OUT OF Time, dancer Colin Dunne's internationally acclaimed solo show, returns to Ireland for a limited run and will play the Town Hall Theatre Galway this Saturday at 8pm.
Best known for his role as lead performer in Riverdance, Dunne brings movement, sound, and image together in a contemporary dance work that creates a provocative dialogue between past and present.
Intimate and playful, Out of Time is both an unsentimental homage to Irish step dance, and a bold investigation of Dunne’s personal and artistic relationship with a tradition that has shaped his life.
Combining dance, sound design, film, and spoken commentary, Out of Time is an innovative and engrossing work. Using live digital sound, Dunne’s footwork is then looped, layered and distorted to create a distinctive sound score as he is accompanied onstage by archival film images of dancers from the 1930s onwards – including one evocative clip of himself as a 10-year-old boy.
Like many other dancers, Dunne first came to prominence in the milieu of Irish dancing contests. He won nine world championships, the first when he was just nine years old. Yet one of the interesting aspects of Out of Time is that it looks askance at that world of virtuoso competitiveness.
“I wouldn’t be the dancer I am without having come through that experience but the emphasis in contests on skill and technique can be something of a straitjacket,” Dunne declares. “The contests tend to values doing things ‘right’ over thinking creatively. You reach a point where you want to forget technique and the whole tendency of being the highest or the fastest and to use your skills to a different purpose.”
Having experienced international success as a solo dancer and then as a lead performer with Riverdance, in 2001 Dunne went to the University of Limerick as artist-in-residence for a year, during which he also completed a Masters in Contemporary Dance.
“The Masters was a practice-based course and it filled in a lot of gaps for me in areas such as creativity, composition, theatricality, and how we use the body to say the things we want to say as dance artists,” Dunne explains.
The course enabled him to study with the likes of Yoshiko Chuma and Yvonne Rainer. Chuma advised him not to stray too far from his Irish dancing roots and one can see that elements Dunne picked up during his time at Limerick have fed into the ideas underpinning Out of Time.
One of the fascinating aspects of the show is the way in which sound designer Fionán de Barra digitally sculpts the noise of Dunne’s own movements into a layered, percussive score. Dunne explains how this evolved.
“In 2004 I started delving into the whole area of sound within dance, I got an Arts Council bursary at the time to facilitate my research. My interest was initially prompted by the frustration I felt from performing in halls with poor acoustics.
“I started off by looking at different ways I could amplify myself using radio mics - tap dancers have often used them for instance. I noticed that the mics also pick up the sounds of your clothes rustling or shoe-leather squeaking and at first we were trying to find ways of eradicating that but then, almost by accident, we hit upon the idea of actually incorporating and highlighting those elements as part of the overall soundscape.
“The engineer I was working with at the time was able to create this really spacey sound using them and when I hooked up with Fionan de Barra for this show he was able to really go with that idea. As well as being a sound engineer Fionan is also a great musician in his own right and he totally got where I was coming from in striving for particular sound effects for the show.”
Dunne also comments on his use of archive film footage within the show: “I had done a lot of my work in more contemporary areas of dance then I came across this archive footage of Irish dancers in Come West Along The Road and I found it very interesting, especially in noting the ways attitudes within dance had shifted. Maybe part of the attraction was that the dancers on film were older and I am getting older myself!”
Another interesting feature of Out of Time which reviewers have commented upon is that it is often very funny.
“The humour element in the show wasn’t calculated in advance,” Dunne reveals. “Certain things just felt kind of eccentric and playful as we were working on the show. I have to give a lot of credit for the show’s humour to my director, Sinead Rushe, she was key in bringing all that together, it’s like she gave me the permission to be more playful in the show and to follow that strand.
“It’s not something you get much in dance productions, they tend to be more serious, but Sinead encouraged me to be even more playful with the dance than I already had been and it was great fun doing that.”
Since its premiere in 2008, Out of Time has been wowing critics and audiences alike at home and overseas. It now returns from an extensive tour of the United States and Brazil, and Galway audiences are in for a treat when it graces the Town Hall stage.
Out of Time is performed by Colin Dunne and directed by Sinéad Rushe. The work features sound design by Fionán de Barra, film design by Sean Westgate, lighting design by Colin Grenfell, costumes by Joan O’Clery, recordings from Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill and additional new music by composer Ian McDonnell.
Tickets are €16/13 and there is a special student rate of €11. Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
