Aerial dance looks easy, but can be a painful process for the dancers. Irish company Fidget Feet’s high-energy show ‘Raw’ premieres tomorrow at Clonmel’s Junction Festival

WHATEVER ABOUT THAT old stage adage about the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd, in the cavernous former warehouse in Clonmel where Fidget Feet are rehearsing for their new show, it’s the smell of Tiger Balm that’s present here. Tiger Balm is a heat rub for muscular aches and pains, and there are several limbs here that are in need of ease. The cast of four are currently spending much of their day suspended from harnesses and ropes as they rehearse Raw, which will premieres this week as part of the Junction Festival.

“Being in those harnesses is very painful, and it’s really difficult,” Chantal McCormick confesses. Together with her musician husband, Jym Daly, they are joint artistic directors of Fidget Feet, Ireland’s only aerial dance company. They have performed suspended from cranes, trees, buildings and boats for their shows, and do site-specific work for festivals;they’ve just returned from Glastonbury.

Raw has been several months in development, and on the day I visit rehearsals, a fortnight before opening, the piece is still evolving.

The four dancers are McCormick, Lee Clayden, Steve Ryan and Jennifer Paterson. The plan all along was, at this stage, to bring in choreographer David Bolger, artistic director of the Dublin dance theatre company Cois Céim, to work with the material and shape it into a final piece.

“I suppose my role is a bit like an editor,” Bolger says. This show has been a new challenge for Bolger, who is best known for his choreography with dancers who use a floor as their working space, rather than the air.

“The first thing I had to do was understand the equipment and the science of it,” he explains. “That if you swing this way, you come back that way. How do you get from one piece of equipment to the other? And when you clip on a harness, can I use that sound as part of the narrative? For me, I’m very interested in how the piece can tell a story. Raw is not so abstract in its form that you can’t pull it into a narrative.”

The idea for the piece started with the meaning behind the word “raw”.

“We wanted to make a piece that was about raw energy, and that would connect with young people, so that’s where the idea of a club came into it,” explains McCormick. “And I really wanted to make a piece of work with pole-dancing in it. It always looks like circus to me.”

Since December, Fidget Feet spent periods of time researching movement with certain pieces of aerial equipment for the new show, including a pole-dancing pole. While most traditional theatre pieces begin with a script, the kind of physical theatre that aerial dance is doesn’t require a script. In fact, narrative is the last element to be woven into the piece.

Raw is about a night that four people spend together in a club, and there are club-related themes that run through it, such as dance, relationships, barriers – real and metaphorical – pole-dancing, music, energy, drugs, being high, and water.

The set, in an old Chadwick’s warehouse on Clonmel’s Queen Street, took four days to rig. It’s a large square set, framed by scaffolding, and the rig looks as fiendishly complex as the rigging of a tall ship, with many ropes, loops and wires that the cast spend most of their time attached to, usually in mid-air. One of the methods Fidget Feet are using for this show is the pendulum, which translates into a kind of human pulley system. One performer descends a ladder attached to another performer by a series of ropes, who then ascends by counterweight.

With a rig this complex and four people using it throughout the show, timing is crucial. In a straight play, if someone forgets their lines, there are ways of covering up, from improvising to being prompted. However, in a piece of aerial dance, if you miss your cue to swing in a certain direction on a certain beat of music, then you could injure both yourself and a fellow performer on impact as you collide.

There are also other, quite specific, challenges in aerial dance.

“Your body can react in different ways through pain or fear,” Clayden says. “Your momentum can completely change if you hear a noise in the rigging, for instance. That sends your body into fear and makes you change your movements as a result.”

You can’t have a club without music, and composer and DJ Jym Daly is ensconced in a DJ box high up over the floor, mixing tracks live. There is another space over him again, a surreal livingroom set, where everything – walls, chair, television – is painted to look like blue skies and cloud. Every now and then during the show, Daly leaves the DJ box and goes upstairs to control the sound system by channel surfing instead.

When the performers are harnessed up, they start rehearsing a complex sequence which involves them literally flying at each other’s throats. “There’s nowhere to hide in this show,” Bolger points out. “And it’s a physical and painful process, this flying, even though it all looks effortless to the audience. It’s part of the idea of rawness, so we’re not hiding the harnesses. It’s playing with concepts too, like the idea that you get high on drugs and start flying.”

OVER THE MONTHS they devised it, the performers have all been working on incorporating certain movements and sequences into the show. It’s Bolger’s job now to decide what is working best as a whole, both visually and dramatically. This throat-flying sequence is about the way people dance in clubs, often starting together and then moving off to dance in their own trance-like space. He watches the sequence intently as it runs through, ending with the performers jumping onto and swinging off individual ropes. Then he makes the dancers recount the beats of the piece from start to finish. He wants to exaggerate the separation between each of them when they go into their own dances.

“Push yourself towards the ropes,” he instructs. “You want to get away from everyone else. Struggle as you’re being pulled back.” They run the sequence again. And again. After three run-throughs, Bolger is satisfied – it’s now far clearer that a crowd of people dancing together have broken off from each other to do their own thing. It’s full of energy. The place is pulsing with it, so you can only imagine what this show will be like during the festival with its audience of 200 to add to the adrenaline.

At this stage, the dancers stop for water and a brief break. They’re visibly sweating. Because everything is so physical, everything takes longer in aerial dance, from devising the piece, to rehearsing it. In Raw, everyone is on set for the hour and 15 minutes’ duration of the show, which takes a lot of energy.

In the rest period, there’s a discussion about how Irish audiences are becoming more used to seeing physical theatre. “But Irish audiences are more used to seeing foreign companies come here to perform physical theatre, rather than thinking it can be home-grown too,” Ryan points out.

Towards the end of the morning’s run-through, there is a pause while the photographer does some close-up shots of McCormick and Clayden. While dancers Jennifer Paterson and Steve Ryan wait their turn, they shin up ropes and curl into the curve of looped ropes in the way some people collapse into an armchair for a rest. They swing back and forwards, completely at ease on their backs, lying on a rope in mid-air. They remind me of something. After a while, it comes to me. Big cats, draped across branches and flicking their tails as they take in the lie of the land below. No wonder they’re using Tiger Balm.

Raw previews today, opens tomorrow until July 7 at the Junction Theatre @ Chadwicks, as part of Clonmel’s Junction Festival, until July 13. www.junctionfestival.com