COISCÉIM Dance Theatre grace the Town Hall next week with their latest acclaimed production Touch Me, for one night only, St Valentine’s Day, Tuesday February 14.
Choreographed and directed by David Bolger, Touch Me features six dancers and a new music score, composed and performed live by saxophonist Kenneth Edge.
The show was conceived as a companion piece to CoisCéim’s 1995 production Reel Luck which looked at Ireland on the cusp of the Celtic Tiger. Touch Me reflects on Ireland today and the transformation from boom to bust.
Set amid the ruins of a boarded-up house, from this lonely landscape David Bolger rakes through the spoils of an unprecedented era to ask what are the new symbols of fortune, what makes us happy now in order to discover a new beauty in the promise of the future.
Over an afternoon phone call from CoisCéim’s offices, Bolger chatted about the new work and its relation to that earlier show, Reel Luck.
“In Reel Luck I was questioning what we might gain and lose in our progression into the Celtic Tiger,” he begins. “I started off with de Valera’s famous ‘ideal Ireland’ speech. It was a time when Riverdance was starting and there was a confidence around and a kind of sexiness about being Irish.
“Over the last two years with the end of the Celtic Tiger, I was curious about going back to the piece and looking at it now that things had drastically changed. So I compiled a list of 10 questions, got myself a recorder, and talked to people of all different ages and backgrounds about how they were feeling. It’s like the two shows bookend a particular period in Irish history.”
That de Valera speech features in both shows and Bolger reflects on its modern resonance.
“In 1995, we’d gone so far away from de Valera’s vision of Ireland as a ‘home of a people who only valued material wealth as a basis of right living’. When I looked at the speech back then I thought it was ridiculous,” says Bolger.
“I was almost laughing at its mentions of ‘contests of athletic youths and laughter of happy maidens’ that whole terminology seemed to be so far away from where we were at but when I went back to the piece this time there were certain sentiments in it where I felt ‘Yes, actually, we did lose our way.’
“We weren’t happy with material wealth only as a basis of right living, we wanted more, we wanted the house in the south of France and the two cars, and so on, but it wasn’t making us any happier and ultimately has ended up making us all unhappy.”
Bolger expands on how his recorded interviews fed into the creation of Touch Me.
“I wanted to see how people were and choreographically respond to it and to examine what it is we have lost and what we might have gained as well,” he says. “One of the things I came across was a sense of community and that things that weren’t of monetary value became important.
“One of the questions I asked people, for example, was ‘What makes you happy?’ and the typical answers I got were ‘When my family comes to visit’, ‘When my daughter calls me’, ‘Seeing my kids and grandkids happy’, there were so many things that were just about normal everyday sense of family community and I found that interesting.
“I started to build the piece on that. That sense of community really came back to me and that sense of our history and, for want of a better word, that sense of a spirituality of a nation and a nation that feels very broken at the moment. Part of the healing of that would be by supporting each other and ourselves.
“When I was listening back to all the interviews some of them were so good I started to use certain excerpts in the show just to layer the piece more and give this idea of different voices giving an idea of what people were feeling.”
As with Reel Luck, Touch Me’s score is composed by Kenneth Edge, who also plays live in the show
“Ken is almost like the pied piper or a musician who is able to breathe life into the saxophone to draw the dancers into this room,” Bolger observes. “There is a piano score as well as the sax. The way we thought about it is that the piano is being played in this large house but you just hear it up the hall so it’s quite haunting.
“Ken is also playing on a multi-layered track; at one point there are seven different parts happening and he plays all of them, six recorded and one live so you’re getting the same phrasing, the same breath, and it’s a really powerful sound.”
Tickets €18/16 and are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
