View from the Green Room: A shuffle in the shadow of the inflexible doorman
Dances like a Bomb at Garter Lane.
Age is like a ticking bomb. The wonder of just what’s around the corner never leaves and the indignity of an ageing body is a constant reminder of our mortality. Of what’s lost and what’s in transit. I had a doctor once who spoke about the issues surrounding the ageing body as "wear and tear". He never mentioned bits falling off, though.
Junk Ensemble is a multi-award-winning Dublin-based dance theatre company founded by twin sisters Megan Kennedy and Jessica Kennedy. The company is committed to engaging diverse audiences through the creation and presentation of brave, imaginative and accessible work that sheds light on important human issues relevant to society today.
That’s where Junk Ensemble brings us tonight.
‘Dances like a Bomb’ presents us, warts n’ all, with the ageing body through dance, text, music and imagery. Performed by Finola Cronin and Luc Dunberry, this production faces issues of ageing and co-dependence and features the old who are really old. The hyphenated old: old-and-lonely, old-and-grieving, old-and-desperate, old-and-caring, old-and-despairing.
It’s rarely pretty. Two ageing actors seated in their underwear at the rear of an empty stage, overwatched by a giant, sneering face reminds me of Lear on the heath forcing us to confront our vulnerability. Lear describes the essence of humanity, stripped of all social conventions and clothing, reduced to the naked self. "Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."
Finola and Luc’s dancing sequences reflect life as experienced by an ageing couple in a relationship where duty replaces love and memory only serves to remind what is lost. Codependence does that. Lovers confront, regret, antagonise as they push each other apart, only to fall into embraces where each must carry the other. A shuffle in the shadow of the inflexible doorman.
Much of tonight’s performance is frightening. The performance opens as each examines the other’s body to find signs of ageing. He calls it the ‘flub’ – the wobbly, fatty, sagging bits of flesh where collagen has long bid adieu.
She jiggles his belly fat and cheek jowls; he flaps her sagging muscles and traces the wrinkles. She slaps her hand against his chest in anger and then caresses him in regret – a cocktail of love and anger that often defines ageing love.
A terrifying sequence of Finola, squatting on an IV pole stand, while attached to intravenous fluid bags that her partner Luc secures, while she smokes, indifferent to his pain, segues into a dream-like carousel waltz to remind us that love lies buried somewhere in the centre of duty. While life has worn them out, duty remains because that is all they know. And maybe…just maybe…that’s where true love lies.
The monotony of an empty, repetitive life is brilliantly expressed as Duberry lists his daily routine that is only dulled by the nightly "hypnosis of gin". Cronin’s indifference comes from a lifetime where routine became never-ending.
A questioning episode brings black comedy. Regrets? "Yes…leaving my mother…not being kinder…leaving passion behind… not taking a class A drug…not paying my taxes…clumsy comments…no sports-top ride around Paris with the wind in my hair." Fears? "Growing old…anxiety…anger…losing my free will…not allowed to be me…needs that never disappear…death." Compensations? Not caring what others think…each other’s help. Golden years…yeahhh rrrright!
The pair move with grace and beauty sometimes but much of their movement is jerky and awkward with each leaning heavily on the other. Nevertheless, their tired energy evokes lives of purpose that still have much to give and when LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ booms out across the floor in an ironic megamix, the dancer-pensioners share a dream of what once was and might yet be. If only…sometimes…maybe...
