dancing about art - Arcane Collective

Saturday November 13, 2010
Brocquy’s that she ever saw were his white faces and
ancestral heads. “I found them deeply inspiring,” she says.
“I had only just come to Ireland and they made me feel
more at home here, I related very much to his way of
looking at the world.
“Having got to know Louis I asked him had he ever seen
his paintings danced. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no,
he said ‘that’s such a good idea’ so I took it upon myself
to do it. There is a lot of movement and energy in his
paintings so it felt very natural and a lot of fun.”
DANCING ABOUT ART
INTERVIEW:
Morleigh Steinberg has devised a dance homage to Louis
le Brocquy. Róisín Ingle met her at a break in rehearsals
HALFWAY THROUGH INTERVIEWING dancer
Morleigh Steinberg, a U2 song comes on the stereo, a
barely audible elephant in the back room of the Dún
Laoghaire pub where we meet to discuss her latest
project, a dance interpretation of Louis le Brocquy’s
paintings. When I point out the musical “coincidence”,
dark haired, dark eyed Steinberg, who also happens to be
Mrs The Edge of U2, doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes, I heard
that when it came on,” she says in her soft voice. Of
course she did. You imagine that it’s no longer much of a
novel marital hazard for U2 songs to find their way on to
the stereo when she or her husband venture out for
business or pleasure.
The paintings reminded her of the dancing style of her cochoreographer Oguri – a Japanese dancer who is married
to her sister Roxanne (also a dancer) – and of the work
they do together. “We dancers are very incestuous,” she
laughs at one point. “Louis wasn’t just painting the face,
he was painting what was coming from the inside out and
what we do as dancers is more about that too,” she says.
She met Oguri through her sister who studied alongside
him in Japan. Her first feature length documentary Height
of Sky was about her brother-in-law’s quest to rediscover
his relationship with dance in the Californian deserts. He
also dances in the le Brocquy piece. As with much of her
work, she says, “it’s a family affair”.
Steinberg, a beautiful women with creamy skin who looks
younger than her 40-something years, has taken a break
from rehearsals in a nearby dance studio. There, dancers
including Liz Roche from acclaimed modern dance troupe
Rex Levitates are warming up, contorting limbs into
elegant poses in preparation for the world premiere of
Cold Dance Colour – A Dance Homage to Louis le
Brocquy . A grafter, and multi-tasker extraordinaire,
Steinberg is artistic director, co-choreographer, lighting
designer and soloist for the piece. The first works of le
Cold Dream Colour is having its premiere in the Pavilion
Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, the same week that le Brocquy
turns 94. The first show was last night and the second is
this evening. “I’m not sure if he can come. I would
actually just perform it just for him and for his wife Ann
and their friends,” she says. Her husband, also known as
Dave Evans, has composed the music with Paul Chavez.
1 “He knew how to go naturally, I think, it was just a matter
of him seeing that he didn’t have to make a song out of
it,” she says. The costumes are by family friend, writer
and fashion designer Mariad Whisker.
ISO spent their formative years collaborating and creating
their own work, starring in music videos and feature
films, as well as touring their own live shows. One of the
videos they starred in was U2’s With or Without You . She
first met the band and struck up a friendship with Bono
backstage after one of the gigs on the Joshua Tree tour.
Does she remember the first time she met Edge? Were
there fireworks? “Yes, I remember, but no, there were no
fireworks,” she says. She became Bono’s movement
coach for the Zoo TV tour. “One day he just said, ‘why
don’t you dance, you are there watching every night’,”
she remembers, so she took over the belly dancer part in
Mysterious Ways even though she wasn’t a bellydancer.
Dance, Steinberg says, has been her life. As a young child
growing up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a lawyer and
an interior designer, she was tutored by a “wonderful”
teacher in modern dance. “My mother found this teacher
and we all danced with her, my sister, my mother, a
station wagon of my school friends . . . It was dancing
without mirrors, so it wasn’t about looking like everyone
else. There was technique but not having a mirror you
learned to express yourself, like when you are a child you
are not worried about what you look like, no, it’s about
what do you feel like.”
“I’m a dancer, I watch, I keep my eyes open,” she says.
Her romance with Edge, who had separated from his first
wife, took off at the end of the tour. “I always think it
took us a long time to find each other,” she muses. She
was never phased by making friends and finding romance
within the world’s biggest rock group. “I grew up in
Hollywood, remember,” she says.
A “second generation Los Angeleno”, she had something
of a privileged background, attending Beverley Hills High
– “a really great school with fantastic music and dance
facilities which is why my mother sent us there” – and
grew up around famous Hollywood neighbours.
Her grandmother, an Austrian born in New York, was
secretary to the head of Universal Pictures and her South
African grandfather was a camera man in the city. “So it’s
in the blood, Hollywood. My mother grew up on the
Universal lot,” she says. “But LA is much more than that,
part of it is this very large hick town, it’s also very multicultural and then there is Hollywood. But most of the
people who work in the industry are technicians, there are
more of them than famous actors. I love it that people
went west to have a dream,” she says.
Moving to Ireland was the next natural step, but as a rover
dancer it only felt permanent when the couple had their
two children, daughter and son Sian and Levi. The couple
have homes in Dublin, New York, France and LA. “I
came to Ireland with a suitcase, it never really felt as
though I moved all my stuff here. I still kept my place in
LA, I still have it. It wasn’t until I had children that I felt
‘well, now I am here’.”
How did she adjust to life in Ireland? “Honestly? It was
hard. Coming from a multi-cultural international city like
Los Angeles it was hard to suddenly be in a culture I had
no connection with and no roots . . . at the same time it
was wonderful to be in a country that was completely
itself. I feel like that about Italy. Although I have watched
Ireland change over the years and I can’t help feeling
‘don’t do it, don’t lose the Irishness’.”
She is unashamedly enthusiastic about her hometown
even though dancing has provided her with something of
a gypsy life, taking her away from the place of her birth
for long periods since she was a teenager.
She was 16 when she went away to study dance at the
famous Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and 17
when she travelled to Paris with her older sister. “I turned
18 in Paris, it was just this crazy year of dancing,” she
remembers. On her way back from the city she was
invited to join the fledgling Momix dance company, the
influential Connecticut-based group of “dancer
illusionists”. After several years of touring she left with
three other Momix founders to create a dance company
called ISO. (Given the abstract lingo that surrounds
modern dance it’s heartening to discover that the I, S and
O stand for nothing more esoteric than I’m So
Optimistic.)
She is clearly itching to get back to the studio now,
politely answering questions in the pub while her head,
her heart is back in the studio with Oguri and the other
dancers.
“I just wanted to bring everybody’s expertise to bear on
this, I want it to be a live event, a real celebration of
Louis’s work,” she says. She hopes it has legs and that
there will be a demand for the work to go on tour. So far
her professional life has taken her into lighting, directing,
filmography and photography but she is a dancer before
all of that.
ISO were two couples who at one point romantically
“crossed over” as Steinberg puts it. The dynamic, she
says, was not unlike a rock group, which is perhaps how
she has a deep appreciation for her husband’s work. “It’s
not always easy when he is away touring, sometimes you
don’t feel like being the one left behind with the children .
. . but I really respect his work ethic, as he does mine, and
I love when people are working hard at what they do
best,” she says.
“I will never stop moving,” she says as she takes her
leave, a portrait of understated elegance. “As long as I can
move I will dance.”
Cold Dream Colour – A Dance Homage to Louis le
Brocquy is at The Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire,
Dublin tonight. paviliontheatre.ie
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