Reading Between The Lines

Choreographer Michael Kliën of Daghdha Dance Company has a special affinity with Edinburgh. Back in the city where he studied for his PhD, he is now at the Edinburgh Fringe for the showcase of his recent production Standing in Ink. Daghdha Dance Company is based in Limerick, Ireland and as Kliën describes “we are hanging off the edge of Europe, we are focusing outside of the all fashions, we are working in a renovated church in the middle of a graveyard and consequently my work is grounded in earth and dirt and continuous rain.”

Standing in Ink is an unusual duet with performers Mark Carberry and Laura Dannequin. It is a durational performance which has been continually re-devised, reworked and re-performed throughout the year. Kliën is keen to emphasise, “Standing in Ink has been developed as an ongoing process. Each performance is unique, there is no finished result, it changes with each audience, and it changes according to the feelings of the dancers on a daily basis. Essentially Mark and Laura are living with this performance.”

Kliën describes his work as a continuous dialogue between himself and the dancers. This is fitting to the research ethos of the company and the enquiring mind of Kliën who notes that “dancers graduate and end up repeating what they learnt in college. Dance has become a commodity of set pieces. I want to go beyond that. Dance is not a language, it is not a set of codes and signs, those are the constructs to help us access dance.”

Kliën advocates the body as the primal communicator within his work and what happens when dancers work together through this understanding. Standing in Ink could be compared to Sam Hsieh’s durational work, One Year Performance (2009), in that Mark and Laura rehearsed daily for a period of time in order to embed the rhythm of their performance into their bodies. Like Hsieh, Mark and Laura have allowed their fatigue and daily lives to influence the work.

The question remains, if Standing in Ink is a dialogue between the choreographer and the dancers, where do the audience come in? The first access point is the title. The “ink” is yet to be written in, the audience are invited to a fluid performance without rules or written composition.

Watching Standing in Ink was like falling into a dream state, particularly the mesmerising performance from Laura Dannequin and her trance like state. The two dancers related to one another like groggy sleepers, reaching through one another through a thick atmosphere that you could cut through with a sword. Interestingly Kliën does not expect applause. “I want to make the audience think rather than clap. I want to start a discussion.”