ONE of Finola Cronin's initiatives as UCD's first Dance Artist in Residence was to transform UCD's Arts Block with a temporary, site-specific performance which exploited the "wonderful architectural possibilities" thrown up by Belfield's grey angularity, its glass kiosks and sculptures, the lake, the atrium, and even the concourse outside the restaurant.
This process of transforming what, to jaded eyes, is ordinary and mundane into something extraordinary is the residual ethos of Cronin's 10-year collaboration with the originator of "Dance Theatre", the German choreographer Pina Bausch. Bausch's idiosyncratic take on the quotidien - which has made her the international, Germanbased company, Tanztheater Wuppertal's number one cultural export - recently caused a sensation in London's Sadler's Wells after a 17-year absence.
They performed Viktor, their 1986 show,which marked the beginning of Cronin's sojourn with the company. While that is the nearest her work has come to Ireland, Cronin's exposure to Pina Bausch's unique choreographic methodology can now filter back through her new role with UCD's Drama Studies Centre. After leaving Pina Bausch's company she returned to the centre for postgraduate studies in 1995, and was able to channel her experience into her MA thesis which examined the way Bausch constructs her pieces in a collaborative and "democratically-founded way of working", using ideas from her dancers "triggered by a task she gives you", instead of the more usual approach of choreographing movement on to the dancers.
Material collected in this way is the source from which the essence of Bausch's world-famous work is distilled. Her dancers are practically given the responsibility of co-authors. "It has to do with the idea that if you let people work the way they work naturally then there is a kind of truth as well", explains Cronin, who created many of the Tanztheater Wuppertal's main roles and performed them world-wide.
This "inside-outwards" aesthetic has naturally percolated into Cronin's current practical work with non-dancer students. "I'm working from the theory that everybody can dance, everybody can move. We have that within ourselves and we do it without thinking." One of her aims in her work with MA students on the brand new dance option (which also contains research and theoretical elements), is to develop physical memory, and an understanding that "it is quite easy to make something that looks like dance by creating a structure".
Much like Bausch, Cronin says: "I tend to set tasks, and set them off so that they can find the impetus and impulse themselves to begin to work", demystifying the process by "letting the students know what I am doing every step of the way."
Since leaving Bausch, Cronin has been developing this approach to movement which can work with "anybody, from professional dancers to children". It is equally "a way of getting rid of the barriers for those who feel they have 10 feet and can't do anything, and of opening up that natural ability I think everybody has."
Cronin, from Clontarf, started her own classical ballet training at the age of seven with Patricia Joan McCarthy, and then at the advice of Joan Davis, went on to London's Contemporary Dance school, The Place, in the late 1970s. She found her way from a one-year contract with a Bavarian Opera Ballet Company to the Tanztheater Wuppertal via (ex-Bausch dancer) Vivienne Newport's Frankfurt company in Theater am Turm.
Her circuitous path would be more streamlined today, what with PLC courses, Arts Council bursaries, and the increasing incorporation of dance into the Applied Junior and Leaving Certificate curricula. Finola believes dance should be integrated into the education system at every level, just as it is abroad.
No dance-snob, in the same breath as admitting it is an elitist artform like opera, Cronin suggests that categories such as "Irish dance" and "Classical Ballet" are arbitrary. Equally "the whole Riverdance phenomenon has been very positive - as long as people are talking about dance it is a good thing."
As part of her new role, Cronin has initiated inter-departmental lectures, and a dance film project, and plans to research and document theatre-dance in Ireland, which - along with a dance archive and magazine - is "crucially lacking". There are rumbles of a symposium during the next Dublin Theatre Festival and a summer school with a visiting choreographer, as well as more UCD site-specific performances in the pipeline. Not bad for someone who doesn't mind adding, in what sounds like pioneer spirit, "I am making it up as I'm going along".
