Performers of aerial dance make it look graceful and effortless but the reality is hard labour, bruises and aching limbs, as Jane Lawrenson found out
I take a deep breath, focus my mind on the sequence I want my body to follow, and bring my arms across my ribs again. A tug, a pull, a sharp pain through my triceps and across my shoulders and I feel my arms flop down by my sides, powerless as jellied eels. It is 6:30pm on Wednesday, day three of the Donegal-based Irish Aerial Dance Fest and if I can’t get my arms to remove my sports bra soon, I’m going to have to shower with it on.
By definition, aerial dance is a form of modern dance that incorporates an apparatus, usually attached to the ceiling, allowing performers to explore movement in three-dimensions – whether it’s up, down or across. Generally it’s subdivided into ‘vertical’ and ‘supporting’ apparatus. ‘Vertical aerial’ covers dance using rope, fabric or straps (similar to gymnastic rings) and ‘supporting aerial’ uses hoop, trapeze, cube and sometimes even climbing harnesses.
A couple of introductory aerial classes earlier this year first whet my appetite for all things airborne. I imagined myself souring through the skies, swinging elegantly from one trapeze to another until finally into the muscular arms of Vlad, the Russian contortionist. The reality of the matter involved a world of gruelling sit-ups and push-ups before we even touched a fabric or trapeze – both of which dangled mere feet off the ground. But the biggest shocker (apart from Vlad’s absence in the whole affair) was the way my body acted. It was as effective and strong as a chocolate fireguard.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I’m standing in a gym in Letterkenny, County Donegal, about to embark on a five-day aerial training festival. There is a man in front of me clicking his fingers and twisting his body into an array of dance moves as he prances, pirouettes, shimmies and shakes his way across the gym. I watch as person after person follows his choreographed reprise. This is the festival’s daily warm-up, and as the chick who’s generally one vodka away from liver cirrhosis before she embarks on any sort of dancing, this is a little outside my comfort zone.
The Letterkenny-based Irish Aerial Dance Fest is the brain-child of Donegal-native Chantal McCormick. After graduating as a dancer from a prestigious London performance school, McCormick got a taste of aerial dance and was hooked, “Once you get in the air, you create a whole other depth of movement and possibilities you just don’t get as a dancer. Your body gets completely tingled into this awareness of 3D, you can go up high or down low and play with the ground.” When not dangling by her toenails from a trapeze, McCormick and her husband Jym Daly run the theatre company Fidget Feet. Now in their tenth year, Fidget Feet is not only behind the festival but but at the forefront of creating spectacular indoor and outdoor productions, nationally and internationally.
Each year the festival runs for two circus-filled weeks. Focusing on training for performance, it’s no walk in the park. Instead, it’s more of a swing by your arms —usually involving three to four classes daily along with various warm-up and warm-downs. That adds up to a 9am to 6pm training schedule, breaks aside. The aim of the festival is to improve performers’ skills and introduce first-time fliers to the variety of aerial dance.
Considering itself an art form rather than a sport, aerialists think of themselves as performers rather than athletes. However, the muscles that grace the upper bodies of the advanced aerialists as well as the box of Nurofen I consumed daily in order to get out of bed tell a different tale. “Aerial is pain,” says Shane Holohan, a teacher at the festival and alumni of preeminent Montreal circus school École Nationale de Cirque. “We celebrate everything that someone achieves in aerial because everything is earned. The illusion of ease, of an almost superhero appearance comes from bruising, burning and holes in hands.” Festival-organiser McCormick, agrees, “It’s a real journey and it always amazes me the amount of people that try it, and it’s really hard, but something compels them to go back and try it again and again. It’s the achievement. And that’s what’s really important to us as part of the aerial festival. There is a real sense of community. Everyone revels in any small achievement anyone makes, so you feel good about yourself.”
Community IS a really important part of the festival. Almost all of the participants live together in student accommodation and nightly dance-offs, fire-breathing displays and sing-songs are an integral part of the experience. Across sore muscles and blisters, friendships are forged, often involving people from all over the world. Even though the festival is only in its fifth year of existence, word has spread globally; of this year’s 108 attendees, 55 came from overseas, several from as far away as Costa Rica, Australia and the US.
As the week drew to a close and I packed my bags and said goodbye to the circus, I had learnt a lot. I could hang from a trapeze and preform a few clumsy tricks, I could complete some basic fabric drops and I could badly choreograph an aerial dance routine and execute it with questionable grace. I had bruises in strange places and lat muscles some dudes would kill for. But most of all, I had one of the most incredible of weeks. I felt a superhero – completely remade. Life under the big top ain’t easy but from now on I’ll always harbour secret, star-spangled dreams of running away to join the circus.
