image: Katie Davenport

“Aided by Coonan’s impressive score…the musicians' presence adds to the sense of shared connection as music and movement travel together through peaks and troughs”

★★★★ — The Irish Times

“A mediative score by Coonan goes a long way to articulating mood, as it does throughout Dēmos. Not least in Breach, in which Coonan's demented fairytale like music, played by musicians onstage, informs a series of duets, again defined by physical distance and creative closeness.”

★★★★ — theartsreview

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A moving tapestry of live music and dance exploring human connection.

Part gathering, part concert, part improvisation, this live performance is about people gathering together in a time of fractured connections and shifting environments. It explores the desires and compulsions in the urge to move, the charge that circulates in a crowd, the connections between music and movement in shifting spaces of togetherness and separation.

When we began working on Dēmos in 2019, we started with a simple desire: to explore the dual themes of ‘togetherness’ and ‘democracy’ through the abstract mediums of music and movement. Given the political landscape of the time, it felt urgent to try to embody how a large group of people, in our case dancers and musicians, might come together and intuit the presence of each other; to find a harmony or equilibrium through the ebb-and-flow processes of co-operation, tension, resolution.

Having met within Irish theatre — a culture arguably dominated by literary figures, impulses, and contexts — we wanted to make work that might somehow embody this in an abstract non-verbal way. Music and dance are, to us, the most complex and immediate forms of expression and communication — they exist without words, and, in their purest forms, are not ‘about’ anything. They can be the most open, abstract art forms, and as such felt to us a powerful combined medium to show what it could mean to ‘be together’ – an immediate experience of it rather than any didactic story about it.

That original desire still feels urgent today, though perhaps for different, albeit equally meaningful, reasons. Having worked on Dēmos across a time period wherein we simply couldn’t be in the same physical space, the question of how to come together in a live space now had to take account of what it felt like to be separated. Live physical spaces become contrasted with projected spaces, dancers and musicians are present on stage and separated onto projections and recordings. Physical spaces and digital spaces separate and collide in new hybrid worlds.

Our title comes from the ancient Greek root of the word democratic — a dēmos refers to both a district, or land, and the people therein — and throughout the course of this entire project remained a most simple frame for what has always been an abstract experience: an offering of pure movement and music.

Liz Roche & David Coonan, October 2021

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