The International Dance Festival Ireland of 2002: ‘the time has come to dance’.⁸⁰¹

Finola Cronin

Mooting the establishment of an International Dance Festival for Ireland in the mid-1990s, Catherine Numes met with less than enthusiastic responses from some members of the dance community in Ireland – from some who may well have been viewed as the major beneficiaries of such an initiative. Numes championed the idea on her return to Ireland after working as artistic director of Newcastle Dance Festival in 1992 and 1994, and her appointment as associate director of Dance Umbrella – London’s renowned festival of contemporary dance founded by Val Bourne (OBE).⁸⁰² Witnessing first-hand the success of Dance Umbrella in promoting contemporary dance in the U.K., Numes understood how dance with its neo-avant garde credentials of experimentation and often radical originality was attracting new audiences, and she determined that a dance festival could serve to build audiences and appreciation of dance in Ireland, just as the ROSC series of exhibitions between 1967 and 1988 had acted to advance the profile of the contemporary visual arts in the country.⁸⁰³

Resistance to the festival came from parties within the dance sector who were conscious of the peripheral status of dance in the arts and cultural landscape of the country, and who were concerned that the festival might deplete their audiences and meagre funding. Dance was marginalised in the mid-1990s. It was not a subject of the national education curriculum, and, as vocational training was not available in the jurisdiction, most Irish dance artists received professional training in conservatories and universities abroad, a factor that perpetuated a certain discontinuity of dance practice in the country. Critically for dance artists, dance was not a recognised named artform in successive Arts Acts of Government, a situation that was not rectified until the Arts Act of 2003.

But for Numes as the Celtic Tiger began to roar, the time seemed right for a festival dedicated to dance. Dance companies from abroad had been presented in Ireland most notably, if sporadically, by the Dublin Theatre Festival since its inception in 1957.⁸⁰⁴ Numes acknowledged however that it was the New Music New Dance Festival and Dance Fest of the late 1980s and early 1990s that laid the ground for a festival of dance. Those festivals had offered opportunities for Irish-based dance artists to create and present their work; however inadequate budgets not only restricted inclusion of international dance artists but affected their longer-term sustainability. Numes’ proposal was altogether different in terms of scale, ambition, costs and potential impact. Her concept was to enhance the artform’s visibility and profile through presentation of international works by key choreographers of the 20^th century in tandem with works from the pool of Irish-based dance artists whose choreographies, in many instances, evidenced precisely their links to international dance practice legacies of invention and inter-disciplinarity.

This essay discusses the context of the inaugural International Dance Festival for Ireland (hereafter IDFI) that took place in Dublin in 2002, and examines how its programme of events was designed to operate as a major intervention in the promotion of contemporary dance in the Irish Republic.

The Body Matters

In shining a light on dancing bodies within the Irish context, Numes’ festival would, in its very first outing, attract considerable attention. Some would argue this was to be expected given scholarly and historical accounts that record a focus on bodies – women’s bodies and specifically women’s bodies dancing – as sites that have attracted somatophobic attitudes in the Republic. Barbara O’Connor argues that dance was appropriated as a marker of Irish identity in the late nineteenth century, while later, ‘ideas of nation and gender were […] intertwined in dance discourses’ as dancing bodies became sites of struggle between ideas of tradition and modernity.⁸⁰⁵ That dance has power to contribute to the transfer and continuity of knowledge is acknowledged by Diana Taylor, who points out that dance contains information on ‘movement patterns and gesture’, and can illuminate ‘culture and tradition, but often in ways not reducible to language’.⁸⁰⁶ This is a viewpoint shared by dance scholar Susan Foster who suggests that dance performance as a choreography of bodies dancing offers information of ‘choices inherited, invented, or selected, about what kinds of bodies are being constructed and what kinds of arguments about these bodies and subjects are being put forth’.⁸⁰⁷ ‘Choreography as this (sic) kind of theorising’ she argues, ‘makes evident the ways in which dance articulates with social aesthetic and political values’ (5).

