Olga had the opportunity to present work at the Heritage Days Festival in Sharjah, the cultural capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Thinking what the UK contribution to this might be she came up with the idea of pairing my dancers with Edinburgh based Irish Dance and Music Troupe Absolutely Legless that specialise in Irish dance and music.
One of Olga’s skills as a Producer is bringing artistic collaborations together from different disciplines and styles of dance, skating, sculpture as a few examples of successful projects. We had a date scheduled for a rehearsal session in Newcastle one Sunday afternoon. Along with company dancers Abirami and Kali we turned up open minded and keen to meet Absolutely Legless and see what we could look to create together.
Being used to working quickly and managing time effectively and figure out creative challenges instinctively we set to work through an introduction and showing each other some examples of movement vocabulary to help understand and appreciate each other’s art forms and figure out points of cross over.
Footwork and rhythmic patterns, narrative and story-based Irish folk songs were strong ways in as a common meeting point.
In a vibrant cultural exchange and through experimentation we found an artistic wavelength of collaboration and were able to sketch out some ideas and material ranging from pure dance, footwork based, pure music and narrative music.
We left the 3 hour session with a strong sense of what the potential of the material was and everyone felt confident that we had something rich in variety that brought the two worlds together well and would work nicely in Sharjah.
This was further cemented by building on the experience of Sharjah to create Irish Indian Dreams as an hour long show for Billingham Festival.
Balbir Singh
Choreographer