This Is It is a new series of candid film portraits of eight iconic women in dance in Ireland, and is directed and choreographed by dance artist, choreographer, performer and teacher Laura Murphy. Watch a preview above.
The portrait subjects include Jean Butler, Alicia Christofi Walshe, Lisa Cliffe, Finola Cronin, Joan Davis, Katherine O'Malley, Mary Nunan and Angie Smalis.
Ahead of the premiere at this year's Dublin Dance Festival, Laura Murphy introduces This Is It below.
During a period in 2019 when I was performing less as a dance artist, I noticed that dance was still alive in me. It was not how I knew it, and maybe even more alive than I had known it.
I began to question what a life in dance meant, to me and to others. This Is It was created from a desire to answer that question.
The following year, I started interviewing eight pioneering women in dance about their life choices, their concerns and desires. The women were at different stages of life, and coming from different dance traditions - ballet, Irish dancing, contemporary.
Each of them told me how dance was expressed in their lives. Some talked to me about parenting, others spoke about childhood, or farming, or philosophy. They all had different takes on it, but I heard a common need to be connected to their moving bodies and to their selves.
We need your consent to load this comcast-player contentWe use comcast-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Watch: This Is It - Jean Butler's portrait in dance
Like any portrait, it is of course time and place specific. Jean Butler spoke to me about the impact of Covid 19 as we danced together from our respective homes in Dublin and New York in lockdown. We questioned what it meant to be a dancer at a time in history when we'd been told 'you can't dance', at least not publicly.
Lisa Cliffe, another portrait subject, spoke of the intertwining of her farming background and her connection to the land with her dance practice. During one of her interviews we baked her Granny's apple pie.
I prefer not to think of the result as a film about dance. For me, it is a piece of dance.
Originally, it had been my intention to create a series of podcasts of conversations with those artists. As I listened back to them and began editing, I began to imagine how visuals such as film and animation might bring the dancer's words to life. I wanted to include the dancing body in an oblique way. So we filmed in gardens and up mountains, on stages and in studios away from proscenium arch.
While the content of the interviews dictated what the visuals would be, I was also guided by the dancers' sense of timing in their words. Rather than follow a traditional plan or storyboard, I worked choreographically, playing with time and space, to create this work. Collaborating with film maker Pato Cassinoni, animator Alan Early and composer Irene Buckley, we wove portraits for each subject.
The portraits are as different as the dance artists they represent. Some are animated, some are more like installations, others cinematic. As I see it, each portrait represents the different bodies that inform my dancing life: the physical and the spiritual, the industry body and the philosophical. All are intertwined and connected in my dance and in my everyday.
I prefer not to think of the result as a film about dance. For me, it is a piece of dance. This Is It reveals dance, in the words of Lisa Cliffe, as 'perhaps not so different after all' from life itself.
This Is It will premiere at the Irish Film Institute on Saturday 25th May as part of Dublin Dance Festival's 2024 edition - find out more here. Following this it will be presented at Cork Midsummer Festival atTriskal Arts Centre on the 21st and 22nd of June. In October 2024, it will be shown at Uilinn West Cork and Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
