Acclaimed dance show inspired by poetry and art

“Yeats didn’t like the obvious and he wanted to push boundaries,” says choreographer Liz Roche, whose ground-breaking and critically acclaimed dance show, Bastard Amber, will be staged in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre tomorrow (Tuesday)

Presented by the Liz Roche Dance Company, it’s inspired by Yeats’ poem, Sailing to Byzantium, and the Gold Meditation paintings of artist Patrick Scott.

Bastard Amber is a co-production between The Abbey Theatre, Dublin Dance Festival and Liz’s own company, she explains.

The Liz Roche Company previously performed one of her pieces on the Abbey’s smaller Peacock stage in 2013, after which the Abbey’s artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail asked her to create a show for the main stage.

That meant Liz was the first Irish choreographer to be commissioned to create a full-length dance piece for Ireland’s national theatre.

“People have described it as ‘beautiful’,” she says, and certainly the reviews for Bastard Amber which conjures up an exotic Byzantine world, have been fantastic since it premiered at last year’s Dublin Dance Festival.

Liz had been a fan of Yeats since school, where she felt a connection with his poetry “and I didn’t connect with much at school”, she says.

He was central in establishing the Abbey as Ireland’s national theatre just over a century ago, and had always been an advocate of dance, she says. He wanted it to be part of Irish artistic life in the same way as theatre has become.

Yeats’ love of dance is apparent in poetry such as Among School Children, where he puts the dancer centre stage with the line ‘how can we know the dancer from the dance?’, she adds.

He was “sensitive around the body”, she observes, and the lines in Sailing to Byzantium which observe that “An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .” reflect that.

“Sailing to Byzantium always stood out for me, growing up”, says Liz, adding that her aunt, an English teacher, used to discuss the poem with her so there was a really strong connection.

From in his 1928 collection, The Tower, it was written by Yeats “in later life when he was thinking about death and where he would be going”, says Liz.

There’s a sense of “him not knowing what would happen, but he’s going there anyway”, adds the choreographer.

“He is taking a journey into the imagination, getting rid of the body and sailing off into Byzantium, which had been renowned as a great place of culture and economy.”

In the poem, Yeats makes several references to gold – hammered gold, gold enamelling, a gold mosaic and a golden bough. These offered Liz a link with pioneering artist Patrick Scott, which came about almost by accident, she says.

“I knew about his art but not about his gold paintings. Through a friend I discovered more about his work and met him briefly before he died [in 2014],” she explains.

After Scott’s death, Liz spoke to his partner, Eric, about her Yeats dance project and asked if it would be possible for Scott’s work be a part of it, specifically the “Gold Meditation paintings which are very clear and very simple”.

He agreed, and these are “now almost part of the set design”, she says. “They are gold against a black background with clear lines and very beautiful.”

She then worked with set designer Paul Wills, lighting designer Lee Curran, and with Catherine Fay on costumes.  Ray Harman composed the music and is one of four live performers who provides the score.

The dancers are the most crucial element of Bastard Amber and Liz has worked with performers from Ireland, France and the UK to create the piece.

That involved in-depth analysis of the poem and Yeats’ lines such as the one about his heart being “fastened to a dying animal”, which created the picture of a person trying to break free of their body.

The troupe of nine (including Liz) also explored the eastern philosophies which he embraced later in life, and have incorporated Sufi dance into the piece. The preparation also involved watching the Peter Brooks film Meetings with Remarkable Men to explore sacred dances and the energy that can be held in the pattern of a dance, she says.

“Sailing to Byzantium is used as the structure [of the dance piece] from start to finish but in an abstract way, as if you are intuiting the poem. The best thing to do is sit there and let the images wash over you.”

Like Yeats, Liz wants to push boundaries by letting the dancers represent the energy of the piece, capturing its restlessness, its meditative nature and ultimately its peace.

And she’s delighted to have the opportunity.

“You don’t often get to make a piece of this size in Ireland because of the cost. Everyone came on board for it and it’s brilliant to have this opportunity.”

Bastard Amber will be in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday (November 15) at 8pm as part of a nationwide tour. Tickets: €20/€16 from 091 569777 or online.