‘This is still a segregated area, and will remain so,” says a tour guide, addressing a group gazing at sectarian murals and memorials off Belfast’s Shankill Road. The union flags waving next to front doors, the republican gift shop, the many kilometres of steel and wire that are the city’s peace walls: the past is still vivid here in west Belfast, but change is visible too.
A few hundred metres from the site of the Shankill Road bombing, carried out by the IRA almost exactly 30 years ago, are the imposing black iron gates of the Shankill Road Mission. Founded in 1898 to help the local poor, the building had been empty for over a decade – with peeling walls, crumbling plaster and archaic fixtures – but now its corridors are full of timber, paint and tools as it’s transformed into studios by the artist collective Vault.
Vault’s last space was in the east of the city, in another segregated area close to a peace wall, the musician and writer Mick McCullagh says. “We cultivated good relationships with our neighbours in the local community and hope to do the same on Shankill,” he says. “As a collective, our diversity of backgrounds is one of our great strengths, we’re an inclusive organisation.”
They’re also a hands-on one, everyone pitching in with the renovations. Circus performers are proving the most handy, says McCullagh, all that rigging experience and muscle strength, they make quick work of scaffolding. Behind one door, with a sign saying “Bible Study Room” is a high-ceilinged studio shared by a juggler, a photographer and the dancer Emily McDonagh. Upstairs is what will be a dance and circus studio, with high vaulted ceiling, great views across the city and just a slight problem with a leaking roof. It’s a mammoth job, but they’re unfazed. “In Belfast we have a strong history of getting things done in spite of challenges, we just roll up our sleeves and do it anyway,” says Vault’s building manager Neal Campbell.
That dance studio will be a much-needed resource for the city’s dance sector, which lacks affordable rehearsal space. Someone who’s got her eye on it already is choreographer Eileen McClory. “It’s going to be a beautiful studio – it’ll be a fight to get in there,” she laughs.
McClory is a name to watch out for, a maker of political, satirical, darkly humorous dance theatre. She is a former schoolmate of Oona Doherty, who is Northern Ireland’s most successful choreographer, her show Hard to be Soft making her the toast of European festivals from Avignon to Venice. But Doherty has just left Belfast for France, saying it was unsustainable to make a living as a choreographer and working parent.
Everywhere I go in Belfast people tell me there’s no lack of talent here, just opportunity, infrastructure and funding. There’s been no executive committee in the Northern Ireland government since February 2022. “Without an executive, we don’t have any long-term public spending or investment plans, everything is at an impasse,” says Richard Wakely, director of the Belfast international arts festival (BIAF), “And we’re already starting at a very low base.”
The government grant for the arts in Northern Ireland works out at just over £5 per capita, compared with £10.51 in Wales, £11.77 in Scotland and £21.90 in the Republic of Ireland. Of that money, dance’s slice is significantly smaller than most other art forms. Still, artists talk about the Arts Council of Northern Ireland like friends, rather than bogeymen. It’s clearly a close-knit community.
There’s a sense that things are shifting in the right direction. Upstairs at the Crescent Arts Centre, in the Helen Lewis Dance Studio (named after the dancer and Holocaust survivor who brought European modern dance to Belfast in the 1950s) McClory is rehearsing a new piece, Gutter, about the invidious nature of 24-hour TV news culture. Gutter premieres at BIAF, where another dance artist, the visually impaired choreographer Helen Hall, is this year’s artist in residence.
Both McClory and Hall have been commissioned to make major works for next year’s Belfast 2024 festival (launched in lieu of Belfast’s application for European City of Culture, ineligible now due to “the Brexit mess”, says Wakely). “That’s the biggest funding that’s ever been available,” says McClory, “It’s really exciting that dance has been selected for two of the commissions, because we have never had that profile.”
On top of that there’s the imminent formation of an all-Ireland national dance company, linking the republic and the north, with a significant investment of funds, and hopefully a new building to house it somewhere down the line. Wakely calls it “the most important cultural initiative since I returned to Ireland 26 years ago”.
The longest standing dance company in Northern Ireland is Maiden Voyage, whose highly respected artistic director Nicola Curry has kept contemporary dance going here for two decades “It’s not a career for the faint hearted,” she tells me. Young artists to watch include the hotly tipped Michael McEvoy, whose work has addressed politics and sexuality; Clara Kerr, who incorporates traditional Irish dance into contemporary dance; and dancer and physical theatre-maker Gerard Headley. There’s a strong dance-theatre voice here, people suggest, and less abstract noodling. “Gritty” and “authentic” are descriptions that pop up. “I think there is something about living and growing here that you understand that there’s change to be made,” says choreographer and teacher Gary Rowntree-Finlay, although he laughs: “Even when I just made a lovely dance, people put all these [meanings] on it.”
Rowntree-Finlay runs the dance department at St Louise’s Comprehensive College along with Louise White. The school is an important part of the dance ecology, it’s where Doherty and McClory trained, and unusually has been awarded Arts Council funding to hire an artist in residence. Former head of dance Marie Mannion saw the need when she joined the school in 1994. “The school is in supposedly one of the most deprived areas in Europe,” she says, “It takes money to train in dance and the money’s not available to many of these people. But there was a great hunger there for dance.”
So Marie made it happen, as everyone is doing in their different ways. “You have to hustle,” says McClory. “You’ve got to be working together. I think the dance community here are really determined and they’ve got grit. I feel like we’re on the cusp of things starting to change. Oona’s success has really made people look at Northern Ireland.” Or as Wakely puts it: “Northern Ireland’s produced a European dance star. Holy shit, where did that come from?!” Now, says McClory, “The artists ourselves have got to step up. Because Oona’s set the standard and we need to match that.”
Gutter is at the Mac, Belfast, 28-29 October. A double bill by Helen Hall and Suzannah McCreight is at Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on 4 November.
