The Flag

The Flag by Emily Aoibheann. Image, Steve O'Connor

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It’s difficult to pigeon-hole award winning artist Emily Aoibheann. One of the founding members of the short lived, but hugely influential aerial troupe Paper Dolls, Aerial Artist naturally springs to mind. But Emily Aoibheann has long moved on to newer challenges. Frequently pushing the body to the edge of physical and durational limits, Performance Artist might seem more apt. Yet that term also falls miserably short. The closest might be Collaborative Multidisciplinary Artist, though that could mean anything. It could mean a writer, director, choreographer who engages in site specific, promenade work built from dance, sculpture, music, visual art, tubas, circular horns, a signature designed speaker, lashings of green ribbon and a little of whatever you're having yourself. Which, oddly enough, is a rather apt summation of some of the elements informing Emily Aoibheann’s current production, The Flag. A multidisciplinary, site specific, promenade performance gracing The National Gallery’s Shaw Room. Exploring national identity as a lived experience, particularly for women, whose tensions are steeped in cultural conditioning. The Flag interrogating The National Gallery as both shrine and purveyor of cultural consumption. Resulting in a work of near unbearable beauty refined by visceral, sensual power.

Comprised of three individual dance sequences and a musical coda, with the entirety repeated three times, it's safer to think of The Flag as a visual triptych rather than an interconnected narrative. A mother, daughter and holy ghost of women shaped by, and shaping, cultural narratives of identity. Commencing, unannounced, with elemental sounds like breaths, or water, or wind soon married to music. Preceding dancer Amberlee Toumanguelov crafting statuesque bodily sculptures straining against, yet shaped by, inner and outer tensions. The strictures of classical form etched in poses defined by Michelangelo-like musculature and formal ballet positions. Positions held, moved in and out of, or repositioned for the audience’s gaze on all sides of the room. The body’s inhuman efforts heightening its power and fragility as a sculptural and performative site. Like the pillared busts around the room, Toumanguelov’s gaze seems to both register and ignore you in meditative silence. There is nothing frenetic to witness here. Just looking giving way to feeling in a delicate exchange of surrender. In the artist’s disclosure of themselves and a reciprocal audience disclosure, less intense perhaps, with both disclosing the self to itself.

The Flag by Emily Aoibheann. Image, Steve O'Connor

As silently as it began, the first sequence ends and a second commences with Anja Nicholson’s clarion call on the circular horn. Beginning a seductive swirling, playful conversation with the instrument, again contemplatively paced, with movement and sound establishing momentary, individual tableau. Nicholson’s external smile offering a private glimpse of some inner delight. Lithe, nimble, at once serious and playful, Nicholson later frames her head within the horn’s circular form before sticking her tongue out like a mischievous pixie. You can’t but spontaneously smile in response. More playfulness follows, meticulously and pain-stakingly crafted. Recognising that whatever this woman is, angel or nymph, she is lighter, freer, more playful than her predecessor.

The final sequence unites Toumanguelov and Nicholson with dancer Annique van Niekerk, reinforcing The Flag’s three part design. A ritual of unbearable tension; you can forget reformer pilates classes. Your core will sympathetically tighten in psychosomatic response as all three bodies, like aerial artists grounded holding v-shaped positions, slowly, meticulously, painfully wind green ribbon around their arms, legs, hands and neck. A steady pulse from a Horn-Mounted Speaker issues frequencies whose vibrations trace tectonic tensions glimpsed in tremors of muscle. The durational tensions making exacting demands on the artists, yet rewardingly transformative for the audience if they surrender to it. The air, space and bodies, the indifferent artworks, disinterested busts and glorious chandeliers releasing trapped energies emanating from, yet channelled through, three taut bodies. Cohering in a visceral, breathtaking experience in which past and present, room and artist merge in connected aliveness. The unannounced arrival of tuba player and composer Adam Buttimer not so much ending as offering release with a beautiful musical coda. Until it all begins again, from the beginning, and then once more.

The Flag by Emily Aoibheann. Image, Steve O'Connor

If a flag is culturally symbolic of national identity, our cultural conditioning to such ideas is richly exemplified by The Shaw Room. You might argue that upstairs with its famous sculptures might have better severed as a space for a work centred in the body. But you only need to step through into adjacent Room 21 to understand why it had to be The Shaw Room. Despite excellent paintings, Room 21 is an architectural banality whose walls are lifelessly dull. The Shaw Room with its paintings, staircase, busts and architecture is inhabited by energies decades and centuries old. Like the dancer’s bodies, the space has absorbed history like body memory. Housing energies through form and shape that impact, even when motionless. Indeed, our cultural conditioning prefers if we stand still in contemplative silence and reverently and passively spectate. Or check the name of the artist, taking a photograph if famous, before quickly moving on to the next work. Something The Flag always challenges yet never truly subverts, despite stringent efforts to do so.

Despite being encouraged to promenade, of which clearer instruction might have been useful, the audience pause on the precipice of the performance, unsure how to enter the room. An uncertainty compounded by Emily Aoibheann’s design. The Flag taking place in what is essentially a room within The Shaw Room. Another frame within a room framing frames. One loosely delineated by Buttimer and his tuba, Emily Aoibheann, and van Niekerk on tech at one end, and the Horn-Mounted Speaker, designed by Emily Aoibheann and Ed Devane at the other. A loosely contained space people seemed uncomfortable entering even when encouraged to move closer.  And they should. Whether standing, seated, on the floor, close up, far way, inside the room, on the stairs, or outside gazing in, shifting frames and perspective infinitely enriches and transforms the experience. Multiple focalisations repositioning the subjective gaze and, therefore, the experience of looking. Doubly important given the quality of audience attention impacts directly on performances.

The Flag by Emily Aoibheann. Image, Steve O'Connor

In reimagining the museum as a performative space, The Flag aspires to reimagine our engagement with that space, our responses to it and its artworks, and our resulting sense of national identity. Un-conditioning, or differently conditioning our expectations of art, museums, cultural identity and cultural conditioning. Enriching art as a private act of solitary reflection whilst opening it to a more shared, sensual engagement, it attempts to reclaim identity from blind, cultural consumption defined by culturally specific paradigms of meaning. So begin at the beginning, middle or end. Leave, come back at anytime during the performance, and leave again. Move in and out of the performance space, ever mindful of the performers. Do so till you realise The Flag is not a visual experiment but a visceral experience. A tense, gentle, contemplative fanfare in which the body is strained and sensual. A site for the subversion of cultural identity, consumption and conditioning. As creator, choreographer, and director, Emily Aoibheann’s collaborative style encourages signature stylings in service of a singular vision. Which, in The Flag, is forever in search of integrity, intensity and depth. In which artworks representing the past press against a performative present in which display can give way to experience if you allow it. The Flag proving intense, wildly ambitious and just that little bit mad at times. Or touched by a measure of genius. An apt description of Emily Aoibheann perhaps.

The Flag by Emily Aoibheann, developed in collaboration with the artistic team, runs at The Shaw Room, The National Gallery of Ireland, until January 31st.

For more information visit The National Gallery.