You trained in Musical Theatre?
Yes and I felt I always had something to strive for in musical theatre. It was always easy to stay entertained, even motivated, because there’s always something to be doing. And there’s a lot more variety in it. So you get to do lots of different styles. So thanks to musical theatre I never got bored with dance.
Now the acting was always difficult and the singing almost always felt impossible. But that meant I was always engaged and always trying to be better at something. There was always something I was trying to get improve at.
You developed in a number of different directions, not just dance?
Yeah, well in that sense I’ve always been a Jack-of-all-Trades. I think that just by existing, I feel like my craft has been developing. Just by living my life, the craft sort of comes to you if you let it.
For example, I do circus and I’ve been hired as a clown several times, and of course I dance and I teach dance as well. Right now I’m in The Vault Artist Studios where I’m surrounded by different sorts of artists. Not just physical theatre artists, not just dancers or singers or people that do stuff live on stage.
I’m surrounded by people who sit and churn out painting after painting, picture after picture, song after song and that has really helped me define who I am as an artist and also accept that you can be lots of things to your artistic practise.
I don’t have to just be a dancer or an artist or a musician. I’m allowed to use it all to make whatever it is that I want to make or create, and those talents, or those skill sets, can be used across the board for anything I feel I want to do.
Do you have any influences?
The people who are around me influence me and that is very important, observing people around me.
As a child I was obsessed with Bob Fosse because I think he was able to make the grotesque attractive and that appealed to me. He mainstreamed that and I think that was very important because it allowed people like me to look at the creepy, the raw, the authentic, and the less refined characters. He made the weird accessible.
After Bob Fosse, my sister is a big influence on me. She ran a company called Pony Dance and I followed them around for years, watching their choreography, learning how they produced their comedy, things like that. That was a major influence on my life and my art.
Mostly I absorb everything which I find around me, so I will be influenced by visual art as much as I will be choreographers or other dancers. I do always seem to come back to musical theatre because it can be anything you want it to be.
That sounds like you have a wide range of general influences?
I think that’s right because I’ve been to lots of galleries and so I can be influenced by work I see in the Tate Modern in London or the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. I’ve been to lots of museums and I’ve seen lots of exhibitions, and paintings and statues in my travels. All of that has influenced me and from there, my work.
If you would like to see more of Emily McDonagh’s work see the links below