But, within the Irish context, as Anna McMullan noted in 1997, those values are most prevalently found in language, while non-text-based performances in Irish theatre which rely ‘on corporeal, visual and kinetic expression’, face a challenge of ‘legitimisation’.⁸⁰⁸ Dance’s broad spectrum of expression from pure dance, to dance theatre to conceptual works, can test audience and critical reception similarly, and despite the wide practice of dance in Ireland in settings of recreational and social dance, folk dance, traditional dance and classical ballet, contemporary dance has been challenged in its attempt to secure a place within the public imagination and its capacity to convey and communicate culture and tradition is not readily recognised.⁸⁰⁹

The debate as to how much has changed with regard to attitudes to contemporary dance in Ireland since the 1990s is not a main concern of this essay. Of significance is that ‘legitimisation’ of dance production comes, in the first instance, from the Arts Council of Ireland, who is tasked with qualitative appraisal of the arts and dispersal of government funds. Given the limited access to dance in national education settings as mentioned above, the imprimatur of the Arts Council has been essential for the survival of contemporary dance, and yet the dominant role played by the Arts Council, in not only resourcing dance artists but in driving policy to sustain the artform, has led to almost excessive scrutiny of its dance policies and funding decisions by those affected.

In the context then of the role of the Arts Council in dance development, what did it hope to achieve through its resolution to dedicate 7.45% of all funds allocated for dance in 2001 to the International Dance Festival of Ireland? And could this new initiative be seen as a trustworthy commitment to dance development given the history of the dance sector’s relationship with the Arts Council – its primary funder?

The Arts Council and Dance Policy

In an edition of Irish Theatre Magazine dedicated in part to dance in Ireland and provoked by the first International Dance Festival, choreographer Paul Johnson claimed that Irish dance had ‘suffered at the hands of fickle Arts Councils’.⁸¹⁰ In his overview of Irish-based contemporary dance Johnson claimed that in the 1980s contemporary dance had flourished from grass roots origins and he cited Joan Davis’ Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre (DCDT), the Cork-based Irish National Ballet (INB) founded by Joan Denise Moriarity, and Dublin City Ballet (DCB) established by Anne Courtney, as important supports of the artform’s organic development. This situation was to change following the Arts Council’s commission to Peter Brinson to report on dance and the ensuing report of 1985 The Dancer and the Dance.⁸¹¹ Brinson’s recommendations were clear enough – the costs associated with sustaining INB were too high. DCDT and DCB along with the Dance Council, a resource organisation for dance, were recommended for continued support with reduced funding to be offered to INB. At first, as Johnson reports, the Arts Council followed Brinson’s recommendations but reduction in funding to Dublin City Ballet in 1985 caused it to ceased operation. In 1989 however, in a move that still continues to baffle interested parties, the Arts Council ceased funding Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre and Irish National Ballet, and thereby blunted the professional development and career opportunities of many dance artists.⁸¹²

Arising from this cull, a number of new chamber-sized artist-led companies emerged in the early 1990s. These were founded in the main by dance artists who had worked with the more major companies who had been dissolved. Three of these new companies, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Fiona Quilligan’s Rubato Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Ireland, directed by Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick, were fortunate to receive a guarantee of funding over a three-year cycle in 1994. Two further companies, CoisCéim Dance Company directed by David Bolger, and Adrienne Brown’s New Balance Dance Company were given revenue support in this period. However in 1997, yet another capricious action by the Arts Council undermined confidence in dance policy as Rubato Ballet and New Balance Dance Company had their funding agreements terminated in an action, as Johnson points out, that recalled the cuts of the previous decade.

According to Diana Theodores, former dance critic of the Sunday Tribune, dance in Ireland in the 1990s was in a ‘constant sense of beginning’. ‘[N]ew companies, projects and institutions [were] constantly introduced for my attention only to close down quickly replaced by new ones. There was a constant turnover of dancers in companies as they migrated for more work, came back, then left again’.⁸¹³ But just a few years after Theodores’ assessment of the dance community’s struggles, working conditions and opportunities for dance artists were set to improve somewhat due to positive growth in the Irish economy. In 1997 the Arts Council was spending 2.9% of its budget on dance amounting to IR£569,000. By 2001 that spend had risen to €2,007,000 or 4.2% of the Arts Council’s total budget dispersed to five dance production companies, the educational dance company Daghdha, a youth ballet company, three dance resource organisations, and grants to individuals in the form of Dance Travel Awards, and Professional Dancers Awards. Clearly increased funding for dance was welcome but seasoned observers might have admitted to a certain anxiety with regard to the Arts Council’s articulation of its role in 1999, as one that would change, ‘[…]moving away from being largely a funding body, towards using its resources in a more developmental way’.⁸¹⁴

