Aoife McGrath

Discomforting/Disarming Touch: Experiencing Affective Contradiction in Improvisatory Dance Performance

This chapter investigates the affective resonances and possible sociopolitical implications of moments of choice, contradiction and vulnerability in improvised dance performance. Focusing on the spectator’s experience of affective contradiction in The Work, The Work (2010), by dance theatre company Fitzgerald and Stapleton, it examines how the piece functions as both a performance of women’s experience of corporeal vulnerability and precarity in contemporary Irish society, and simultaneously as a performance of empowering choice. It considers how the experience of affective contradiction in this work might produce a questioning of usual patterns of viewing for the spectator, provoking a heightened awareness, and potential rethinking, of how Irish society diminishes women’s ‘power of activity’ by restricting their capacity for corporeal autonomy and choice (Spinoza in Spinoza: the complete works. Hackett Publishing, Cambridge, p. 258, 2002).

The Dance of Affect in Contemporary Irish Dance Theatre

This chapter examines how dance theatre choreographers are engaging with a “terrible inheritance” (Lepecki, TDR, 43(4): 139, 1999) of corporeal oppression in Ireland, through an investigation of the choreography of affective encounters in their work. Building on the Spinozan notion of “affectio”—the impact the affecting body leaves on the affected—the chapter analyses moments in dance performance in which the sensing, exchanging and imprinting of affect takes place between dancers, and between dancers and spectators. Considering works by Junk Ensemble, Fearghus O Conchuir and Emma Martin, the chapter discusses how these pieces highlight the control and policing of corporealities in Ireland, making visible the resultant oppression of those deviant to desired norms. Yet, within the confinements of this regimentation, the interactions and affective encounters of dancers with each other, and with the objects and spaces containing their movements, cause transformations in the affective environment to materialize for the spectator. In Junk Ensemble’s The Falling Song (2012), O Conchuir’s Tabernacle (2011) and Martin’s Dancehall (2015), imposed, external societal values and ideals are shown to reduce agency and capacity for action and change. However, in their rehearsal and repetition of affective encounters within oppressive social constructs, these works also show how affect accumulates, and how the imprint experienced through affective encounters generates change, suggesting possible future transformation. In the wake of a period of economic and social collapse in Ireland, and the attendant danger of a petrification of movement for change, the choreography of affective encounters in dance performance can highlight both the experience of oppression, but also a space for imagining possible future, collaborative and emancipatory moves.

'Dancing the Downward Slide: Spaces of Affective Adjacency in Rian and Bird with Boy'

This chapter examines how the choreography of affect in two dance theatre works creates a space of affective adjacency—a space in which the building of an alternative structure of feeling and an alternative economy of the body can be experienced. Focusing on the choreographic use of repetition in Junk Ensemble’s Bird with Boy (2011) and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s Rian (2011), it shows how the work required to build an alternative affective space can become visible. Although affect is most often viewed as a preconscious, ephemeral phenomenon (a passage of intensities), that can have little or no lasting impact on socio-political action, theorists such as Megan Watkins have argued for a consideration of the ‘cumulative aspects of affect’. Highlighting Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the capacity for a body to affect and be affected), and affectio (the impact the affecting body leaves on the affected), Watkins points out that affectio can ‘leave a residue’ allowing for the ‘capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities’. The choreography of repetition in Bird with Boy and Rian presents sites for an examination of this accumulation of affect and its capacity not only to form and shape dispositions, but also, as Lauren Berlant suggests, ‘to move along and make worlds, situations, and environments’.

Choreographing the Unanticipated: Death, Hope and Verticality in Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre's Giselle and The Rite of Spring

Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan’s works for Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre incorporate a wide range of movement and dance techniques, spoken word, song, storytelling, and a strongly developed visual aesthetic. Inhabiting a space between dance and theatre and harnessing every expressive facet of the dancing/speaking body, the pieces created by Keegan-Dolan are socially engaged, and are often reworkings of well-known narratives that serve as platforms for explicitly communicated socio-political critique. In his reworkings of Giselle (2003) and The Rite of Spring (2009), he radically departs from the original librettos of the ballets in order to challenge the traditional endings. In both instances, an unexpected twist in the narrative occurs in the closing moments, leaving the spectator with a surprising final image that, I will argue, allows for a questioning of seemingly hermetic narratives of oppression. In particular, this article will examine the potential political efficacy of these unanticipated endings, examining how these alterations transfigure the relationship between a feminine corporeality and death.