The Monthly interviews dance practitioner Dylan Quinn – Part 1 – I always enjoyed the energy of dance

Any early memories of being attracted to dance?

I was always attracted to the physicality of it, the energy of dance. I used to watch the old musicals, “Singing in the Rain”, “West Side Story” , Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I would see them on TV and I really enjoyed watching them. I thought they were exciting and interesting to watch.

I never wanted to do that type of performance, that kind of style or genre, but I did like it. It didn’t matter that I was very young, or that maybe you would have thought that I couldn’t relate to it. I just liked those films.

Do you go on from enjoying those films to actually dancing?

When I was in Secondary School I started up a boys dance group. We danced to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and “Man in the Mirror” and we had curtains on a stage and a trampoline behind them and we bounced on the trampoline, somersaulted through the curtains and danced to those songs. I created the routine, I convinced the guys to do it, and it was completely unheard of in the school that I was going to. A hard knocks, secondary, Catholic school, in a working class area in Enniskillen. Again I really enjoyed that.

We would have little discos in the high school, and other discos elsewhere and again I just enjoyed dancing. I enjoyed the movement of dance. Actually I can say that one observation I made was that I saw a lot of boys who would have liked to dance, and some who wanted to do it, but they just couldn’t make themselves dance, or it just didn’t seem like the right thing to do. I think we still restrict that in our society. The desire is there but it is the question of boys, in particular, allowing themselves to dance.

Did you get support at home?

Everybody thought I was going down the drama route, because I was doing a lot of that, and when you would go to the Feis I would do very well there, so drama seemed to be what I was going to do.

There was always a hint of the contemporary in there, a hint of wanting something alternative and different, and as soon as Mags Byrne set up a youth dance group in the Ardhowen Theatre in Enniskillen, I got involved with that.

The story tends to go that I fancied one of the girls in the dance group and that is why I went along, but I think I was tricking myself because there was something within me that really wanted to do it and it was something I was really interested in.

Now Mags came, a couple of years later, with a Prospectus for, what was new then, a The Northern School of Contemporary Dance. I could see on the cover, boys dancing the Troy Games, a famous dance piece, which that Richard Cohen Robert North had created with the London Contemporary Dance School Theatre years before. It was the kind of work lots of [dance] schools would have taken on as part of their repertoire.

I saw the picture on the cover, it was mainly black guys and a white guy, the Northern School of Contemporary Dance was based in a predominantly Afro Caribbean area in Leeds, the person who was running the school at that time was attracting young black working class boys into dance, and I saw the photograph and thought this is what I want to do. It just looked fantastic.

Now at home I don’t think there was any question that I was going to do something in the performing arts, I wasn’t really academically gifted and I think I was a kinesthetic learner in that I learned learnt by doing things.

My father played guitar just at home really, so there was a musical element there, but neither my mother nor my father questioned what I wanted to do. They were supportive in a way that they never questioned what it was I was going to do.

What about school?

Brian Gallagher was the Principal of St Joseph’s Secondary School and he had taken over the school with the mission of straightening the school out. It was considered a bit of a rough school. That’s my memory of it [anyway] and that was what he was there to do and coincidentally, he was a supporter of the arts.

He did say to me that I walked a very fine line, doing just enough to stay out of trouble, and enough not to get questioned. I was always doing the dance stuff, and I was fortunate enough to be in a year, where people might not have been academically fantastic but we were very good at representing the school. The Principal used to say that he could send this year group out anywhere and they would represent the school brilliantly.

St Joseph’s Secondary School

Now because he allowed the arts to happen in the school, there was value put on it, it was considered a valuable activity, and so when I did that, it felt to me that there might be a career potential in what I was doing. Not that you could actually do it, but that there might be a chance that you could do it.

And this was right through the school. Moira Buckley who was the music teacher, Aidan Kennedy who taught Literature English and Drama supported that approach, Joe Peake did Irish Dancing with us, so there lots of support at school.

It is one of the things I think about Northern Ireland is that there is not anywhere near enough support for the arts, particularly in schools, but and if you compare here to the south or the UK GB we are lagging [well] behind. However, I certainly felt support at my school and that I had the backing of the staff and the Principal.

To see more of Dylan Quinn’s work see the following ink – www.dylanquinndance.com/

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