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Acclaimed Irish choreographer and dancer Luke Murphy – whose dance theatre series Volcano has its Australian premiere at the Brisbane Festival – puts the sweating body at the centre of urgent questions. By Kate Holden.
Choreographer and dancer Luke Murphy on pursuing what he wants
The essential question, said singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, is, “What is the proper behaviour, what is the appropriate behaviour in the midst of a catastrophe?”
One reply began in Irish choreographer Luke Murphy’s living room: four walls, some furniture, a man dancing in the midst of a pandemic. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Murphy – usually based between London and New York – was at home in the Cork countryside. His lounge room was about the size of a possible stage set and two bodies were all he needed.
“I invited a dancer to stay with me in this house and we did a week, just starting to make this show.” The show is Volcano, which will have its Australian premiere on August 30 at the Brisbane Festival, and it’s one response to a question like Cohen’s. Two men, one room, a thousand memories, reflexes and reactions. According to The Irish Times, “You will not have seen anything like this before.”
Murphy has always been interested in moving forward, in collapsing different things together, in challenge and in memory. Now in his 30s, he finds himself making artworks that, like the award-winning Volcano, crash theatre against dance, confound audience rituals or dazzle with kaleidoscopic renditions of reality. His works suck up the detritus of popular culture and put the breathing, sweating, animal bodies of humans at the centre of urgent questions: what is memory? What makes us who we are? And what do we create – or forsake – when the world swerves around us?
“Ultimately, Volcano looks at what you keep and what you leave behind,” Murphy says, speaking on Zoom from his home in Ireland. “The feeling that I hope people arrive at is of watching two people as their world shifts and unravels, watching how they face it and both the beauty and the misery of that. In some ways [such a shift] can be very small and personal – it can be the catastrophe of something that happens in your own personal life – or it can be broader. That relationship between the personal and the universal: things can expand, it’s all the same, or it can come down to something that feels very, very intimate.”
Volcano, like Murphy’s whole approach to his art, arrived in stages. Studying and then working in New York back in 2009, he came upon a performance installation in the windows of a hotel. “I loved that as an audience member,” he says, it was a glimpse from the real world into a wholly different one. “I loved that you’re standing on a busy New York street with people shoving past you and trying to buy bagels, and you’re watching a show – it was so beautiful. I was thinking, What would it mean, if I had to keep coming back to this corner, and keep watching this world progress? Something contained, something episodic, that you caught mere glimpses of...” The thought stayed with him through his years based in Britain as a dancer with immersive theatre giants Punchdrunk.
His own career is episodic: beginning with elocution competitions in Ireland (“my first taste of performing arts was dictating poetry in a church hall as a competition, amongst my seven-year-old peers”); youthful initiation, through his salsa-dancing mother, into the pleasures of movement; transferring to boarding school in England in search of training and then to the United States to study. He wanted to be a jazz dancer – “Fred Astaire; I wanted to be Gene Kelly” – and went to America looking to dance Fosse, only to realise there was no longer a stage for jazz ballet. “I had to pivot,” he says, in an instinctive dance metaphor, “and then I moved towards contemporary dance.”
Classic dance training was too narrow a beam for him, but he lacked the confidence to break out. “If you’re performing in a way that it comes out through your face or you’re having an emotional experience, that’s seen as warping the purity of expression solely through your technique,” he says. “I wasn’t old enough to know really what I wanted for myself yet. I was shoving off a huge part of myself that’s distinctive.” He’d studied literature and theatre, tried his hand as a teenager at writing plays (“I was obsessed with people like Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Frayn,” he says, rather unexpectedly), and in the US, it all came back to him.
Meanwhile, he was making a name as a precocious and talented dancer. Murphy was with Punchdrunk for 10 years, with Belgian company Ultima Vez from 2014–18, and has worked with major companies around the world. Now he heads his own company, Attic Projects. As creative director, choreographer and author of Attic’s works, his intention is to cultivate performers, and their potential, against the grain.
He’s thought deeply about the practice of performing. As a 22-year-old in the conservatory, he was defined against an ideal. “You’re trying to be good, but you don’t realise you need to be interesting,” he says. “So I was bottling down all the things about myself that are now such a big part of who I am, and make me in any way distinctive as a performer or dancer,” he says. “You’re like a stew that’s been left in a pot for too long.” It wasn’t until his 30s that he comprehended the power in challenging such sclerosis. As a director of performers now, his intention is to bust things open.
