Dublin Dance Festival celebrates 21st year
The 'Luail' dance company will present its debut show called 'Chora' in Dublin before hitting the road to bring the show to audiences across the country.
"The countdown is on for our very first performance and we are in a whirl of rehearsals," artistic director Liz Roche said as last minute preparations took place in Dance House on Foley Street in the heart of Dublin city centre.
Ms Roche went on to explain that "Luail is a national and all-island dance company that is supported by the Arts Council".
"It's the first company of this nature in many, many years in Ireland, and our mission is for dance to be celebrated across the island," she said.
Ms Roche explained that after many years in the build up to the launch of the company, they are very enthusiastic about the opportunity now "to increase visibility for dance for everybody".
Confirmation of Luail's plans have been welcomed across the dance communities here.
Professional dancers from Ireland said they have to travel abroad for their training and they assume that their long term careers will be spent on the road, away from home due to the shortage of work on stages here.
Part of the significance of Luail is that it can now offer dancers, choreographers and the wider creative teams security and stability in a traditionally unpredictable career.
"The possibility of having full-time employment here, which is something I didn't think was possible now is great."
A contract to dance full-time on home stages is a welcome step forward for creative talent.
For dancer and newly recruited member of the Luail company, Rosie Stebbing, this first production is significant.
She says that "Luail for me and I think for loads of dancers in Ireland, it's like a really landmark thing, because we haven't had a full-time dance company in Ireland.
"The possibility of having full-time employment here, which is something I didn't think was possible now is great."
She adds that she had to travel to Europe to train and work and she is delighted to be able to be home and dancing full-time here now.
Chora has been co-created by the acclaimed choreographers Guy Nader and Maria Campos and it will be first performed at the Bord Gáis Energy theatre on Tuesday night before heading out to stages nationwide.
Mr Nader supports the roll out of a national dance company.
He said: "We are workers so that stability is very important, not only economically but also it allows you to be stable emotionally and I think that is very important too."
Luail is the launch event for the dance festival and the buzz across Dublin dance communities is building.
The programme will host events from the 13th to the 25 May across a number of Dublin City venues and some of the highlights include Oona Doherty's return with 'Specky Clark', at The Abbey.
This acclaimed show blends fiction and biography, where a young boy dances as if in a Francis Bacon painting.
Somnole at the Project with Boris Charmatz is described as a dreamlike yet powerfully physical solo and Mosh from Rachel Ní Bhraonáin will be staged in the Space upstairs at the Project too and this show features loud music and smoke machines so be prepared.
Back at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre meanwhile, there will be welcome return for Matthew Bourne's ground-breaking all-male version of Swan Lake.
For artistic director Jazmin Elodi, the festival is the culmination of a year's work, as she travels internationally inviting the best of dance to Dublin.
"People should come to this year's festival because we are celebrating 21 editions this year of the festival," she said.
"We are full of amazing artists and performances coming from Nigeria, France, they're coming from the UK, and of course we have our Irish creative talent too at the heart of all this."
The 21st Dublin Dance festival runs from Tuesday until 25 May.
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I could no longer sleep upstairs in our bed' Opens in new window ] Her grief was also channelled into two superb short stories, The Coast of Wales and New Zealand Flax, commissioned by Sinead Gleeson and Belinda McKeon respectively for anthologies. 'I couldn't write about anything else. That was the only thing I was thinking about. They are examples of stories I would not have written if I hadn't been invited to.' Ní Dhuibhne has had two great influences in her writing life, Canadian Alice Munro and Irish feminist and LGBTQ+ activist Ailbhe Smyth. Back in the 1980s, soon after she had married and had two children, Ní Dhuibhne joined a women's studies forum that Smyth had set up in UCD. 'She opened my eyes to cultural feminism, the facts of literary history, that there weren't as many women writers as there should be. I had been blind to the facts. I did English at UCD without realising we only read three women (Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte and Jane Austen) in three years. It was consciousness raising. 'I could have let writing go but it became more than a matter of self-expression or personal ambition. It seemed I was now part of a movement of women writers of Ireland. It took off and now we have gender equality in fiction. Women are no longer ignored. There is no way you could have a syllabus these days that excluded women.' Munro, the late Canadian author, 'showed me a way of writing about the past and connecting it to the present' through her stories about her ancestors. 'It definitely influenced Blood and Water. Before that, my stories were really corny, probably because I wasn't linking past and present, just taking my father's anecdotes and trying to transform them into literary stories.' Munro's mesmerising, intimate style pulled her right into the story and her protagonists' unpretentious lives. 'It seemed artless, though obviously was not at all. I loved her luminosity the way she handles time, the way her stories spread out and are not tight little stories focused on one thing. I learned a lot about composition from her.' A wry, dry humour is another of the laureate's trademarks. The Literary Lunch, a satire on self-serving members of an arts organisation dining for Ireland, is her most popular story. The Arts Council must have a sense of humour too. 'Perhaps they haven't read it,' she laughs. 'I know everyone thinks it is based on the Arts Council but it's not at all. It was inspired by another committee.' As well as the late English comic writer David Lodge and Samuel Beckett's bleakly comic novels, she was weaned on an Inter Cert anthology featuring Somerset Maugham and Saki. Finally, why should people read fiction? 'It's hard to answer that without sounding trite,' she says, 'but it is the best way of getting inside the head and heart and personality of other people, total empathy. I think that is its trump card in art. It's so entertaining, you're entering into the lives of other people. In fiction there is an intimacy of contact with humanity, it's psychologically insightful, it teaches you something.' Éilís Ní Dhuibhne will be in conversation with Niall MacMonagle at a free public event in the National Library, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 16th at 7pm.