In early April 2014 the first official State Visit by an Irish President took place. Ahead of the visit we produced this short video taster to accompany the visit.
The video emphasises the strong ties between Ireland and our closest neighbours, The United Kingdom, and was produced in conjunction with the Department of Foreign Affairs and in partnership with other Departments and State agencies
In the week up and including the State Visit the video garnered almost 100,000 views on Youtube.
Ireland is known as the land of one hundred thousand welcomes - and what better way to experience it than by watching this video, which was shown to the key international buyers who came to Ireland to the Irish tourist board's largest travel trade show, Meitheal 2014.
This was a video I scripted and produced - Vincent Gallagher directed it and Simon O'Neill DP-ed.
This is a St Patrick's Day video I wrote and produced. Within a week the video had gained over a million views, was one of the sixth most shared videos in the world during March and caused the song, a cover of Higher Love by James Vincent McMorrow, to reach number three in the Irish itunes charts over St Patrick's weekend.
If you’re not from Ireland, our pub culture can be a confusing and beguiling affair but fret not because here is a guide to buying a round in Ireland.
Irish people, on the whole, are relatively easy-going creatures. Perhaps for this reason, visitors from abroad are often surprised at how effortlessly they slot into Irish culture despite our many quirks and idiosyncrasies. A crafty foreigner could possibly fly under the radar by stopping for a moment to admire the stretch in the evenings, waving at strangers on country roads, eating the odd crisp sandwich and commenting on “the state of yer wan” last night.
Unfortunately, it’s our slightly complicated pub etiquette that often catches our overseas visitors out. The core bastion of which still relies on The Round. It is worth noting at this stage that there is no absolute obligation to get involved in The Round nor is the realm of The Round solely alcohol based. All beverages are welcome in The Round. (It is also worth noting that The Round is not always round. It can be square, triangular or any other shape you can imagine.) A Round, defined quite simply, is a round of drinks.
If you are in a pub having a drink, regardless of who you are with, you are normally expected to offer to buy your companions a drink too. This is not a hoax to part you with your money — you should notice immediately that people will reciprocate with a drink for you. Irish people may be famed for their friendliness but any offer of drinks is made under the implicit agreement that you will buy the next drink for them. If you continue to drink the drinks bought for you without making any effort to reciprocate, you can guarantee the table’s topic of conversation on each of your trips to the lav will centre completely on your absolute scabbiness.
If the group is large, it will usually organically break into smaller rounds, often appropriately sized to the amount of drinks the group is expecting to have that night. If there are 10 people present it will likely divide into approximately two to three rounds, based on who arrived when, and who has finished their drink faster.
When you are involved in a round, stick with it. Buying drinks or accepting drinks from someone else in another round is akin to cheating on a partner. A simple “No thanks, Mary, I’m grand, I’m in a round already with Dave and Barry,” will suffice. If you accept the drink you’ll have joined their round and will therefore need to ‘clear your balance’, so to speak, in the first round by buying another before you leave it. For this reason, it’s usually easier to stick with your original round throughout the night. However, under the rules of The Round, it is acceptable to change rounds if the venue changes but only after attempting to reform your original round in the new pub and failing for some reason.
If you feel like you can’t go another full cycle, it’s acceptable to exit the round on an even turn – when you’ve bought as much as you’ve drunk – by declining a further round with the words: “No it’s alright, thanks. I’m only going to have one more so I’ll get this myself.” The chances are the person buying will insist on buying you the drink regardless, and it’s perfectly fine to accept if you have made a candid effort to buy your own drink. Respond with “Ah cheers, I’ll get you back the next night.”
Sometimes with The Round you’ll finish up having consumed more drinks than you bought. Sometimes you will finish down, having bought more drink than you consumed. As long as you have made somewhat of a concerted effort to even out your share, it’s all good. The mysterious magic of The Round means it all eventually balances out in the end.
Right now, there are four particularly special bothies across Ireland. Though familiar to adventurers and hikers as basic shelters usually left unlocked and available for public use, these bothies are a little different. First of all, their locations are secret. Known as 4Bothies, you can only find them if you follow clues on the 4Bothies.com website. The project is the brainchild of Irish filmmaker Luke Franklin, who, alongside a team of other talented folks, built these distinctive bothies in the north, south, east and west of Ireland. Jane Lawrenson finds out more.
Despite the fact that the 4Bothies started as a final project for his master’s degree in art and science, Luke Franklin says it probably actually began when he asked for a drill one Christmas.
From there it grew. Taking the notion that art shouldn’t just be the preserve of the ‘soft hands’ contingent and that it should be taken out of the gallery, Franklin and his team set about building four bothies over a period of four months, with the final piece reaching completion in mid-spring.
