Sky Video

Dublin Dance Festival is the premier dance event on the Irish arts calendar. Each year in May, the Festival brings together dance artists and choreographers from across the world to share vibrant contemporary dance with audiences in Ireland. 2012 will see the 8th edition of the festival, and the fifth as an annual event. Sky Arts spent the month leading up to the festival following two Irish based dance companies, Liz Roche Company and Junk Ensemble as they prepared new work. Established in 1999, with a world class dance ensemble, Liz Roche Company (formerly known as Rex Levitates Dance Company), is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary dance companies. Based In Dublin and led by Choreographer and Artistic Director Liz Roche, to date they have produced a diverse programme of innovative dance productions examining sources of inspiration, embodied social and cultural constructs and the intensity of physical connections and boundaries through their unique, organically developed movement style. In our film we follow Liz as she worked on her new piece Body and Forgetting . In it she explores themes of loss, separation, hope and control. A cast of remarkable dancers appear on film and on stage, as if creating different versions of themselves. They struggle to understand how and why they have forgotten. Junk Ensemble was established by Megan and Jessica Kennedy with a commitment to creating works of brave and imaginative dance theatre. Winners of Best Production Award 2011, Culture Ireland Touring Award in 2008, Excellence and Innovation Award in 2007 and listed as a Sunday Times Highlight in 2011, junk ensemble’s work has toured nationally and internationally. Their productions are often created in collaboration with artists from other disciplines to produce a rich mix of visual and performance styles that seeks to challenge the traditional audience performer relationship. This approach has led to productions being created in non-traditional or found spaces as well as more conventional theatre spaces. We followed Megan and Jessica as they rehearsed their new piece The Falling Song . Performed by an international all male cast and a live children’s choir, the piece looks at the nature of flying and falling and the dangerous relationship between the two. Male physicality is pushed to the extremities to explore self-destruction, invincibility and failure. Additional footage in promo care of Dublin Dance Festival and Ged Murray.