Dance and drama fuse to explore legacy of war

Soldier Still, an acclaimed show that explores the impact of war on people’s lives, will be performed at the city’s Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday next, November 6. The work of Junk Ensemble, one of Ireland’s leading dance-theatre groups, it explores the awful legacy of war, based on a series of interviews with current and former soldiers from the Irish Defence Forces, the British Army, and civilians affected by the Bosnian war. The soldiers who shared their stories have been deployed in places from Afghanistan to the Falklands.

Blending movement, text, music and real stories, Soldier Still was first performed at the Dublin Fringe Festival last year, receiving a four-star review from the Irish Times, and went on to play at Belfast International Arts Festival.  It features dancers Miguel do Vale, Lucia Kickham, Julie Koenig and Stephen Moynihan alongside retired Irish Army captain Tom Clonan, whose revelations about bullying and sexual harassment in the Irish Defence Forces led to government action that changed the culture of the Irish army.

“We’re bringing it back a year later and it feels just as pertinent as ever,” says dancer and choreographer Megan Kennedy, who with her twin sister and co-artistic director, Jessica, founded Junk Ensemble in the early 2000s.

The awareness of how war affects soldiers has increased over the decades as conflict has become ever more militarised and deadly.

World War I, with its trench warfare, poison gas and canon shells, marked the dawn of modern warfare and destroyed lives, but at the time, there was no awareness that a condition known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder existed.

The affected soldiers who were described as ‘shell-shocked’, were treated briefly by doctors and sent back out to the battlefields as cannon fodder; their underlying condition untreated.

“They had tics and movements they had that they couldn’t shake off, due to what they had experienced,” says Megan. The stories of these soldiers, who had witnessed such terrible things and realised they no longer fitted in, has informed some of the movement in the show, which explores how trauma “effects itself in a person’s body through movement”, she adds.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and  county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.