In 1998, Numes submitted to the Arts Council An International Dance Festival for Ireland?: A Feasibility Study with the stated aim ‘to explore the possibility of developing Irish dance within a global context [and] to assess whether an international dance festival [is] an appropriate and desirable means by which this can take place’.⁸¹⁵ The Study was informed by consultation with ‘representatives of the dance community’, but made clear that ‘the requirements of a feasibility study into an international festival and the requirements of the dance community may not always be compatible’ (3). Numes’ central tenet, to highlight dance as a ‘vibrant and serious art worthy of the highest respect within Irish cultural life’, was, critically, fully endorsed by the Association of Professional Dancers in Ireland, the artist-led dance resource organisation whose members included key dance productions companies and a significant number of professional dance artists (7).

The Study provides valuable insight into the state of dance in Ireland, and in particular to relations between the Arts Council and the dance community in the mid-1990s. The section ‘Current Concerns’ lists a total of seven points; one mentions that the Festival might ‘serve as a smoke screen’ to enable the Arts Council ignore the ‘basic and immediate needs of dance’, while another articulates that the Festival would ‘fall victim to a lack of policy for dance […] with no substantial commitment’ (6). Clearly the Arts Council executive needed to be persuaded that their investment in the festival would constitute increased supports for dance and do this on a national basis. But the charge that ‘the infrastructure for dance in Ireland is not strong enough to support the many possibilities and positive repercussions of an international Festival’ (ibid), reveals the dance community’s mistrust of successive Arts Council dance policies, and puts on record that Numes and some members of the dance community were in no doubt of the sector’s vulnerability.

Numes’ efforts to secure a festival for dance coincided with the Arts Council’s writing of their new Arts Plan. Studying the Arts Plan of 1999-2001 through the lens of the recession in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, its aspirations project a long since exhausted confidence in that organisation’s ability to secure funds for the arts. The Arts Plan’s optimism is reflected in the style of argument for ‘increased resources’ made by the Arts Council to Government (7), and the inclusion of a comparative table that records Ireland’s resources for the arts as amounting to only 0.09% of GDP or IR£12.26 per capita in 1997, a figure that places Ireland second from the bottom of the list of European jurisdictions topped by Sweden’s spend of 0.35% of GDP or IR£62.14 per capita on the arts.⁸¹⁶

The Arts Plan signalled also a new kind of writing about the arts. Led by Arts Council director Patricia Quinn, the notion that it was a ‘moment for radical change’ made much of the upturn in the Irish economy, and the Arts Council was keen, it seems, to associate the arts with business and the economy to appropriate its claim to a share of the globalising Ireland Inc. brand (6). In discussion of the use of the term ‘International’ for example in the Festival’s nomenclature, Numes alludes to the fact that although the title ‘was a bit long-winded it was the result of lengthy deliberations [to bring] more weight and [have] potentially more far-reaching impact’.⁸¹⁷ But for the Arts Council, IDFI might have seemed the model organisation to materialise their key objective to ‘support Irish arts through exposure to international audiences and influences’, after all, just how well dance travelled, had been proven by the Riverdance phenomenon (20).

It is important to note that IDFI was not the only project articulated in the Arts Plan under ‘Dance’. Perhaps most significantly for dance artists, the Arts Council executive declared its intention to progress the case for dance to be included as a named artform in the impending Arts Act (2003). This last, it was considered, would elevate dance in line with other arts, and deem choreographers eligible for nomination to Aosdána, the prestigious artist body reserved for creative artists considered to have made a significant contribution to the arts in Ireland. Another prospect was the rather unusual commitment by the Arts Council to dance artists, to copper fasten (notionally) capital funds to the tune of IR£1million for the construction of a suite of dance studios for professional practice in the capital city. Clearly this raft of initiatives was envisaged as a catalyst to develop dance, nevertheless, an exceptional factor of the establishment of the festival was the articulation as a ‘specific action’ in the Arts Plan to: ‘bring international dance to Irish audiences by continuing research into the feasibility of an international Dance Festival in Ireland’ (35).⁸¹⁸

