This year’s Dublin Dance Festival is the first under the direction of Benjamin Perchet but it continues in the tradition of previous editions of the festival in that its programme will be bold and rich with international talent alongside the work of Irish choreographers, dancers and artists.
Operating tangentially to the festival, Dublin-based arts magazine DRAFF will publish their third print edition and hang a festival in Culture Box in Temple Bar that investigates the processes of some of the performers at Dublin Dance Festival. DRAFF’s modus operandi is to collaborate with artists – theatre-makers and dance-makers particularly – to produce both work that, whether printed in a magazine or hung in an exhibition, blurs the line between documentation and being separate artwork in and of itself.
Run by Rachel Donnelly, Liv O’Donoghue and José Miguel Jiménez, each with their own background in theatre and dance, DRAFF is fascinated with what goes on beneath the surface of performance, the unofficial version of the creation myth, the rough drafts and discarded ideas, the unintentional mistakes that become creative breakthroughs.
“At the start there were the two main engines or ideas,” explains Jiménez. “It was this idea we had, about how as artists we were quite often disappointed in the avenues we had to communicate our work, in interviews. You know, when you are making a show or have a performance and you have a phone call or a radio interview or even a piece in a magazine or a newspaper, the fact that you’re faced with this set, standard questionnaire, we always had this feeling afterwards like ‘I’m such an idiot, I didn’t say anything important!’ And that was a thing that happened again and again, so we started to think about creating an avenue of communication that was much more open to whatever artists wanted to use to communicate their work.”
“And the other thing was the idea of process, the idea that shows are usually 10% of all the things that you generated during a process. So in a way it was like, how interesting is all that stuff that is left behind. That’s what ‘draff’ means actually – offcuts.”
With connections throughout the Irish dance and theatre scenes, the DRAFF team launched an online pilot around the 2014 edition of the Fringe Festival and staged an exhibition in 5 Dame Lane that coincided with last year’s Dance Festival, but José insists, “The dream was always a print magazine, to make an object of it.” Their first print edition was published last year ahead of the Theatre and Fringe festivals, and their third coincides with the arrival of Dance Festival. In preparation for this José travelled to Amsterdam, Wuppertal and Athens to document the creative processes of Fernando Belfiore, Cristiana Morganti and Euripides Laskaridis respectively, three of the high-profile international names visiting Dublin next month.
Originally with a background in theatre, Jiménez has found himself working more and more in film and video in recent years. “Now I’m almost exclusively working with video and film. It started purely as a documentation activity really, you know. Basically: shoot the performance, give me a good version of it and give me a promo made from it. But then it started to move more into creative stuff. Now it’s creative, but still in the vein of a documentary. I read some interview with a documentary maker and they said, there are two kinds of documentary makers: the ones who harvest and the ones who hunt. The ones where you prepare and then film the result, and the other ones who just go out with the camera and hunt whatever they can find. I think I like the second one.”
There is of course a reason that much of the creative process remains hidden from view by artists. What is for public consumption is the artwork itself, and their road to the finished version is likely to be full of intimate details that they might not be ready let the audience consume. “One thing that happens is that when you communicate the idea for the first time, the artist is like ‘OK, no problem’ and they send on their press pack,” Jiménez explains, “you know with all the production images and the official copy for the show. And this is exactly what we don’t want.”
The documentation process is about trust and José believes that the mode of communication is central to establishing that. “One thing we learned is that we need to have a Skype conversation with the person and you get a feel of how they are and how they move. Once you break the formality of the first email, and have a face-to-face conversation, [the communication] becomes much better. We do get sometimes a very curated version but it depends on the artist as well. Surprisingly enough, you would think that the more famous or the bigger artists would be more careful about [how it is presented] but some of them are and some of them totally get it, like here’s my ‘dirty underwear’ almost. But in the conversation we start to break down that thing. If what happens in the first instance is that we get something that is too curated, we say, ‘Well, this is nice, but these parts are good – what about this? What’s the story behind this particular corner of the curated thing?’ On the other hand, sometimes if it’s too like a scrapbook, or a bank of really shitty images – which we do ask for – we might say, ‘OK, the idea is cool but the quality is too low, so think about print, and your page is your page in the magazine.’”
Even better than a Skype conversation, of course, is personal contact. “The next step on from that is that we go and meet them, so last week I was in Athens and then the week before that I was in Amsterdam and Wuppertal, meeting artists, going to their houses, going to their rehearsal rooms, asking ‘What about this? What about that thing?” I was filming all of that, and sort of interviewing them. But the idea is not to generate interviews, but a journal, or a portrait, hopefully more visual than verbal.”
José’s first visit took him to see Fernando Belfiore, a Brazilian choreographer based in Amsterdam, whose solo dance piece that will be performed at the festival that has the unpronounceable title AL13FB<3. [Project Arts Centre, Wednesday 18th May] He spent the day poking around rehearsals as the show was rehearsed and adapted to fit the gallery space he was using that day. “The cool thing for me about these trips for me has been to see very different approaches to what you could call the ‘same’ thing. Obviously, it’s not quite the same thing. It’s not surprising in a way, that different artists have different cosmologies, if you want, but it was really cool to see it in practice.”
