ÔObsceneÕ ballet inspires new work from superb CoisCeim

When David Bolger told his father, at the age of 16, that he wanted to be a professional dancer, his father didn’t bat an eye. It was in the 1980s, when there wasn’t much of a living to be made from professional dance in Ireland, but David’s father didn’t urge his son to follow a more conventional career path.

Instead, he said that the would-be dancer would have to take ballet classes. David didn’t see the need for this initially, but his father informed him that all the great dancers – including Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire – had studied ballet and it was the best possible training.

With that decision, he did his son – and the arts in Ireland – a service, because David, who is now best known as a choreographer, is one of the most important figures in dance in this country, mostly through his work with CoisCeim Dance Company which he co-founded 15 years ago.

His freelance CV is also hugely impressive and includes choreographing a show involving 75,000 people for the opening of the Special Olympics in 2003, as well as working with the English National Opera as director/choreographer on La Traviata. Closer to home he worked with Druid as choreographer for plays from Sive to the acclaimed Synge Cycle.

Now, to mark its 15th anniversary, CoisCeim is back touring the country with a new double bill featuring two dance pieces, As You Are, choreographed by Muirne Bloomer and Faun, choreographed by David Bolger. The two pieces are, according to David, separate but interconnected.

Faun was inspired by the controversial ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912 in Paris for Les Ballet Rousses. L’apres-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of the Faun) flew in the face of accepted ballet practice at the time and caused a scandal. Part of this was because the dancers were performing in bare feet, with many of the movements rejecting the constraints of classical ballet. But it was the ending which really shocked, with newspaper allegations of obscenity, filth and bestiality.

“The last image of the faun pressing on the scarf in a masturbatory gesture almost upstaged what went before, which was the dancing in bare feet,” says David, adding that this work is partly the reason why Nijinsky is regarded as the father of modern dance. Nijinsky set his dance to music written in the 1890s by Debussy entitled Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. That in turn was inspired by an erotic poem, written in 1865 by Stéphane Mallarmé, which broke new ground in its use of symbolism.

“A faun, which has the legs of a goat and the torso of a human, wakes from his afternoon sleep and doesn’t know if he has imagined an encounter with two maidens he has kidnapped,” explains David of the poem’s plot. During a dreamlike monologue the faun discusses his encounters – real or imagined – with those nymphs.

“It’s a beautiful poem and the faun kind of thinks that the relationship isn’t real and the women are untouchable,” says the choreographer.The faun was experiencing an awakening of sorts and that was one reason the piece appealed to David.

Nijinsky’s ballet continued to influence subsequent artists, with Queen’s version of I Want to Break Free featuring Freddie Mercury dressed as Nijinsky portraying a faun. The soundtrack of I Want to Break Free also features in Coisceim’s Faun. David Bolger is a Freddie Mercury fan and feels it links in perfectly with the piece.

But he is also interested to see if contemporary audiences can relate to the ballet which caused such controversy in 1912.

There were no live recordings of the original production, simply a series of 32 photos showing individual movements and these are recreated in Coisceim’s interpretation, but it’s not a reconstruction. “It’s almost like a modern photo shoot,” he says.

With this piece, David also poses a fundamental question: is it possible to shock people any more? That is asked by one of the dancers, and he says, it’s an important question because it challenges us to think about what does shock us in a world where we are being bombarded by images.

While Faun has a contemporary feel, it is also rooted in the past.“I wanted to keep the mythological world of symbols and fauns and ask if we still believe in myths. Irish people are used to myths and folklore and even today there is superstition about things like fairy forts. Myths are still there to teach us things.”

Faun complements the other piece in this show, As You Are. This has been choreographed by CoisCeim regular Muirne Bloomer whose starting point is the notion of individualism and the difficulty of this in a world where we have to conform. She was partly inspired to create this as the mother of a seven-year-old boy.

“She has to say ‘don’t do this’ and ‘do that’ and he questions her and sometimes she has to say ‘because I say so’ and it dawned on her that by doing that, you are forcing imagination and the world of play out of a child. You have to conform to a certain way of living.”

For more, read page 29 of this week's Connacht Tribune.