Head Above Water

Back in 2006, CoisCéim rocked Aurora Nova – a venue not short of amazing companies – with the high pressure, hardcore Knots. Taking RD Laing’s unsparing dissection of relationships and bringing it to brutal life, they proved that dance is not merely an aesthetic extravagance, but can be hard-hitting in ways that plays can only dream.

Knots had a cast of six: Swimming with My Mother is a duet. A meditation on memory, and the bond between child and parent, it sees the artistic director, David Bolger explore his personal history.

“Dance has the power to communicate on many levels, all at the same time,” he explains. “Swimming With My Mother was created in a very different way to CoisCéim's normal practice. I wanted to be led and be fully open to what the piece was delivering to me.” 

Choreographing onto himself and his mother, Bolger has discovered new challenges and advantages. “There is no need to be someone else in the performance. Being oneself on stage takes a long time to get used to,” he admits. At the same time, he has discovered that the work has an intimate impact. “Lots of the feedback we gets is how people go away thinking about their own relationships with parents or children.” Like Knots, which famously made some audience members reconsider their marriage plans, Swimming evokes personal reactions.

Since his mother taught Bolger to swim before he could walk, he would later reflect “that the gift of swimming, and indeed dancing, had been passed down through generations of her family.” The choreography draws on the physicality of both activities.

“Swimming is very rhythmic and a physically demanding sport - as is dancing. I was very interested in developing movement which would harness how swimming is demonstrated by swimming instructors 'on land' to students in the water.”

This led Bolger to the next task: “to define how my mother's body moves, after years of teaching swimming.” Further family history informed the process: “How she remembered learning to dance with her father, Nicolas . Then dancing with my father, Andrew, in Dublin ballrooms in the 1950s.” As the work progressed, Bolger acknowledges, “We both learnt huge amounts about each other and the result is a physical closeness in the work.”

Coming from a work-in-progress as part of a festival aimed at celebrating the creativity of older people, Swimming has become a success across Ireland. The representation of a nurturing relationship, the evocation of childhood by the sea and the obvious love between the performers makes it one of the many contemporary dances that steps over the traditional line between performance and reality, recreating something that grows beyond the stage.