October 2015