DancePlayers offer a fresh take on ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’

The Dreaming of the Bones, a one-act dance piece by WB Yeats will be staged by DancePlayers Company at the O’Donoghue Theatre, NUI Galway from Thursday to Saturday, November 7-9, at 8pm nightly and on Sunday, November 10, at 1pm with a Q&A session afterwards.

It’s set in 1916 as a young man arrives to the Burren in County Clare. It’s night-time and he’s looking for refuge in the hills, having taken part in the Easter Rising in Dublin. As he tries to find his way, two figures emerge from the dark around Corcomroe Abbey and offer him guidance. However, these are no ordinary people, but the ghosts of an infamous 12th Century couple, Dermot and Dervorgilla. According to history, they were responsible for the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1167, which led tor centuries of conflict.

This couple need the young man’s help to escape from a curse but he proves unyielding.

Written in 1918, The Dreaming of the Bones is one of the earliest plays by an Irish writer for physical theatre, with dance, masks and music. Inspired by the Japanese Noh theatre tradition, Yeats wrote this piece for an empty stage, where movement, gesture, masks, spatial relations and dance all contribute to the act of storytelling, explains Melinda Szuts of DancePlayers.

Completed just two years after the Easter Rising, it was deemed too problematic to be staged and no attempt was made to produce it until it finally premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1931. Since then, it has become one of Yeats’s most frequently performed dance dramas, in Ireland and abroad.

DancePlayers Company, formed last year, is a group of professional theatre-makers and musicians who produce collaborative pieces for physical theatre.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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