What kind of ideas do you investigate in your work?
I call myself a Dance Theatre Maker because I like working with narrative. I like working with story. That doesn’t mean I am working from text. This also means that I can be quite divisive with the material I bring into a space.
A good example of my work is the piece called The Gate House which is inspired by my grandfather’s life long career working at Guinness in Belfast. From being one of the first Catholic men to work for Guinness, to being burnt out of his house with my mother and his family, and having Guinness lift him out of Belfast and taking the family to Omagh. It is quite a big Belfast story and lots of my works are inspired by Belfast stories, Northern Irish stories, and that can be anything from folklore to my family history.
It is quite a wide subject area, but I really like to take something which has grit to it, and that is where my process begins.
How is your work divisive?
The Gate House was performed in St Anne’s Cathedral because of the religious element to the work and the only set we had was 7 chairs and 7 half pints of Guinness. That represented the 7 people in the household, my grandparents and the five children.
All very divisive choices, sort of stenographer choices, in that when you meet a stenographer who will design your set or your costume, they will pull on threads from a traditional story, and that is what I do as a choreographer. I give myself a narrative and pull on the threads of that narrative.
You have to be much more illustrative rather than literal with dance, because when you are working in the theatre you can walk on stage and say, “here is my brother” but you can’t do that with dance. Everything that you do is part of world building and character building and playing within the cortex of the narrative you have produced.
In the Gate House it is our job as a company to allow the audience to connect with The Troubles narrative at the cortex of the work.
Does the administrative work get in the way of you coming up with work and building an audience for that work?
It is just part of the process. The best piece of advice I would give any young choreographer wanting to produce work in Northern Ireland is that the art must come first, but you have to be able to work as a producer.
You have to be able to write a budget, you have to be able to understand safeguarding, have to be able to write policy, have to be able to understand what it is you need to do to get yourself into a room. Now once you are in the room you can take your producer’s hat off and get to work on the art.
It is really hard to write an application for funding because there are so many criteria, so many guidelines that funders require you to meet. Even if the funders are inspired by you, as an individual, they need that application to be written in a certain way and to meet certain standards.
I understood that side of things pretty quickly because I realised that if I was just a choreographer, I wasn’t going to get anywhere.
We are 6 months in to working on a charity application, we want to register as a charity, and we have had to work on getting a bank account, establishing a board, making sure we meet the criteria, which all takes a long time and you have to be prepared to work hard at that side of building a company.
It is worth noting that it is very different in England and in Ireland.
Is there a balance to be struck between administration and the art?
I don’t think there is a balance which is easily achieved, and if there is it is constantly changing.
I asked Akram Khan how did you manage your career and your work, and I was told “be ambitious, be bold and find a way to make a hole in the industry so that the industry will support you rather than you constantly asking for support when many people just don’t understand what it is you are trying to do. They might not even see the value in what you are doing. You just have to find a way to do it.”
When I asked him how he balanced risk with finding a way to pay your dancers, he said that he was very lucky in that someone sold their house and gave him £100,000 to make his first work.
That is a considerable piece of luck?
Absolutely, and Northern Ireland is never going to have that level of philanthropy. And the commercial arts is never going to have that kind of scope here because Northern Ireland is too small to offer large returns on financial investments. But it is possible to work on changing the landscape so that many kinds of investment can be made. We need to look at investment beyond just money and financing.
To follow up on the work of Michael McEvoy see the link below
