We sat down with Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello about their new show Arlington created with their company Shotput.
Shotput is a dance-theatre company based in Glasgow, founded by and led by Artistic Directors Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello. Shotput makes live performance as a shared space where together we explore difficult ideas, collective joy, and uncontainable human nature. Their productions are physically and visually rigorous, rooted in experimentation and collaboration. Though live shows are the heart of the company, we define our work not as a collection of shows, but as a web of relationships – collaborating with artists, audiences and communities.
What drew you to Arlington and made you want to bring it to the Scottish stage?
The play is so many things. Every time we came to it (and we came to it a lot – we’ve been wanting to do it now for five or six years), it meant something different to us. In an important way, it’s a mystery. Not a whodunnit, but something much darker and confrontational. The audience needs to work hard, and we love that at Shotput. We think theatre is a serious business that can also be manic and fun and uncontainable and messy and beautiful, and this play is all of that.
And apart from that, it would be hard to find a play that is more up Shotput’s street than this one. It revels in dark humour. It’s cinematic and visual. It’s got a huge dance solo bang in the middle of it. The text is as athletic as the dance.
And Scottish audiences love grit and heart, and this play is full of those two things. It’s not a gentle piece, it’s full of adrenaline. But, like a good gig, after the sweat, there’s a massive sense of release. If we get it right!
How do you bring to life the hope and love in a dystopian world, against the bleak backdrop?
Distill it down, this is a Romeo and Juliet story. There’s a divided world, too – maybe not dystopian but definitely screwed up – and it is the love story. Two people discovering each other. Touching each other. At first just with their words. That’s Arlington too, but with a different mask on. A different poetry.
This mix of despair and hope isn’t particularly new – it’s in all great dystopian literature. A good dystopia doesn’t just shove your face in the shit and say ‘Look how rotten.’ As humans, we naturally search for inversion. A good dystopian vision activates the political core of the audience. It forces us to imagine what a better future – or maybe more precisely, a better present – looks like.
Do you see similarities to reality in the world Enda Walsh has created? How do you bring that to the stage?
This is connected to what we were saying about dystopias above. All the way through the design process and rehearsals, we’ve been clear that it is extremely important that this world looks and feels identical (or at least blink-and-you-miss-it similar) to our own. We, the makers and the viewers of Arlington, cannot let ourselves off the hook. There’s no room for complacency.
How do you bring that to the stage? You essentially ask everybody you are working with to be their full selves. To embrace the contradictions of what it means to be a human. We’re also on the look out for anything that’s odd just for the sake of it, and try to double down on the very real oddness that is within us. That oddness can be harder to detect because we swim in it, but once found it is a gold mine – and it’s the basis for both the comedy and the tragedy of Arlington.
How do theatre and dance work together to tell the story?
We don’t want to give too much away on this. The filmmaker David Lynch (huge RIP) used to say that we make these beautiful, mysterious things (in his case, films) in the exquisite language of cinema – and then after that is sent out into the world, it would be so sad, so inadequate to explain the film away, to decode or neuter it. When it comes to explaining the language, we are really reluctant to do that. We just want people to feel it, unmediated by our words, first hand.
What we will say is that the language of theatre and the language of dance are, for us, not so different. They come from the same place, just like someone speaking Spanish and someone speaking English try to describe the same sunset or tell each other they love each other in the same way. That’s how Shotput uses these different tools in our belt.
This is the first Shotput show without Lucy or Jim performing – how has it been to step into new roles as co-directors?
How has it been?! Fantastic. We love performing and connecting with audiences in that particular way. But being only directors/choreographers this time has allowed us to be bolder, to work with swifter feet, and to collaborate with a tremendous bunch of performers who can do things that we can’t do and who bring experiences that are different than ours. It’s also allowed us to double down on how collaboratively we work with our designers, who are as much a part of our ensemble as the performers. So we’ll be back on stage one day, but this has been brilliant.
What do you hope audiences will take away from this work?
Well, as we said above, we think the audience will leave having really had a work out for their souls, brains, and bodies – and in that vein, we can’t know what they’ll take away because they’ll have done that work themselves. And we hope they talk to each other and to us in the bar afterwards about that work.
We certainly hope that this production allows room for existential despair, while also becoming a point through which people can – through humour, through hope itself, through connection to other people – pass through that despair to something generative and surprising and rowdy and beautiful.
Arlington by Enda Walsh is a show about telling stories, love and the enduring power of human connection in the face of oppression. It tours Scotland 17 October – 8 November.
Tickets: Lanternhouse, Cumbernauld | Tron Theatre, Glasgow | Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh