“DANCE IS not very good at telling stories, unless it is classical ballet, but it is very good for exploring emotion and dance allowed me to go through the emotions experienced of knowing someone who has Alzheimer’s and witnessing what was happening to them.”
This is how Chrysalis Dance Company founder, artistic director, and principal choreographer Judith Sibley describes her new dance show Thought Once Was, a double bill featuring two new dance displays - The Space Where Thought Once Was and Scatenato - in the Black Box Theatre on Friday May 11 at 8pm.
Specifically Judith’s above quote refers to The Space Where Thought Once Was, arguably her most personal show to date in that it is a reaction to and inspired by her father having Alzheimer’s disease.
Starting to dance
Judith and her family are originally from Dublin but they have been living and working in Galway for a number of years now. Dancing has been her life from an extremely young age. Taking note of her daughter’s dancing ability, Judith’s mother sent her to dance and drama classes. By the time Judith was 12 “I knew dance was what I wanted to do”.
“I loved it so much I would be training in my room before I even had to go to class,” Judith tells me during our Monday afternoon interview. “By the time I was 14 I was doing dance five/six days a week. Then mum sent me to dance school in England. This was the days before internet and easy access to information, when you really had to search it out, so I got to go to Elmhurst School of Dance.
“I had left school in Ireland after my Inter Cert but mum was determined I would continue my education so I did my A Levels in English and history. At the time I was ‘Why do I have to do this?’ but now I’m glad I did.”
After this Judith attended the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London, and, upon graduation, she returned to Ireland where she served as a principal in Ballet Ireland and in the Cork City Ballet. “I’ve been a dancer since I was 19,” she says, “and I’ve never stopped working.”
Then in 2004 Judith established Chrysalis Dance Company, to explore her vision of combining ballet with contemporary dance.
“I had worked as a classical ballet dancer and I love ballet, but I felt that if ballet wants to be a progressive art form, it has to develop,” she says. “There is always a place for the classics. At the same time a lot of people can find contemporary dance very daunting. I felt there could be a fusion of the two.”
Dancing through a difficult subject
The Space Where Thought Once Was, the key part show in the Thought Once Was double bill explores the effects on both the sufferer and on his/her family of Alzheimer’s.
“My dad is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” she says. “My dad has always been a huge supporter of me and my dancing. He travelled to Germany with me for auditions and has always been really involved in my career.
“Alzheimer’s is a strange disease to witness. You have to separate yourself from it to a certain extent as if you didn’t you would go mad as it’s very upsetting. And yet it’s also strangely fascinating. My baby daughter is learning words at the same rate my father is losing them so you see the whole circle of life in front of you. Also he can tell me in great detail about things he did when he was 25, very lucidly, and remember whole conversations word for word, but he can’t tell me what he did last week.
“I don’t think anyone has made a ballet about such a subject,” says Judith. “There have been films like The Notebook and theatre pieces. It has been a challenge to take the realism of Alzheimer’s and create a dance, but I felt I have really explored the illness.
“For me dance is not good at telling stories, unless it is classical ballet, but it is very good for exploring emotion and in The Space Where Thought Once Was I go through the emotions experienced of knowing someone who has it and witnessing them.”
So what can audiences expect to see and hear on the night?
“You will see dancers become tunnels or stop dead with others trying go around and through them,” says Judith. “Alzheimer sufferers walk with their weight forward and they will keep going forward until they reach a door and then they will try and get through it.
“I also felt that if it happened to me I would feel like a broken ballerina, hence there will be dancer moving as if she was a broken ballerina. There will another dancer trying to move as if they are in a straitjacket, you will hear laughter which sounds funny at first but it keeps going on and on and you realise it’s not funny at all. It’s been a real challenge but the dancers I work with are amazing. They are very expressive and they know how to act as well as dance.”
The music for The Space Where Thought Once Was is by Jessie Ronneau, a composer and lecturer in contemporary music at Maynooth.
“It’s very post-post-postmodern,” says Judith. “He’s created this very disturbing soundscape and it adds so much to the dancing. There will also be video projections of a rocking chair, clouds, and brain scans but these are left for the audience to interpret.”
However in choreographing the show, did Judith worry that she might be accused of ‘exploiting’ the disease for artistic gain?
“It had occurred to me that I might offend people,” she says. “My brother asked if I could give it a happy ending, but I felt I could not. I do allow the scenario to go to a contented place, where Alzheimer sufferers eventually go. Western Alzheimer’s and The Alzheimer’s Association of Ireland are both very much behind the show and their logos are on the programme.
“Almost everybody knows someone who has, or has had, Alzheimer’s and yet it’s still a disease that is not much talked about. You should not shy away from sensitive subjects and it an attempt to make sense of a disease that makes no sense. I think people will be very moved by what they see and once they see it they will never forget it.”
Go wild
The scanned piece on the night, Scatenato, will be a very different and much less dark affair, being a celebration of wildness and abandon with a hint of eroticism.
“Scatenato is an Italian musical term, meaning wild, unchained, and loose,” says Judith. “And we will be joined on-stage by the ConTempo String Quartet. They are just incredible and bring such high energy.”
For the piece ConTempo will perform an original mix of Shostakovich’s string quartets eight, 10, and 11, and George Crumbs’ ‘Black Angels’ string quartet.
Company dancers Leighton Morrison, Andrea Santato, Joanne Klijn, Amy Lawson and Jane Magan feature in the two works. Both pieces are choreographed by Judith Sibley.
Tickets are available from the Town Hall on www.tht.ie and 091 - 569777. See also www.chrysalisdance.com
