Michael Seaver

This Dancing Life

Irish Modern Dance Theatre / Sara Rudner

I've never walked out of a performance that I liked, but Sara Rudner's This Dancing Life is as much about not being there as being there. She doesn't really want audiences to sit through the four hours of dance ("you'll get the idea after an hour"), so the act of leaving - and returning later, if you like - is as important as content. This truncated viewing might have denied a single edifying insight from the algebra of almost 100 individual dances, but that is exactly what Rudner wants.

Her blessing to come and go (generally well-observed by the audience) is an act of subverting convention that is more effective than site-specific settings in galleries or rooftops. While throwing off theatrical constraints is one thing, using the newly found freedom is another, and Rudner's concept and realisation are in perfect balance. By fiddling with our perception of beginning, middle and conclusion, and highlighting dance as a time-based rather than decorative artform, she focuses on what is happening right now in front of us: dancers are dancing.

It's a simple statement, reinforced with spoken cues and casual benches in the shared wooden-floored performing area, which together lend overtones of an open rehearsal. The gratifying movement that she constructs for the 20 performers from her New York-based company and Irish Modern Dance Theatre is ever-changing in tone, rhythm and physicality, and enriched by the contrapuntal possibilities such a large cast offers. A rattlebag of instruments and appropriate use of silence by musicians William Catanzaro and Jerome Morris add subtle colour, while designer Eric Wurtz's minuscule changes to the natural light are like clouds passing overhead.

A four-hour work such as This Dancing Life could be either stretch Hummer or hair-shirt, but Rudner is neither showing off or being virtuous.

Through her own dancing life she has learned that it is the live dancer, rather than the abstract concept, that is the real source of strength for the artform. Somewhere, right now, a dancer is dancing, and, for her, that makes this world a better place.

August 22, 2007

Irish Modern Dance Theatre
Photo Credit: Chris Nash