Liv O’Donoghue is a dancer and choreographer. Benedict Schlepper-Connolly is a composer.  On Tuesday March 15th, Liv is performing This woman I met  at the Southbank Centre in London, featuring music composed by Benedict. This year, they are collaborating on two new productions at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo. The first is an inter-generational piece to be presented as part of May’s Bealtaine Festival, and a documentary-style film.  Below is an exchange of thoughts between these two artists on their respective disciplines – dance and music – and what might happen when the two meet.

Liv O’Donoghue:
I guess from the beginnings of time, music and movement have been in a harmonious relationship. Rhythm in sound almost always encourages rhythm in movement and vice versa. Every human being on this planet has experienced that. It resonates on an incredibly primal level. So, with the relationship being so instinctual, it’s hard to tell sometimes which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the music or the movement. In choreography, it often depends on the starting point of the work. Sometimes I might just hear a piece of music and instantly see the shape and colour of the choreography. Other times the movement may exist, and the sound simply allows the dance to exist in a different world, its essence heightened by the music.

***

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly:
Six years ago. Manhattan in a heat wave. The music season is out, but dance performances almost every night. The Joyce Soho on Mercer Street, La Mama in the Lower East Side, Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea; for me the unearthing of a new world. It seemed that dance, unlike music, was free from the pressure to explain itself; it was entirely convincing as a statement of elegance alone. One afternoon, in a penthouse near the Lincoln Center, Merce Cunningham wheeled in by his nurse; thick black shades, a suit too large and a dickie bow. A public interview. His interrogator wants the gossip on his life with John Cage, my only reference point in all of this. But late in life, from his wheelchair, this man was still choreographing. Repetition, tangents, dead-end tales; this was how he illuminated the work. “It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s how you find a way to accept it.”

***

Liv O’Donoghue:
It was a handkerchief-prepared harmonica. A stirringly sinister, breathy sound and it was perfect. The cloth-wrapped instrument, played by an ensemble of nine musicians, each following the minutiae in breath and movement of the duet of dancers before them. It was the idea of Christian Mason, the first composer I ever collaborated with. Who would think to use such an instrument in such a way? It was like making a discovery and I instantly fell for the collaborative experience. As a choreographer working within my own language, it’s not hard to think outside of the parameters of convention to design a piece of dance, but when it comes to expertise beyond me, such as music, I am burdened by my inabilities to express myself, or even simply to imagine the possibilities. So, there you have the beauty of collaboration. Those instances of discovering an idea or pathway you would never have dreamt of because it would be beyond your personal experience, knowledge or normal concern. Isn’t it an awful shame to be stunted by that?

***

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly:
Some composers say they see the music before they hear it, and some even make drawings before they put notes on the page. Sometimes I listen visually; aged seven, marking the sounds onto the page with crayons as the tape played. We all make comparisons to other professions, perhaps in an attempt at validation. I like to think composers are like architects in they way they work with material, structure and form. But there are limits to these analogies, and a badly made building is a different problem to a poorly constructed piece of music. For me, any visual analogy to music is a frozen one, like a map viewed from above. To think of music becoming movement just gives me a headache. Even though dance, like music, moves in time, it stays a world apart for me.

***

Liv O’Donoghue:
When I see dance in my mind’s eye, it is often shaped by more than just the movement. Music, light and space are entirely different vocabularies, yet so integral to the vision of a dance. The work wouldn’t exist in the same way without collaborators. In recent years, dance has become what some call ‘total theatre’, there are no boundaries to how choreographers can work – film, theatre, text, song, circus – all elements which have become commonplace in dance, the collaborative possibilities endless.

It’s funny that you use the analogy of architecture as that’s often how I’ve thought of my work too. In choreographing, I tend to think in form, shape, structure, design. In recent years, I’ve tried to be more alert to the actual content of my choreography, rather than just the concept of it. Though too often, my practice is marked by circumstances; money, time, space, the limits and parameters of the world surrounding the work, inform so much of how the piece is made.

***

Benedict Schlepper-Connolly:
There was a time when I thought the content – or what I call material – didn’t matter: it was all about structure, about dividing time and filling it. But now I look at it the other way around. Structure and form serve to articulate material; to indulge again in the architecture simile, you can’t build a thing with bad bricks.

I’m a cautious collaborator, to be honest. It has to do with control, and my being used to directing all aspects of the work. Working with others I have to accept, or rather embrace, the fact that things will happen that I don’t expect. There’s a large amount of trust involved. In the end it’s a very healthy thing to do, and liberating.

***

Liv O’Donoghue:
Giving up that creative autonomy does still frighten me. Until I realise the potential of arriving at a different possibility that I originally anticipated. That’s the beauty of process in creativity, the realisation of something new and unfamiliar. I don’t think I’d be as stimulated by choreography if the result was mapped out from the beginning. Every collaboration I’ve been involved in to date, has offered me new insights into how I work, and, like some kind creatively enriching Venn diagram, I’d like to think that I have influenced others in the same way.

In May 2011, you can see Liv performing another choreography, TEN, as part of the Re-Presenting Ireland showcase in Dublin Dance Festival