by Rose Rushe
HER education as a dancer began aged six and it is just a few years since choreographer Morgann Runacre-Temple hung up her shoes by the ribbon to work as choreographer. She is the brains behind ‘Carmen’, Ballet Ireland’s lauded dance interpretation of Bizet’s opera that is set to Rodin Shchedrin’s music, ‘Carmen Suite after Bizet’. This was written for his Bolshoi dancer wife, Mayo Plisetskaya.
We tell you this as her ‘Carmen’ will be danced out under the Big Top at Milk Market on May 29 and 30, serenaded by Irish Chamber Orchestra musicians. This will be a thrilling, exceptional event, enabled by €€ from City of Culture for this premiere that may yet travel to stages in Ireland and overseas.
“It was Gerry Keenan of the ICO who asked me to look at the Shchedrin piece on Youtube. I was absolutely blown away by it. The music was orchestrated for dance with percussion and strings in the 1980s. It’s one of the most visceral, dynamic scores one that compels you to dance”.
An award winning choreographer, Runacre-Temple has invested her ballet with more than music “that has amazing punch”: “If you want to see a ballet in which a woman has an empowered role – not playing a fairy or a victim – there are not many but Carmen is it.”
She sets a dozen dancers against a scaffold cube on stage, designed by Lorna Ritchie to be a cage, a prison; one side opens out to make it a tavern, another makes a factory.
Of this 90 minute work, half the score is by flamenco guitarist John Walsh, working with Ballet Ireland to create intimate moments of story telling within the soar and sweep of the Russian score.
Tickets to book at ww.uch.ie for 8.30pm shows on Thursday May 29, Friday 30 at Big Top.