“Fernando’s thing is about objects. His substance is almost about the ‘will’ of objects, and how the objects interact, and almost have a personality and should be considered as such; our reliance on machinery and extensions of our body – telephones and computers – it’s not only in one direction, but it’s mutual. Dependency on machines, the relationship with machines, loving machines – he’s got this thing about objects which is also very present in the solo which he’s bring to Dublin.”
Speaking with Beliore’s set designer, José discovered those themes extended into the set used for the piece. “For instance, one of the elements of the solo piece that is coming to Dublin is that the whole space looks like a rainbow, so I asked him what is that, where did that idea come from. And it’s the colour picker from Photoshop, because every image we have today is photoshopped, is processed – I’m not criticising that, that’s the way it is – and that for me is a really clear example of the heart of the work. This idea of the synthetic or the machine-made is already part of the reality.”
From Amsterdam, Jiménez travelled to Wuppertal, near Düsseldorf in western Germany, and home to Tanztheatre Wuppertal, directed by one of the icons of contemporary dance, Pina Bausch, until her death in 2009. Bausch’s long-standing soloist Cristiana Morganti is performing a solo piece that she has choreographed at Dublin Dance Festival entitled Jessica and Me. [Project Arts Centre, Friday 20th & Saturday 21st May] “It’s somehow the first piece she has ever choreographed. I went to her house and we talked about her process and obviously her history came up and it’s very important because one of the main elements of this piece is the idea of freeing yourself from a huge master. She worked with Pina Bausch for 20 years and that was all she knew. So when Pina Bausch died, Cristiana was like, ‘I don’t know what my taste is, I don’t know what my vision is, I don’t know what it is that I do.’ So this solo is the first expression of her total autonomy as an artist, the first creative output that is fully responding to her own sensibility. And part of the piece is that she’s not that young any more and how she spends more time warming up than dancing in the show. So the piece is about that, about outputting this first creative thing at this age when she’s not at her full ability.”
The last DRAFF expedition took Jiménez to Athens to visit Greek absurdist Euripides Laskaridis who tiptoes back and forth across the imaginary lines dividing theatre, dance and performance art. At the festival, he performs his work Relic [Project Arts Centre. Thursday 26th to Saturday 28th May] with Osmosis Performing Arts Company. “It’s another different approach,” José says. “He’s completely about building from the outside. I went to one of his rehearsals and visited his studio when he was at the very start of a new piece and saw how they were playing. The way he approaches it is that they all wear costumes and headpieces and make-up and high-heels. The core of his work is ridicule and transformation. He makes these ridiculous characters and transforms himself completely and looks at himself in the mirror and imagines how this character could sound or move. For Relic, the piece he’s bringing to the festival, for instance, he’s completely transformed inside this kind of fat suit, with a stocking covering him so you can’t see his face, so it’s all about transformation, and physical transformation.”
“I think the best way to experience any artwork is just to be in front of it,” says José nonetheless, but with a medium like dance, where the formats are so often heavily abstracted and the processes can be obscured or completely invisible – especially to those without any training in the medium – DRAFF offers something both useful and unusual. Rather than an explanation, it’s a companion for the wandering and insightful mind.
DRAFF’s picks for the Dublin Dance Festival
Euripides Laskaridis & Osmosis Performing Arts Company // Relic
wanting to know what it’s like to dance in the body of a fat woman // working from the outside in // transformation // acceptance of the other
Thu 26 – Sat 26 May | Project Arts Centre (Cube) | 7pm, €15 | Tickets
Oona Doherty // Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise
a weightless milky future // a bright white limbo // collective pain carried in the collective body
double bill | Fri 20 & Sat 21 May | DanceHouse | 8pm, €22 | Tickets
Maria Nilsson Waller // merry.go.round
loops and orbits // groove, proximity, timing // the big romantic myth // romantic superheroes, marvel universe
double bill | Fri 20 & Sat 21 May | DanceHouse | 8pm, €22 | Tickets
Fernando Belfiore // AL13FB<3
alchemic constellations of elements // Shamanic interventions // mundanity and profanity and pop // our particular relationship with objects
Wed 18 May | Projects Arts Centre (Upstairs) | 8pm, €22 | Tickets
Patricia Apergi & Aerites Dance Company // Planites
mapping journeys by the how and the what, not the why // inhospitable streets // global trash, human garbage // migration, migration, migration
Tue 17 – Thu 19 May | Samuel Beckett Theatre | 7.30pm, €25 | Tickets
Cristiana Morganti // Jessica and Me
Wuppertal // two voices, one head // Pina Bausch // outdated tape recorders // imaginary childhood friends // high heels from a London transvestite shop
Fri 20 & Sat 21 May | Project Arts Centre (Upstairs) | 8pm, €22 | Tickets
The Dublin Dance Festival runs from Tuesday 17th to Sunday 28th May at a variety of venues across the city. The full line-up is available at dublindancefestival.ie. The third issue of DRAFF is available now for free around the city. Their new exhibition takes place between Tuesday 3rd and Sunday 28th May in Culture Box, 12 Essex Street East, Temple Bar.
Words: Ian Lamont
