As she prepares her new solo show, Jean Butler discusses the legacy of Riverdance, the loneliness of choreography and why Dublin has lost its sparkle
JEAN BUTLER IS in a rehearsal studio in inner city Dublin, warming up before a run through of her new solo work, Day. Her hair is scraped back and tied up in a high ponytail. She wears black tracksuit bottoms and a long sleeved gray T-shirt. She trots around the room like a thoroughbred horse, elongating her arms as though swimming in mid-air.
Instantly recognisable, her pretty face conjures up memories from another time, another country. It's no surprise to hear that a female air steward made a fuss of her on the flight over for the Dublin Dance Festival from New York, her home for the past five years. In 1994 she became the Irish-American poster girl for the new Ireland, that country of promise and prosperity reflected in the global Riverdancephenomenon.
That was then. Before we woke up and realised that behind all the fancy footwork we had lost the run of ourselves.
Butler’s dancing life has undergone a dramatic transformation since those seven life-changing minutes as part of the Eurovision interval act. She is not going to be dancing a jig on stage any time soon.
When the Abbey came calling with a commission for a solo work for the festival she was sure of two things. Firstly, she didn’t want to have creative control. She wanted to work alongside someone both for the personal challenge and to escape the crushing loneliness that can be part of the natural terrain of a dancer choreographing and performing her own solo project. Secondly, she knew she wanted to work with acclaimed dance-maker Tere O’Connor.
She had seen his output in New York and even before the commission she had begun to “court” him. “I knew I really wanted to work with him, I would watch his work and think ‘I want to do that’. I am so glad he said yes,” she says. His agreement was far from a foregone conclusion: the last person O’Connor created a solo dance for was Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1993.
She flicks a switch, the music starts. I sit on a lone chair, facing her, notebook in hand. Like many people, I don’t quite know what to make of contemporary dance. Butler begins and I watch her move, a study in awkward elegance, around the space. I write in my notebook: “Disconcerting, uncomfortable, demented marionette, dislocated, angular, computer, daily grind, vulnerable warrior, baby, child, why is she rubbing her thighs like that? Very, very strange.” When the piece ends, I am worried that she will expect a wise interpretation of the work (later, she tells me it is concerned, in part, with the multiple personas we adopt in life). “You don’t have to get it,” she says kindly before excusing herself to jump rope for 15 minutes, her customary practice after rehearsal.
We reconvene later. She says contemporary dance is like watching someone paint a canvas. “A Jackson Pollock painting can mean something different to me than to you . . . nobody tries to put a blanket meaning on art but they do on dance.” The lack of narrative can be alienating for mainstream audiences; is that something she appreciates? “I understand that,” she says. “My poor mother, the first time she saw me do anything that wasn’t a slip jig she was pretty much aghast. It’s a massive departure but that’s where I am and I couldn’t have stayed where I was because I had more interests.”
When it comes to contemporary dance, her argument goes, accessibility is over-rated. “I think to try and make this kind of dance accessible would take away its tension and the whole genre of contemporary dance as an art form is very much a minority art form, exactly because it’s challenging,” she says. “But I think there are many entry points to this world, including one where you might just go ‘I don’t know what that was about but the costumes are nice’.”
This feels like less ephemeral ground. What is her costume like? “It’s a beautiful costume, a dress, but there’s leggings also because of the crotch work, my Madonna moments,” she laughs.
Conversation with Butler is full of these contrasts, the serious, studious dancer talking about "parenthetical moments" in Dayand the earthy Long Islander, gabbing about "crotch work". She can be cool and guarded one minute and the devoted auntie sharing stories about her two nephews the next.
Hoping for a slice of unguarded Butler, I tell her that I was supposed to interview Michael Flatley recently, a job foiled by the ash cloud. What was it like working with such a forceful character back in the day? “That’s an interesting adjective to use,” she says. On this subject, she chooses her words with extra care. “Michael is a professional,” she says. “And he was much older than me and he certainly wanted some specific things that he wouldn’t be shy about saying.” She remembers, at the time, thinking “well I am going to have to rise to this . . . I suppose that created some of the chemistry”.
Did rising up mean becoming more vocal? “It was always in me, I am a redhead, but it was never challenged until that moment.” So she gave as good as she got? “I was swimming with sharks,” she says. “Looking back now I would have done things a bit differently but I survived it all.” They don’t keep in touch. “No, it was not a friendship, it wasn’t a non-friendship either, it was professional, we had very different kind of agendas and aesthetics.”
