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The boy Dunne good

SHELLEY MARSDEN speaks to Irish dancer Colin Dunne as he prepares for his first UK solo show… By Shelley Marsden - 24/12/08

Acclaimed dancer Colin Dunne saunters into the café at Sadler’s Wells dressed in tracksuit bottoms, dark trainers, leather jacket and woolly hat. His casual yet sporty look makes me think of a New York contemporary dancer, who’s just popped out to the coffee shop between rehearsals.

As soon as we sit down and start talking, he hits me with a stirling impersonation of my Belfast accent. Though Dunne, 40, was born in Birmingham and lived there till he was 26, he has lived in Ireland for many years and most traces of the Midlands have long gone. “The accent kind of slid away”, he says. “It sounds pretentious when people lose their indigenous accents, but I have a musical ear, which has kind of neutered it I guess.”

Dunne is at Sadler’s Wells with twenty other international choreographers for a series of dance workshops and he reminds himself out loud that, for the past week, they’ve all been speaking about dance in very abstract terms. He needs to simplify a little!

You don’t really see many solo performances from an Irish dancer, and Out of Time is Dunne’s first full-length solo piece, though he had been experimenting with short solos since 2001. It had its premiere in Glor, Ennis in January 2008, close to where Dunne lives in Kilaloe, and here in the UK will run for 12 days at the Barbican from mid-January.

“I took my time to create this show,” explains the dark-haired dancer, whose presence is remarkably intense, considering the noise of people chatting, cappuccinos being made and crisp packets crinkling.

In terms of performance, Irish dance as Dunne knows it professionally is like, as he puts it, “sprinting the 800 metres”, all in short, sharp bursts. The same goes for the big pieces in Riverdance; performers going for it full pelt for 90 seconds and are then completely knackered afterwards.

Creating a one-man, one-hour show isn’t something that Dunne or any of his contemporaries, considering the rigours of the dance form, would have entertained before now. What brought him to this point where he decided to give it a go, then?

“I suppose it was coming out of Riverdance, doing Dancing On Dangerous Ground, and then my Masters at the Uni of Limerick in Contemporary Dance”, explains Dunne, while he eats his sandwich.

Out of Time, The Pit (Barbican) runs from Tues 17 - Sat 28 Feb 09 (no performance on Sun 22 Feb). Tickets £12, show 60 mins with no interval. Box Office: 0845 120 7550

For the full interview, buy a copy of the Irish World at your local newsagent or click HERE to buy a copy online for only 50p!