The IDFI team led by Numes, and which included among others, Val Bourne and Fiach Mac Conghail, proposed the new venture to their potential funders as a ‘partnership’ with the Arts Council (Numes, 2015).⁸¹⁹ The partnership aspect sought arguably, to safeguard the commitment of the funding body for a festival of an artform, the value of which was still under question. The Feasibility Study was rejected initially but following an appeal, the Arts Council finally granted capital funding of IR£150,000 in 2000 for research and development.⁸²⁰ The Steering Committee formalised activities and established a company and board of directors with Numes appointed as Artistic Director. In 2001, IDFI submitted a Revenue Application to fund its first Festival and a grant of IR£433,000 was awarded.⁸²¹ Significantly, the Arts Council signed off on a multi-annual agreement to support three festivals with the concession that, due to Arts Council concerns of audience capacity, the Festival would run on a biennial basis. The application clarified IDFI’s interpretation of contemporary dance as a ‘wide-ranging activity inclusive of many diverse […] activities […] from pure abstract performance to collaborations with other art forms […] and from multi-cultural work to community projects’.⁸²² While under ‘Guiding Principles’ the IDFI’s agreement to take a ‘pro-active role in developing the artform’ is a clear indication of its readiness to take responsibility for developing infrastructure in dance for the benefit of the dance community (IDFI Application for Revenue Funding, (section 4.1.3)).

Classic Works of Contemporary Dance – the programme of 2002

Numes was convinced that the presentation of dance ‘of only the highest quality would help to refine sensibilities of both Irish audiences and dance practitioners’, and clearly the international work was to set standards and attract Irish audiences who needed a ‘kind of “crash-course” in dance’ (Numes, 2015). The programming defined the Festival’s intent as more concerned with ‘quality and substance rather than fashion’ in presentation of tried and tested classic works of contemporary choreographers – including some works that might be considered to be almost beyond criticism (ibid).

In the event, the Festival’s 2002 programme was diverse and eclectic with works of substance clearly in abundance which reflected, for the most part, cutting edge contemporary dance practices. The flagship event of the festival presented four works of the established avant-garde American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, at the Abbey Theatre. These works were indicative of the sophisticated style of Cunningham’s oeuvre and representative of his collaborations with giants of the American visual arts scene such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol and contemporary avant-garde composers John Cage and Morton Feldman.

The central theme of the festival to illuminate the ‘interaction between dance and the visual arts’, revealed the interest of choreographers not only in collaboration with visual artists and composers but in research of innovation of theatrical form, and a concern with shape, space and aesthetic.⁸²³ If the programmers wished to draw attention to dance as not only a time-based theatre art but as an artform that was often practiced conceptually and did not always adhere to linear narrative, Cunningham’s works at the Abbey Theatre were the perfect example of dance liberated from its interpretative function and relieved of the task to represent emotion.

Cunningham’s ground-breaking ideas that dance does not need ‘to do’ anything, or be a vehicle to express or represent emotion, are acknowledged as a nod to ideas of Marcel Duchamp whose ‘spirit’, according to dance writer Roger Copeland, hovers over many […] Cunningham works’.⁸²⁴ Writing of Summerspace, the work from 1959 selected to open the IDFI, Cunningham noted that the ‘principle momentum was a concern for steps that carry one through a space, and not only into it’.⁸²⁵ The work exemplifies the idea of space as neutral, that is, it tests how dance in performance might resist the power of the centre as the primary and most important space onstage, and so the structure of the choreographic composition assigns equal value to all space on stage. Scenography was by Robert Rauschenberg and the design and pattern of the backdrop (a Seurat pointillism effect) was replicated on the dancers’ costumes to give an impression that they were ‘not only in the space […] but of it’ (294).

