Director and Choreographer: Laura Murphy
As part of Dublin’s Dance Festival 2024, The Irish Film Institute presents the premiere of Laura Murphy’s compilation of short films portraying 8 “fierce” women born to dance.A mesmerising collaboration, each individual and diverse segment expounds uniquely and distinctly.
In a veritable dance of expostulation and reply, a vertical black line on a white background responds animatedly to Kathleen O’Malley’s voiceover. It expands, bends, swirls and sways as she describes wanting “to bust out” of her body in “a hulk moment”. For her, “improvisation is almost like meditation – outside, in”.
We watch Alicia Christofi Walsh as she runs through mountains. In the cadence of spoken word she says she is “drawn to the challenge, the dare” and that despite the muscles of her feet cramping, it “tells you that you’ve worked hard”. As Walshe swims in a Wicklow lake, horizontal black lines delineate the screen into three shifting sections of black and white and colour. She is “breathing and moving, immersed in sensation”.
Dance is in the “marrow of the bones” of Joan Davis, where “her blood is made”. Animated cells cavort, extend and contract on the screen as she regales us with the story of how, feeling very sad at their loss, she “made a choker” with her adult teeth. Davis is a hoot when she admits she thought it looked stunning.
Angie Smalis is depicted in the third person, from the perspective of a group of young dancers. “She is an artist”. “She dances contemporary”. “She teaches”. “She helps other people become dancers”. “Ever since she was little she wanted to become a dancer”. We listen to the homage while enjoying more of Early’s captivating magic on the screen.
Filmed in black and white, Finola Cronin gently sways and bends by a window in a studio. Her arms open, lifting and elongating gracefully. In her youth she moved to London and never thought about anything other than dance. “It was obsessive”. Then, in her thirties, she fell pregnant and her life changed. Her dance then was dancing with her daughter.
We only ever see Lisa Cliffe’s bare calves and mud encrusted feet as she walks through the long and short grass on her land in the rain. The artistic approach she chooses is “attached to farming and homemaking”. For her “dance is just another form of living”. It comes to Cliffe “instinctively” through her farming family and the generations that came before.
Early portrays Jean Butler in robotic form. The animated figure transmutes into Butler’s willowy physique as it stretches and winds with agility between vertical and horizontal black lines and cubes on a white background. Back in the day, when Butler was training in a studio down near the docklands on the quays, she wasn’t dancing for anyone except herself. “I’m dancing because I have to. If I don’t, I’ll lose my mind.”
Just as a line animation echoed O’Malley’s words at the beginning, dancers Marion Cronin, Siobhán Ní Dhuinnín and Sarah Ryan reflect Mary Nunan’s dialogue in this final piece. In the dance where “space is a substance, not just a concept”, they “attune” to it as “spatial organisms”, “moving through it and with it”, “doing less, but less in a targeted way”. It is the perfect coda. As is the vertical bar midway through the title of the film which is a clever nod to Early’s animated dancers.
Murphy’s vision in portraying these characterful females is successfully and artistically realised through the series of multimedia techniques employed. The women’s passion for movement, in all its guises, is palpable. But while the creator’s premise is clearly to examine the person behind the performer, it is disappointing that, aside from a short turn by Cronin, we do not see the eight artists dance themselves, for as Davis says “I was a dancer and I still am”.
Reviewed 25th May 2024.
The Review's Hub Score
Always and forever a dancer!
