Philip happy to suffer for his art in ‘Whack’

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Humour, sadness, violence and tenderness are among the conflicting emotions on display in Whack, a two-man dance show that explores a dysfunctional human relationship.

But while Whack is about dysfunction, its performers have to trust each other totally for it to work, explains Dubliner Philip Connaughton who created and performs in the show with French dance artist Ashley Chen.

“It’s not just throwing yourself around the stage – although we are doing that. But there’s an art to it.

“What we do on stage is based on trust. We can be physically violent and it brings the performance up another level,” he says.

And, even with total trust, which has come from over a decade of working together, things can go wrong.

Whack premiered in Paris last April, and so far Philip has broken a rib. For Ashley it was a toe.

“When we did the performance in Paris, Ashley’s shoulder just bumped into my rib cage,” recalls Philip. “I couldn’t breathe. I was hyperventilating. We had 15 minutes more to get through and adrenaline carried me.”

Ashley’s injury came even earlier, when they were choreographing Whack.

On the first day of rehearsal, they decided to start with the idea of obstruction – how bodies collide and how people feel the need to control each other, explains Philip.

He was throwing himself sideways into Ashley, running at him as they practised.

“On the third time, my knee landed on his little toe and it broke. We laughed and put trainers on and carried on.”

Getting Whack to its current stage was a process of compromise as well as of physical suffering!

“Ashley had one way of working and I had another,” says Philip. “His was acrobatic, and more physical, as he was interested in movement in space. Mine was more visceral and maybe emotional.

So while Ashley questioned how their bodies were shifting in space, Philip wondered “should we feel the emotional truth behind the movement”.

They thrashed out their viewpoints to create a competed work where the connections are so strong that “it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins”.

Dressed in suits in a bright, white space, the two men negotiate each other as obstacles, leaving the audience to wonder if they are fighting or just trying to communicate

Ashley is the bigger of the two, and the discrepancy in size makes it interesting to watch, Philip feels.

“There’s violence and we are pushing each other around but the dynamic changes through the show.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.