Biped (1999) was the second work presented on the opening bill and offered a very different aesthetic that introduced Irish audiences to Cunningham’s application of advances in new technologies. Cunningham’s experimentation with the computer animation programme, LifeForms, had evolved from its initial use in the late 1980s as a compositional tool, to becoming a key influence on his movement vocabulary (Copeland, 188). Biped juxtaposes the live and the virtual performer with his/her virtual image ‘motion-captured’ and projected on a scrim positioned downstage stretching the width of the proscenium arch. As Copeland notes ‘the interplay of flesh and image that begins to challenge […] conventional notions of animate and inanimate, interior and exterior… [i]t sometimes looked as if the dances were wearing their skeletons on the outside of their bodies’ (194).

This technically assured and stylish work along with Interscape (2002) and Rainforest (1968) are masterpieces of the contemporary dance canon and they set the tone of the Festival programme where Cunningham’s influence was palpable in the works of next generation choreographers. The influential British multi-disciplinary artist Rosemary Butcher’s work, Scan (2001), designed by Turner nominee visual artist Vong Phaophanit, and which had premiered at London’s Hayward Gallery, was presented in Dublin at the Green on Red Gallery, St. Stephen’s Green. Butcher’s interest in ‘non-technical, ‘minimalist’ and improvisatory’ ideas was ignited by choreographers of the Judson Church Group of New York who were heavily influenced by Cunningham’s ideas but, contrary to him, they eschewed virtuosity in favour of exploring dance’s capacity to include everyday movements in works that were often participatory.⁸²⁶ Butcher’s works were likewise not concerned with virtuosity, but in line with Cunningham’s ideas, she asserted that her work was ‘pure abstract form’ rather than representational (in Jordan, 172). This position placed her in stark contrast to her peers in Britain in the late 1970s and later who wanted their work to ‘relate to [the] social context’ (ibid).

Scan was performed by four dancers. Butcher noted that her impulse for the work was an X ray image of a wedding ring on a finger, an idea she materialised using bands of white light that not only dissected the space but forensically slit the dancers’ images as they moved through it. The Irish Times dance critic wrote that the movement was ‘cold, uncompromising and reeks of isolation’ and judged that Butcher created works not as ‘a theatrical choreographer but as a visual artist’.⁸²⁷ Be that as it may, Butcher’s interest has always been rooted in the body as a site to explore human contact, and isolation as a trope in Scan seemed to make visible the very corporeal remoteness that can exist in human relationships.

Butcher has declared that she likes to think of her work operating as ‘a kinetic sculptural experience’ (172), and the idea of corporeal sculpting seemed connected to the work of visual artist, Austin McQuinn in his installation work Virtuoso performed in Project Arts Centre’s Cube. McQuinn positioned himself in front of film footage of the Irish traditional dancer Louise McDonald who was wearing the 100 medals she has been awarded in dance competitions. McQuinn’s performance of immobility was thus juxtaposed with the swift tempo demands of McDonald’s competitive Irish step dancing. Not only did the work explore ‘the dynamic potential inherent in the collision of these two arts forms’, but served to question relationships between the competitive thrust of Irish dance and its obvious demonstration of technically virtuosic dance (IDFI Programme, 9).

Two Irish works brought dance out of theatre venues. Yoshiko Chuma’s experiential and experimental Reverse Psychology, produced by Daghdha Dance Company, was planned to feature a street promenade performance of thirty performers in period costume accompanied by live music and film, but rain impeded the plan and so the work was performed indoors, while John Scott’s new work for his company Irish Modern Dance Theatre, The Last Supper, focused on the ritual of dining in Dublin’s Trocadero restaurant. Other Irish-based works were cleverly integrated into the Festival. Motion Pictures was a day-long programme of International dance film screenings curated by film maker and IDFI Board member, Alan Gilsenan, and in addition served as a context for the premiere screening of CoisCéim Dance Company’s film Hit and Run. IDFI commissioned also two independent Irish dance artists – Mary Nunan and Cindy Cummings – to present a double-bill at the Cube in Project Arts Centre. Saxophonist Maajnoon Yeheudi with William Monigold accompanied Cummings’ Smoke Rings, while Nunan performed Claim Reclaim with cellist Ferenc Szucs.

