Jerry Pearson's work 23 years ago made a lasting impression on Irish dance, writes Michael Seaver
After last weekend's avalanche of tourists you'd probably be cynical hearing yet another American boast a "special connection to Ireland", but Minnesotan Jerry Pearson has good reason for the claim and it's not just the fact that he was born on St Patrick's Day or married his Irish wife on Bloomsday. Twenty-three years ago, as a young choreographer, he came to Dublin and made Lunar Parables, arguably the quintessential Irish contemporary dance. This week he has returned to Ireland with his Santa Barbara Dance Company, unaware of the work's lasting influence on Irish dance practices.
"Lunar Parables was a breakthrough for Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre [ DCDT]," says Robert Connor, co-artistic director of Dance Theatre of Ireland and a performer of the work back in 1984. "At the time it attracted quite a bit of the attention and helped strengthen the profile of Dublin Contemporary in the theatre scene."
But it did more than capture the zeitgeist; Pearson's work outlasted its own life and elements are still traceable in choreography produced in Ireland.
Any reminiscences of Dublin's dance scene in the 1980s have an almost Frank McCourt-like cynicism - hungry dancers rehearsing in dilapidated spaces (optimistically called "studios") . . . and it really was cold and rainy. "I remember it was so cold during one workshop that people were getting physically ill," Pearson recalls.
In those pre-Riverdance days, the lonely flag-bearers for contemporary dance were being pushed by the Arts Council to interact with traditional dance forms. The pomposity of the council's 1985 report, The Dancer and the Dance, sums up its vision: "Irish dancers will perform the world's legacy of theatrical dance as something which is their own and Irish choreographers, drawing on this inheritance, will communicate the Irish spirit and Irish ways of life through dance styles they have made truly, fundamentally Irish."
According to Connor, these aspirations were more theoretical than practical and the pressure continued until the council's first Arts Plan was published in 1994. But like many a previous foreign invader, Lunar Parables was more Irish than Irish dances themselves.
Based on the writings of Yeats (and developed with dancers Connor, Joan Davis, Loretta Yurick and Mary Nunan), it returned to the essence of Yeats's symbolism and the idea that abstract forms can evoke strong emotions. Pearson had previously performed in the Alwin Nikolais company, whose works are a collection of abstract images that change to form dramatic meaning. The image, in other words, was just a catalyst to evoke an emotional response from the onlooker.
One onlooker at the time was Diana Theodores, then dance critic with the Sunday Tribune, who reviewed Lunar Parables on three separate occasions for the paper within six months. She saw "the dancers maintain a relaxed, elastic quality, yielding to gravity with soft knees, easy hips and gently curved torsos. Against this their feet intermittently cut out little staccato phrases suggesting jigs and hornpipes". Pearson didn't deliberately create Irish steps, but true to both Nikolai and Yeats, he was able to construct movement that suggested whatever the viewer was looking for. And in 1985, Irish contemporary dance audiences were looking for traditional Irish dance.
IT TOOK THE arrival of another American - Michael Flatley careering across the stage in Riverdance - to liberate contemporary dance from the need to legitimise itself by being "Irish". But Lunar Parables had shown the way 10 years previously that badging your Irishness doesn't come from sprinkling jig-steps throughout your choreography. Instead it was possible to use abstract movement within the frame of an Irish theme, and create the "Irishness" within the audience's imagination. This strategy, as well as Pearson's emphasis on visual design and music, has seeped into Irish dance-making.
Choreographers such as Connor acknowledge Pearson's artistic shadow. "As a choreographer I have felt his influence in how he developed movement, and how he involved dancers in the creative process, both conceptually and physically," he says. "I continue to sharpen the tools that I picked up from working with Jerry."
Now director of dance at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Pearson looks back on Lunar Parables - and the Joyce-inspired Bloomsday, which he set on DCDT in 1988 - with contentment and an eagerness to get his hands on them again. "It sounds obvious, but the type of work you make when you're in your 30s is so different to what you make in your 50s. There are some aspects of those older works I'd like to have another go at, particularly in Bloomsday. . . Yeah,there are parts of that piece I could do a lot better now."
Whether it's his Californian life, the comfort of academia or being a bit older, Pearson no longer feels part of self- conscious trends. "As an older choreographer I'm not nervous about the mainstream. I like to have a theme, I like to ask myself a question and I like to just go for it. There's nothing obscure about my choreography. I'm not trying to be part of a scene like I was in the past."
ARTISTIC CONNECTIONS WITH Dublin have been limited. After Bloomsday - when he met his present wife, Darine Davidson - he created Hopelessly Helixed for Dance Theatre of Ireland in 1995. "I love the idea of returning to Dublin with my company this week. Next to New York, it is the most important city in my life and I would love to see how audiences now respond."
They'll see familiar threads from the past. The videos of sticks thrown into the air providing the backdrop for Santa Barbara Dance Company's Artifice might be reminiscent of the slides of Celtic swirls and lunar landscapes in Lunar Parables.
Audiences will immediately recognise Pearson's enduring sense of mysticism.
"One of the attractive things about Jerry is his light way of being. He's a lifelong meditator and has a deeply individual spiritual life," says Connor.
Pearson is slightly more coy. "Mysticism has been a theme of my life. I'm always struck by the magic and wonder of things. Without sounding too Californian, I really believe in this process of dance more and more. How people relate to each other and the way things happen that are bigger than the parts. When dancers start working together and put movement together with music, something magical happens. And to me it's just beautiful. I'm touched on it by a daily basis."
Back in the 1980s, Irish audiences at Lunar Parables heard the voice of Niall Toibin quote from Yeats's The Symbolism of Poetry and those lines are equally relevant to the dances that Santa Barbara Dance Company perform this week: "When sound, and colour, and form are in a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one colour, one form and one emotion. The more various and numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more powerful will be the emotion."
Santa Barbara Dance Company will perform Jerry Pearson's Artifice, Strange Boat and Romeo and Juliet at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, tonight at 8pm