“The space that we make is one where you bring the things that are yours, and you’re also bringing all the things you can’t do, and those things might be just as relevant as everything you can do,” he says. “So that’s part of the culture of how we pursue making work. You don’t get to hide behind your skills, you also have to come in and be interested in taking on something new.” For Murphy, that has included mastering how to make giant bubbles. “Oh, the bubbles! The bubbles were a nightmare,” he remembers. His cast, including his future wife, begged him to leave off. He spent lunchtimes frowning over a vat of detergent, and it worked out. “It was probably the most stubborn I’ve ever been.”
Like a giant bubble held together by a miraculous membrane and its maker’s determination, Murphy’s company conjures fabulous, exceptional work. The intellectualism of contemporary dance – its meditations on history, identity, legacy – flexes comfortably through his art. His busy brain tops a body used to supreme control. Always questing, he likes to jostle surprise and challenge in his works, for his performers, the audience and himself.
“What I think can be really powerful is when someone moves from one [aesthetic] language to another fluently,” he explains. He wants the audience to feel they’re watching actors and be astonished when they begin moving as dancers, or to think they’re in a dance performance and find themselves in an engrossing drama. Very few performers can manage this and timelines are always tight. Murphy tells of his upskilling campaigns where his teams must learn professional ballroom dancing off YouTube videos in two days. “The chaos can also be a little bit pressure-filled,” he admits.
It produces extravagantly compelling work. In the lockdowns, filmed theatre was competing against Netflix. “Everyone was watching The Mandalorian. It made me think, What is a dance theatre TV show?” And he recalled the window installation in New York. He formed some routines in his living room and took a course in writing for television to master suspense and narrative propulsion. “All those things led to essentially what the story is, and the story facilitates the set-up, which allows us to do a lot of different things in the space. Then once that’s all there, your imagination can just go wild and you can suggest anything.”
Volcano, a “sci-fi thriller”, is set in a room full of human mementos and features two “contestants” who are living for two years in one room, a pod floating in space. “With Volcano, we try to show a couple of moments of people, how they’re facing their world shifting in a very intimate way, that can also be representative of something universal,” says Murphy. Their own memories become confused with those of the Amber Project, a comprehensive collection of human experiences. Dazed, the two thrash, argue, dance, anguish and yearn through montages of stroboscopic dream-state reverie, including impersonations of Astaire and Kelly.
The original production in Ireland during Covid had a mere eight audience members, contained in a small room. Gradually the show has extended its arrangement so that now 250 people observe the action over four 45-minute instalments throughout the evening, with an advertised dinner break – “more like a light snack!” advises Murphy – after part three.
The fatigue and emotional crackle of performing the piece is part of the practice: it’s hugely satisfying to do, he says. “You just warm up well and make sure your body’s in good shape, so you can go on the trip.” It is extraordinary theatre, a fresh take on the kind of work Murphy encountered with Punchdrunk and has since pushed far from shore. “I do make work that’s around questions,” reflects Murphy, “and the kind of loneliness of effort and failure, and the beauty of effort and failure, and the beauty of effort in the face of failure.”
The characters in Volcano clutch to known comforts: the bladed edge of challenge is Murphy’s comfort, it seems. Coming up is a work based on The Field, the play by John B. Keane, which will debut next May, and The Archivist, the first part of the Prometheus Project. He says it reimagines the story of Prometheus, “but rather than fire, it’s about electricity, people preparing to lose electricity forever. Imagining all these different fantastic characters and the question: what would you do in a crisis? What do people hold on to if the world’s about to change?” At present, Murphy envisages several different shows simultaneously in a shared space, each for a different audience, that emerge over three or four years.
“I’ve no shortage of ambitions,” he says. “I love sitting with my imagination, it’s really nice, and sitting with it in the ‘what-if’ land is lovely, and sitting with it in the land of ‘how can I think creatively about how to solve this problem’ is also very important” – he laughs – “but it’s not always as lovely.”
Such urgent questions, such poignant seeking. In times of crisis – including in the arts – how does he respond to Leonard Cohen’s question? Murphy gives it careful thought. He’s sceptical of how much a production shown to 80 people at a time can change the world. “It’s a huge amount of audacity to think that anyone should look at what you make and care about what you think. It’s a huge amount of audacity to stand up and say, ‘Everyone, pay attention to what I have to say’, because why should they?” He laughs again. “There’s no reason for people to do that! But I know that I have had really profound experiences watching work, whether it’s in a museum or an immersive experience or in theatre or listening to a piece of music. I know what the impacts of a piece of art can have on me.”
He knows now what he wants. “I’m going to make the work I want to make and use every string on my bow – and I’m going to cultivate every string on my bow so it improves. I love what I do, and I love that I’ve arrived at a place where I’m pursuing everything that’s interesting to me.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 24, 2024 as "Unwinding catastrophe".
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