Clearly putting Ireland on the map would entail creative programming to entice international presenters and producers to Ireland to attend rarely seen or new works of major choreographers, and it was vital to captialise on their presence in Dublin in order to promote Irish-based work, and enable networking and professional development opportunities emerge. In the spirit of longer-term investment in Irish dance, the Festival offered Liz Roche a choreographic residency under the mentorship of Rosemary Butcher who was appointed Festival Associate Artist. Roche’s initial research would evolve from a solo investigation into a work for six dancers – Resuscitate – which premiered at the Samuel Beckett Theatre during the 2004 Festival.

If a nod to ‘fashion’ was evident in that first Festival it was Scottish choreographer, Michael Clark, known for his Royal Ballet trained virtuosic dancing and his post-punk aesthetic. Clark was billed as the so-called ‘bad boy’ rebel of British dance whose deliberately provocative work and collaborations, with icons of the fashion industry Stevie Stewart of BodyMap and designer Hussein Chalayan, appealed to a whole new generation of dance audiences. In Dublin, the work Rise (2001), the second work in his two-part production Before and After: The Fall was designed by artist Sarah Lucas of the generation ‘Young British Artists’. The Irish Times critic was unimpressed with Rise and its onanistic theme that recalled Nijinsky’s infamous gesture at the end of the ballet, L’Apres Midi d’un Faun (1913) where he rubs a scarf close to his crotch, and he witheringly described the event as ‘all very adolescent’ and ‘about as risqué as a Benny Hill show’.⁸²⁸

Other choreographers selected for that inaugural Festival included the then upcoming Bangladeshi /British choreographer Akram Kahn, and Ballet Freiburg, the German-based company directed by Amanda Miller (long time performer with William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt), and works by Vincent Sekwati Koko Mantsoe and Quintavalla-Stori-Compagnia Abbondanza-Bertoni completed the international element. But Numes could not have predicted that the work entitled Jérôme Bel by French choreographer, Jérôme Bel would be the subject of a court case and become a cause celebre within international dance studies.

Jérôme Bel is a highly conceptual work. Almost the entire 35 minute score of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is hummed by one performer as the work builds on inter-referentiality to Nijinsky’s 1913 work for the Ballet Russes – a work which famously caused riots at the Paris Opera both for its avant-garde complex musical score and its rupture of centuries of ballet tradition in its presentation of simple dance steps that shunned technical virtuosity. In Bel’s work, four of the five performers are naked as Bel questions if ‘it is possible for the dancer’s body to be the degré zéro of dance, free of signification’ – a concept that refers to Roland Barthes’ query as to whether writing can be free of connotation.⁸²⁹ The production’s aim, to present bodies without, or indeed outside their cultural and social contexts, would of course end in failure. What Bel did succeed in doing however, was to question the perception of bodies as ordinary or ‘natural’. The photo advertising the production in the IDFI programme depicts the hirsute hands of a man in the act of pulling his scrotum towards his navel. The disappearance from view of his penis demonstrates how skin pulled or stretched alters bodies to make them unfamiliar, and suggests also a scrutiny of gender’s modality. In materialising the effects of the so-called ‘civilising process’ on Western bodies, Bel probed the sensitivity of both performer and spectator in a choreography of bodies standing, sitting, and humming, and of bodily functions of dribbling and urination, in what the Irish Times dance critic noted was a ‘wonderful and compelling performance’.⁸³⁰

The moment of urination however was to prove provocative for some audience members, and one, Raymond Whitehead, took grave offense and a case against the IDFI. The case before the Circuit Court in 2004 was for breach of contract and negligence because Whitehead claimed that ‘the terms of [said] contract implied that the performance would consist of dance and/or theatre’.⁸³¹ In the event Judge Joe Mathews found in favour of the IDFI but ‘did not make an order on costs’ as he stressed that it “was not an obscenity case” and could only be judged on “very narrow criteria” of contract law’.⁸³²

In his argument to the court, Whitehead defined dance as ‘people moving rhythmically, jumping up and down, usually to music but not always’, (in Holland), and this definition was grist to the mill for dance scholar Andre Lepecki’s polemic on dance’s ontology in his monograph Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. He surmised: ‘in the past decade [sic] some North American and European choreography has indeed engaged in dismantling a certain notion of dance – the notion that ontologically associates dance with “flow and a continuum of movement” and with “people jumping up and down”’.⁸³³ Lepecki’s observations of a shift in dance practices in the 1990s implies that audiences and critics, not only in Ireland but internationally, were in need of a ‘crash course’ in new forms of dance expression. Thus, in line with many other writers on dance, Lepecki added his voice to the idea that dance means something, but the business of articulation and circulation of this complex medium can be challenging.

