Finding the Goldilocks Zone

Back in 2008, Legitimate Bodies were the surprise comedy hit of Dance Base. A show that promised to use contact improvisation to explain the Irish Peace Process was hardly expected to be a side-splitting fusion of serious politics and obscure technique: yet Hanging In There elegantly jumped the divide and was an accessible and hilarious introduction to both.

“Hanging in There has been hard to follow,” admits Nick Bryson, one of the two dancers behind the company. “The work gathered momentum and was successful. We performed it that many times that we grew into those characters, the Northern Irish politicians. It is also a pressure - or at least a big responsibility - to go into the studio knowing that you have that piece in all its succinctness and clarity to live up to. It is the second album effect! But I think we have worked slowly and therefore deliberately and we are once again ‘on the money’.”

Their new piece, The Goldilocks Zone, has been created through a familiar process. “The starting point has to be the specific connection on stage, between co-performer Damian Punch and me,” he begins. “It cannot really be altered: just shoved into a different container. This time the glaringly obvious answer is that of an Irish-built spaceship.”

It is a mark of Legitimate Bodies’ finesse that this is a genuine all-ages show, a rare beast within contemporary dance. The original concept for this show was, in fact, even more child-friendly. “The original container in our second show was some sort of peculiarly abstracted set of a kid’s TV show, Bryson continues. “ I/we was/were/still am/are deeply imbued with the need to explore the ‘genre’ of the kid’s TV presenter (actually Damian not so much, now you come to mention it).”

“However myself and Damian on CBBC would be strangely trivial and superficial. I realised within one afternoon that we were actually worth much more than that, not that kid’s TV isn’t worth a lot. Therefore, as with all art, it is a question of internalising the feeling, until perhaps we have emerged as Irish astronauts containing the essence of the Irish kids TV presenter. It is a kind of glam rock eurotrash feel, but of course more profound than that. We are contemporary dancers after all.”

Belonging to a genre often caricatured as pretentious and obscure, Bryon and Punch are consciously courting a wider audience. “We use comedy to reach the audience. I, personally, am sometimes almost overbearingly conscious within the contemporary dance scene that the Legitimate Bodies Dance work of Nick and Damian is very accessible.”

This has almost led to Legitimate Bodies finding themselves excluded from their natural home. “Contemporary dance is so cool and this work is somehow off the radar,” Bryson points out. “We give all our attention to creating a work that will entertain, and is the ideal vehicle for our diverse abilities.”

Indeed, Punch and Bryson have very different backgrounds: “Damian is an actor, mover, comedian, and improviser. I am a dancer, performer, and undoubtedly more obscure in my theatrical instincts.” It is in the space between the two that the particular style of Legitimate Bodies is forged, and this style suggests the content. “ One ideal vehicle is an astronaut who learns to speak ‘alien’ with his body (a dancer). It is almost like the solution to a mathematical puzzle. There is a friction there too that makes the work, as I haul myself out of abstraction. And Damian is just Damian, which is saying a lot, don't get me wrong.”

One of the joys of Hanging In There was the way that they used a contemporary format to find the humour in the serious, and illuminate the words through illustrative movement. This time, despite the fanciful surmise - “We are representatives of mankind expressly trying to communicate with aliens and command an important spaceship that the audience is on too, Bryson explains – science gets the LBDC treatment.
“The Goldilocks Zone is an astronomical term for an inhabitable region around a distant star and it would take 36,000 years for us to get there. The NASA Kepler Mission has just discovered there may be 100 million ‘Goldilocks Zone’ habitable planets out there. This is real. An initial choice has repercussions that we keep following through. This is real too.”
Despite the seriousness of the theme, LBDC are a prime Fringe experience: joyous and fun, taking tough ideas and offering them in a palatable entertainment. “Our work fits within the dance world in a way by opening outwards to other forms of theatre and mixing it together,” says Punch. “It could be put under many headings”. This, adds Bryson, is “why it works in festivals such as The Edinburgh Fringe.”

While acknowledging that children are a great influence on their work – the sense of fun is, indeed, childlike - Bryson does leave with a final warning. “I would say that myself and Damian, as Irish, do feel the legacy of Samuel Beckett. There is that sense of ineffable apocalypse and waiting and then actually ending up where you started, like a distant planet ready to support a cargo of humans. This is the adult side of what is definitely a dance show for all the family.”