She describes Riverdanceas a "complex time". She was studying theatre at Birmingham University – she always wanted to be an actress – when the call came to join the fledgling troupe as principal dancer. She was a very different person then, taking everything much more personally.
" Riverdancewas my life, I gave everything to it, I had nothing else," she says. She left after trying unsuccessfully to make changes to the production but it was an amicable parting. Riverdanceproducer Moya Doherty's Tyrone Productions would later release her Irish dance masterclass DVD.
The late 1990s was a time to regroup. She had been working non-stop since the age of 17 when she toured the world with the Chieftains. Together with Colin Dunne, her post-Flatley Riverdanceco-star and a childhood friend from the dance-competition circuit, she choreographed and produced a new show, Dancing on Dangerous Ground. It didn't work.
"It was flawed from the start in terms of organisation and management," she says. It was also, she feels, ahead of its time. "We were very ambitious about what we wanted to do . . . I don't think the world and the audience could really grasp it. Unfortunately Riverdanceand Lord of the Dancepresented such a strong image of Irish dancing it was very hard to penetrate that and create something else."
The run in the West End of London at the end of 1999 was financially crippling, and even a packed out two weeks in Radio City Music Hall couldn't save the show. It was favourably reviewed in the New York Timesthough, and Butler holds on to that. "The whole experience taught me a lot," she says. She and Dunne are still firm friends. "Colin is family. We have been through a very specific experience and now we are in non-specific land so we are very supportive of each other's process. It's interesting because we know each other's bodies so well, we know each other's dancing so well that to surprise each other with our work now is quite exciting."
After Dangerous Groundshe spent time "recovering". She married fashion designer Cuan Hanley and when the opportunity arose in 2002 to do a masters in contemporary dance at Limerick University's Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, where she became artist in residence, it was a natural next step.
"It was a time to recharge the batteries because they were pretty low . . . I think I just wanted to step out of all that expectation for a while." She read avidly about the history of contemporary dance and began to think about her craft in a less one dimensional way. In 2007, she created her first solo show Does She Take Sugar?' for the Project Theatre in Dublin.
“That show was very much a self-portrait although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that at the time,” she says. “It was the beginning of something for me as an artist, which probably I would have been very unhappy saying I was five years ago but it makes sense to me now.” She worries, suddenly, about sounding “arsey”.
Would she go and watch an Irish dance show now? A pause. “No,” she says, before quickly clarifying that last Patrick’s Day she went to see her younger sister Cara, an Irish dancer, perform with the Chieftains in New York. “I literally cried watching her. She was incredible, she was doing things I can’t do, things I could never do. She moved me. So I suppose I am only interested in going to see Irish dancing if it’s really good.”
She enjoys spending time in Ireland but thinks Dublin has changed. “I said to my mother-in-law recently that Dublin used to bounce and sparkle, and now it just feels like a kind of worn energy that I haven’t ever experienced before.” And what about the US? “The consumer side of things is frightening and a lot of popular culture over there frightens me. Oprah Winfrey gives me the heebie jeebies, she’s so powerful and America just lays down at her feet. Personally I have better things to do with my afternoons and my mental prowess.” And don’t get her started on Martha Stewart. Butler was in the gym one day when Stewart came on the television. “The woman was giving instructions to America on how to use a broom . . . all that can get to me a little bit so I just try to tune it out.”
The past year working with O’Connor has been a very personal challenge. “I did it to stretch myself in ways that I didn’t know were possible. I wanted to throw myself at something that could easily fail to see how much sticking power I had.”
She is “dumbstruck” when I ask about whether she might go back to performing Irish dancing. “I don’t go back, I go forward,” she says. And anyway, part of the reason for moving towards contemporary dance is because she hopes it will give her a longer lifespan as a dancer. She speaks in awe of Deborah Hay, an acclaimed experimental performance artist who did a solo show in New York recently at the age of 70.
“I’m 39, I’m not able for all that lepping around any more,” as she puts it. She will continue to do the occasional masterclass and still has lots of ideas around choreography but it’s unlikely she’ll be onstage again delighting her mother with anything as obvious as a slip jig.
Having said that, all this talk of her Irish dancing roots brings to mind her sister’s wedding next month. Cara, who has danced with the Chieftains for 18 years, is marrying a fiddler and a dancer. “There’s going to be a lot of music and dancing.”
Then, before heading off for a meeting at the Abbey, she utters some words to gladden the hearts of all people with incurable Riverdancenostalgia: "The invitation said bring your shoes and instruments," she says. "So I've been thinking that I am definitely going to have to get a step on for that."
Dayis at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin from May 19 to May 22, as part of the Dublin Dance Festival