Inevitably, introducing new audiences to dance, risks exposure of the artform beyond a spectator’s ‘horizon of expectations’, to use terminology of Hans Robert Jauss.⁸³⁴ Jauss’ focus is on literary texts but he unpacks the idea that if something is entirely new to a reader or spectator it is likely to be incomprehensible. In the context of the Dance Festival of 2002, we might question whether some spectators may have found some choreographies simply unfathomable intellectually, most particularly if their expectation had been to become bound up with those performances empathically. More seriously perhaps, the case illustrated the vulnerability of the dance programmer, and it is unfortunate to say the least, that dance’s ontological association with bodies became a target for those who may have been unfamiliar with its broadening expression. But dance, as O’Connor notes, does not merely ‘reflect social order but (re)produces it’ to make evident its ‘capacity for transgressive and rebellious resistance’ and clearly, that dance can threaten normative values and make for uncomfortable experiences in performance contexts, points also to its ability to grasp, hold and indeed question ideas of culture and tradition (14).

The International Dance Festival in its Dublin location enabled contemporary dance be experienced on the larger scale, and made visible how dance can operate as a dynamic and vital kinaesthetic encounter. The building of a dance audience who gather at particular times and in particular places, specific to, and in Dublin, supports also the idea of how theatrical events operate to reveal ‘the interdependency of social and cultural performance within a specific society’ (Taylor, 9). Numes’ programme of the first IDFI demonstrated that choreographers were interested in creative projects where bodies were not only available to express emotion and/or gendered relationships, but were able also to subvert such themes and to interrogate bodies in relation to conceptual and abstract ideas of form, space and shape. The programme cover for the 2002 Festival is from Butcher’s Scan, and depicts a figure floating horizontally – as if in defiance of a dancing body’s fight with the vertical. The simple flipping of the image requires a second glance at something eminently familiar – perhaps a perfect metaphor that encapsulated Numes’ invitation to dance in 2002.

The Festival in 2002 exceeded audience targets – the time had come to dance. In his critical review of the Festival the Irish Times dance critic, Michael Seaver claimed the Festival ‘left an indelible mark’ and he praised its attempt to ‘broaden the palette of dance’,⁸³⁵ while the headline of Seona MacReamoinn’s review in the Sunday Tribune, in reference to the range of dance styles from Indian Kathak to African tribal dance, declared: ‘Dance Festival’s mixed message captivates it audiences’.⁸³⁶ Seaver’s review predicted future challenges for the Festival. His concern about the Festival’s ability to ‘sustain itself and the momentum it [has] generated’ was astute, but most markedly, he noted as ‘puzzling’ the ‘non-engagement by many in the Irish dance community throughout the festival’ and pointed out the benefits that might have been gained if dance artists had ‘actively engaged’ (12). But if the first Festival enjoyed much goodwill from the critics, Seaver’s response to the Festival’s second programme in 2004 indicated a mood shift, and, in relation to the issue of a perceived lack of engagement with the Festival by the Irish dance community, he placed responsibility firmly on the shoulders of the Festival to take action, writing that it was ‘most crucial […] how the festival fits in to the Irish dance scene’.⁸³⁷

The third biennial Festival in 2006 was to be Numes’ final one as Artistic Director. She resigned her position, but not before negotiating funding to programme the Festival on an annual basis. But by 2007, the recession in Ireland had begun. Reductions in funding to dance in Ireland were to have devastating impact and stunt development in the sector once again, so much so, that the dance landscape of 2002 seems, in retrospect, a unique time of opportunity and possibility. The IDFI has survived, and perhaps because of funding cuts to many dance organisations, the Festival (renamed Dublin Dance Festival in 2008) endures, for the time being, a rare pillar of infrastructure in the dance landscape.

This is a previously unpublished essay.

Cross Reference: Liza Fitzpatrick on Fabulous Beast

See Also: Discussions on Dublin Theatre Festival and references to Festivalisation