#attic projects

The choreographer and dancer Luke Murphy tells Lauren Murphy why he wants to challenge and even bewilder audiences – particularly in Ireland

It all started with Michael Jackson. Then he decided that he wanted to be Gene Kelly. Growing up in Cork with a passion for dancing was not always easy, according to Luke Murphy. The 38-year-old choreographer, director and dancer recalls his childhood with a wry smile.

                “It was pretty rough,” he says. “It was disgustingly similar to Billy Elliot in terms of me being the only boy in a dance class in a relatively working-class environment. I grew up hiding the fact I was dancing from everyone I was in school with. There was no opportunity to do it professionally in Co Cork so anyone who was interested in dance at that time had to find their way abroad.”

                After years away, Murphy is back living in his native county, where he continues to create visionary work under the umbrella of his Attic Projects company. The latest is Scorched Earth, a five-dancer piece inspired by the play The Field by John B Keane.

                “I don’t think you can look at anything to do with ownership in Ireland without coming back to The Field,” Murphy says. “It’s such a seminal story. The show has a lot of influences. Mark O’Connell’s book A Thread of Violence was a really interesting one to read. And there’s a bunch of TV shows like The Jinx, the documentary about the murderer Robert Durst, and a crime-room drama series Criminal. So I was kind of collecting these influences and thinking, OK, what’s the scenario? What’s the story I’m trying to tell?”

                Murphy has always aimed for the intersection between contemporary dance, theatre and other media with his work.

                When he decided at 16 that he wanted to be a professional dancer he enrolled in an English boarding school (“like Hogwarts for dance”) where he could train while studying. That led to a place at the Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – a city that is similar to Cork, he says, with its working-class roots and big sports following – where he spent four years. While there, however, his ambitions to be a jazz dancer waned.

                “I came to contemporary dance late,” he says. “The reason I went to the States was because you could specifically study jazz dance, so I thought I was going to go off and become Fred Astaire.

                “Then I got to America and within 15 seconds I realised that there were no Fred Astaires any more. There were very few opportunities for that kind of jazz dancer and that was not what I was going to be doing.”

                A move to New York coincided with Murphy crossing paths with an early iteration of Punchdrunk, the theatre company famed for its immersive and groundbreaking approach.

                Murphy’s time with the company on the shows Sleep No More and The Drowned Man (the latter in London) proved formative, not least because it allowed him to break free of the formal training he had received at university. He did more than 1,500 shows with Punchdrunk and realised the difference between dancing and performing.

                “You can dance perfectly but how you perform is really different,” he says. “At Punchdrunk I was given a chance to take seriously how I think about the process and the consistency of performing. I learnt a huge amount from being with them. Even just thinking about how movement interacts with storytelling. That’s become a big foothold in how I think about dance, what I like about dance and how I want to use it.”

                He founded Attic Projects in a bid to draw all his ideas together. At one point he flirted with the idea of becoming a playwright and a screenwriter while also choreographing.

                “The company came when I felt I had a better idea of what I wanted to do and that’s to follow whatever a project wants to be,” he says. “So if it wants to be a book, it’s going to be a book. If it wants to be a film, it’ll be a film. If it wants to be in a gallery, it’ll be in a gallery. And that’s probably why it’s called Attic Projects as opposed to ‘Luke Murphy Dance’, because it came from feeling like I had a lot of ideas that were just being stored up at the top of my head. It was, like, it’s time to take them down and not let them sit up there gathering dust.”

                Recent successes have included Volcano, a “live-performance miniseries, crossing the boundaries of experimental theatre, contemporary dance and psychological sci-fi thriller” that won multiple awards, and The Prometheus Project, a series of five connected performance installations.

                “In all of the shows I’m putting a character under a kind of pressure and then we observe their choices,” Murphy says of the themes across his work.

                “In Scorched Earth there’s a character who is in an interrogation room being questioned about a murder that happened 15 years ago, and that’s the set-up. And how you watch this person interact with this space and with the sense of memory … that’s my way of kind of going, OK, what is this sense around ownership?

                “And even in a non-Irish, more global sense [it’s asking] what people are willing to do over what they feel is theirs. In Prometheus the question at the centre of it is, how do you cope with a crisis? In Volcano the question at the centre is, what do we hold on to?”

                Despite his years abroad, Murphy’s Irish identity remains fundamental to him. He recalls with a smile the first time he pitched Scorched Earth to a director and was told he couldn’t make it because [the choreographer] “Michael Keegan-Dolan does Irishness”.

                Murphy laughs. “I have nothing but respect for Michael but the idea that someone would corner the Irish identity on stage in dance is so insulting and so reductive of what that identity can be. So I think that’s all the more reason for different people to own it in different ways.”

                The best thing someone could say after seeing Scorched Earth, his biggest show to date, is not an easy question for Murphy to answer. He ponders it. “With all my shows, I want people who don’t normally go to see dance shows to see them. I like for people to feel like they’re not sure what they just watched.

                “If people are coming and they expect a dance show, I want them to suddenly feel like they’re in the middle of a courtroom drama. If people are coming to see a play, I want them to be surprised that the actors are suddenly doing all of this virtuosic movement. And if people come out feeling like they’ve watched a weird film, that’s a success for me in terms of the form.”

                He smiles. “In Ireland, there are inbuilt things about who’s right and who’s wrong. Even with the terms ‘landowner’ and ‘landlord’ there are such inbuilt ideas about who’s the hero and who’s the villain in these types of stories. So I think it would be a success if [the audience] are questioning some of those preconceived notions.”

                There is a lot more to come from Attic Projects and Murphy is aware of his good fortune in having a means to realise his vision. “I’m still really surprised by the fact that I’m getting to do exactly what I want,” he says. “That feels like a massive privilege. I’m getting to make the shows I want to make and do the things I want to do, and I don’t that for granted for a second.”

                He smiles again. “It feels as if I have an opportunity at the moment and I have to seize it. I have to throw everything I can at it.”