Oh, and they’re hidden. People must visit the 4Bothies website (4bothies.com) and accept the challenge of solving a mystery and taking on an expedition to find them. They’ll have only a few images and some words to guide them to the secret locations of the bothies.
What’s unusual about these bothies is that each has its own unique identity: a library, a study, a studio and a gallery. From the pink metal styling’s of ‘The Study’ to the rustic charm of ‘The Library’; the angled lattices of ‘The Studio’; and the space within a derelict space of ‘The Gallery’, each bothy is different in size and appearance. Although the bothies are built for people to stay in them, visitors are advised to bring supplies and their own cooking gear if they intend on an overnight stopover. Some of the bothies are also quite small so if there are more than one or two visitors, it might be an idea to bring extra camping gear. They are unlocked and free for anyone to use, people are just asked to respect the bothies and those yet to visit.
“If you go to the website, you see the story of us building them,” says Franklin. “We go and have quite an arduous journey in the name of the initiative but we have done our bit, you as viewers must take on the next bit and go see it.”
But what really drove Franklin to embark on this project? He cites climbing greats George Mallory and Sir Edmund Hillary as some of the inspiration behind 4Bothies. Franklin states, “We may never know if George Mallory was the first man to climb Everest because he died on the way down. What we do know is when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest he said, ‘Because it is there.’ Which is a really flippant response, but it’s kind of the right response. We don’t NEED to climb Everest but it’s part of the human condition; there is something in us; we have to explore.”
Franklin himself is no stranger to exploration either. As an avid climber, runner and paddler, it doesn’t take a genius to work out – superficially, at least – this project is an attempt to marry his two passions of creativity and adventure.
But Franklin claims the true meaning of 4Bothies is to scratch a little bit at the values we assign to various entities. “We understand why Mallory and Hillary did what they did. We understand that drive. We do the same with sport. We say that it’s perfectly fine to train a six-year-old girl, who shows some promise, seven days a week, so she can be an Olympic gymnast. But if you take those examples and map them on to art, and if you say I am going to go out into this freezing, cold place and risk my life climbing up mountains in the name of art or if I say I am going to commit my life and work my body to point of exhaustion in the name of art, people would find that strange. I find that strange because art adds just as much value to our lives as exploration does.”
Yo, twentysomethings, listen-up! As well as completing your education, perfecting the art of cohabitation, navigating hazardous relationships, finding a partner, seeing a little of the world and trying to get your feet on the career ladder, you also need to consider this decade as the most important of your entire life. Screw this up and you’re destined to spend your life as a withered, old spinster hag with zero career prospects. At least, according to clinical psychologist Meg Jay.
Personally speaking, I initially took my 20s very seriously. By 24, having never placed a foot wrong, I had completed my masters and was one of the few graduates in my class to obtain a job in a top Dublin ad agency. Fast forward two years and I’ve cut all my hair off for rent money so that I could continue living in my 10-person hovel in a dingy Toronto borough. As far as my career responsibilities extend around this time, they are limited to ensuring the correct cream goes in the correct donut.
Suffice to say, I have, at times, veered off life’s success superhighway onto f**k-up lane. Yes, mistakes, lots of mistakes but I wouldn't take any of them back for all the tea in China. AND I LOVE TEA.
Jay may see this period of prolonged adolescence as a nuclear wasteland where your dreams will fester and melt. As twentysomethings, it seems, we should save our friendship for individuals who can help us professionally and screen each potential suitor in the terms of their ability to fill our uteruses with 2.5 bursts of suburban offspring.
But here’s the thing. As people continue to live longer, our ratio of years we spend with a shed load of responsibilities as opposed to the years when there aren’t any is weighted heavily in the direction of the ball and chain segment. Generations of your life will come and go where you don’t have the luxury of making epic blunders. So enjoy the detours. And remember, one of the most epic blunders you can make is bricking it that you’ll make one.
Had I not set about systematically destroying my life for a bit, I would not be the person I am now. Whoever that is, she at least knows no amount of money is ever worth shaving the back of your head for.
Besides, success and maturity aren’t always all they're cracked up to be. Ask anyone up to their knickers in negative equity because their success and maturity meant they could afford to buy an overpriced house during the boom.
Of course, the lady’s right on one thing. Your 20s are formative. During that decade a person will take more wrong turns and go down more cul de sacs than a tourist on an Irish driving holiday. That is, if you’re lucky. Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Charles Darwin and JK Rowling all starred down the barrel of 30, abject failures. Our speed bumps define us and pressuring people to take a linear route to preconceived notions of success isn’t sound advice.
Maybe, instead, we should be pushing ourselves to fail a little harder rather than succeed a little easier?
