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Dancing about art

INTERVIEW: Morleigh Steinberg has devised a dance homage to Louis le Brocquy. Róisín Ingle met her at a break in rehearsals

HALFWAY THROUGH INTERVIEWING dancer Morleigh Steinberg, a U2 song comes on the stereo, a barely audible elephant in the back room of the Dún Laoghaire pub where we meet to discuss her latest project, a dance interpretation of Louis le Brocquy’s paintings. When I point out the musical “coincidence”, dark haired, dark eyed Steinberg, who also happens to be Mrs The Edge of U2, doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes, I heard that when it came on,” she says in her soft voice. Of course she did. You imagine that it’s no longer much of a novel marital hazard for U2 songs to find their way on to the stereo when she or her husband venture out for business or pleasure.

Steinberg, a beautiful women with creamy skin who looks younger than her 40-something years, has taken a break from rehearsals in a nearby dance studio. There, dancers including Liz Roche from acclaimed modern dance troupe Rex Levitates are warming up, contorting limbs into elegant poses in preparation for the world premiere of Cold Dance Colour – A Dance Homage to Louis le Brocquy . A grafter, and multi-tasker extraordinaire, Steinberg is artistic director, co-choreographer, lighting designer and soloist for the piece. The first works of le Brocquy’s that she ever saw were his white faces and ancestral heads. “I found them deeply inspiring,” she says. “I had only just come to Ireland and they made me feel more at home here, I related very much to his way of looking at the world.

“Having got to know Louis I asked him had he ever seen his paintings danced. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he said ‘that’s such a good idea’ so I took it upon myself to do it. There is a lot of movement and energy in his paintings so it felt very natural and a lot of fun.”

The paintings reminded her of the dancing style of her co-choreographer Oguri – a Japanese dancer who is married to her sister Roxanne (also a dancer) – and of the work they do together. “We dancers are very incestuous,” she laughs at one point. “Louis wasn’t just painting the face, he was painting what was coming from the inside out and what we do as dancers is more about that too,” she says.

She met Oguri through her sister who studied alongside him in Japan. Her first feature length documentary Height of Sky was about her brother-in-law’s quest to rediscover his relationship with dance in the Californian deserts. He also dances in the le Brocquy piece. As with much of her work, she says, “it’s a family affair”.

Cold Dance Colour is having its premiere in the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, the same week that le Brocquy turns 94. The first show was last night and the second is this evening. “I’m not sure if he can come. I would actually just perform it just for him and for his wife Ann and their friends,” she says. Her husband, also known as Dave Evans, has composed the music with Paul Shavez. “He knew how to go naturally, I think, it was just a matter of him seeing that he didn’t have to make a song out of it,” she says. The costumes are by family friend, writer and fashion designer Mariad Whisker.

Dance, Steinberg says, has been her life. As a young child growing up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a lawyer and an interior designer, she was tutored by a “wonderful” teacher in modern dance. “My mother found this teacher and we all danced with her, my sister, my mother, a station wagon of my school friends . . . It was dancing without mirrors, so it wasn’t about looking like everyone else. There was technique but not having a mirror you learned to express yourself, like when you are a child you are not worried about what you look like, no, it’s about what do you feel like.”

A “second generation Los Angeleno”, she had something of a privileged background, attending Beverley Hills High – “a really great school with fantastic music and dance facilities which is why my mother sent us there” – and grew up around famous Hollywood neighbours.

Her grandmother, an Austrian born in New York, was secretary to the head of Universal Pictures and her South African grandfather was a camera man in the city. “So it’s in the blood, Hollywood. My mother grew up on the Universal lot,” she says. “But LA is much more than that, part of it is this very large hick town, it’s also very multi-cultural and then there is Hollywood. But most of the people who work in the industry are technicians, there are more of them than famous actors. I love it that people went west to have a dream,” she says.

She is unashamedly enthusiastic about her hometown even though dancing has provided her with something of a gypsy life, taking her away from the place of her birth for long periods since she was a teenager.

She was 16 when she went away to study dance at the famous Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and 17 when she travelled to Paris with her older sister. “I turned 18 in Paris, it was just this crazy year of dancing,” she remembers. On her way back from the city she was invited to join the fledgling Momix dance company, the influential Connecticut-based group of “dancer illusionists”. After several years of touring she left with three other Momix founders to create a dance company called ISO. (Given the abstract lingo that surrounds modern dance it’s heartening to discover that the I, S and O stand for nothing more esoteric than I’m So Optimistic.)

ISO were two couples who at one point romantically “crossed over” as Steinberg puts it. The dynamic, she says, was not unlike a rock group, which is perhaps how she has a deep appreciation for her husband’s work. “It’s not always easy when he is away touring, sometimes you don’t feel like being the one left behind with the children . . . but I really respect his work ethic, as he does mine, and I love when people are working hard at what they do best,” she says.

ISO spent their formative years collaborating and creating their own work, starring in music videos and feature films, as well as touring their own live shows. One of the videos they starred in was U2’s With or Without You . She first met the band and struck up a friendship with Bono backstage after one of the gigs on the Joshua Tree tour. Does she remember the first time she met Edge? Were there fireworks? “Yes, I remember, but no, there were no fireworks,” she says. She became Bono’s movement coach for the Zoo TV tour. “One day he just said, ‘why don’t you dance, you are there watching every night’,” she remembers, so she took over the belly dancer part in Mysterious Ways even though she wasn’t a bellydancer.

“I’m a dancer, I watch, I keep my eyes open,” she says. Her romance with Edge, who had separated from his first wife, took off at the end of the tour. “I always think it took us a long time to find each other,” she muses. She was never phased by making friends and finding romance within the world’s biggest rock group. “I grew up in Hollywood, remember,” she says.

Moving to Ireland was the next natural step, but as a rover dancer it only felt permanent when the couple had their two children, daughter and son Sian and Levi. The couple have homes in Dublin, New York, France and LA. “I came to Ireland with a suitcase, it never really felt as though I moved all my stuff here. I still kept my place in LA, I still have it. It wasn’t until I had children that I felt ‘well, now I am here’.”

How did she adjust to life in Ireland? “Honestly? It was hard. Coming from a multi-cultural international city like Los Angeles it was hard to suddenly be in a culture I had no connection with and no roots . . . at the same time it was wonderful to be in a country that was completely itself. I feel like that about Italy. Although I have watched Ireland change over the years and I can’t help feeling ‘don’t do it, don’t lose the Irishness’.”

She is clearly itching to get back to the studio now, politely answering questions in the pub while her head, her heart is back in the studio with Oguri and the other dancers.

“I just wanted to bring everybody’s expertise to bear on this, I want it to be a live event, a real celebration of Louis’s work,” she says. She hopes it has legs and that there will be a demand for the work to go on tour. So far her professional life has taken her into lighting, directing, filmography and photography but she is a dancer before all of that.

“I will never stop moving,” she says as she takes her leave, a portrait of understated elegance. “As long as I can move I will dance.”

is at The Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin tonight. paviliontheatre.ie
 
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