The Brooklyn Rail

Midway through Navy Blue, the Northern-Irish artist Oona Doherty voices a long and wide-ranging polemic, pitting kaleidoscopic angst against cosmic wonder. But the screed, which fuels a growing vulnerability and ferociousness in the cast of twelve dancers, is only one of the production’s provocative elements. The dance theater work premiered in August 2022 at Kampnagel in Hamburg, with an original composition from British musician and DJ Jamie xx and pooling, blood-like projections of blue paint from video artist Nadir Bouassria. Since then, the international touring has been nonstop. On June 4–9, Navy Blue makes its New York debut at the Joyce Theater.

Doherty has danced professionally across Europe since 2010, including four years with the punk performance group T.r.a.s.h. in the Netherlands. In 2015, she made a thirty-minute solo, Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus, which led to numerous awards and commissions for her choreography, including the Silver Lion at the 2021 Venice Biennale. Her unguarded movement vocabulary—so often described as raw or emotional—draws from her ballet and contemporary dance training, as well as hip-hop (in which she claims to be untrained), and is often elicited through a somatic technique she has developed called Strings:

When I’m teaching someone Strings, for the first three days, I could probably say the same thing to whomever’s in the room, doesn’t matter if you’re a clown, a dancer, whatever. There is a speech about really relaxing: the back of the knees, the ass, the belly… submission. What happens when you truly go into submission? The way that lands on highly trained dancers, it seems that they can start to hear their body again.

Likening Strings to both Jackson Pollock’s painting process and a lost toddler dancing, Doherty developed this structure for letting go after years of doing Emio Greco’s more tightly wound Double Skin/Double Mind dance method.

“Don’t follow form, follow the feeling, allow it to be messy. ‘Fuck it,’ I have to say to them a lot. Like let it out,” says Doherty. “What makes it challenging for the doer is you’re never really free. But can I learn to love it? Can I learn to love my past and can I move past my habits in movement by loving them or not rejecting them? That is what we’re attempting.”

In the final section of Navy Blue, a cathartic solo—a veritable Strings masterclass—is danced by a different cast member each show. Because of this rotation, the ending varies performance to performance.

A few weeks before the start of its US tour, Doherty and I spoke by Zoom, from her new home base in Marseille, about the inspirations for Navy Blue, the multiple interpretations drawn from the work’s gestures, and the questions at the center of her choreographic practice.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Candice Thompson (Rail): I’m wondering if you could bring me back to when you were making Navy Blue. Where were you at in your career, your creative practice, your life?

Oona Doherty: It was probably very early 2020. I had been on tour a lot. I was invited to the National Ballet of Marseille/(LA)HORDE. I went there and was scared of and intimidated by working with a ballet company—it kind of brought up a lot of stuff for me. At a flea market they had these mandarin collar, blue workers’ suits that were kind of trendy at the time. I bought one for myself and flew home feeling a bit empty, a wee bit lonely, in my blue workers’ suit, with my MacBook Pro, a bit like a hipster.

And then lockdown happened. I was at home in Ireland, close to Belfast and for the first time ever in my life, I just stayed home and watched the news. All that was going on in my head: wars and politics, a bit grim when you stopped for long enough and had a look at it. I had been on tour and in contemporary dance festivals for so many years. What a bubble to be in! And then when I finally stopped… Oh, God, I think that’s the world where Navy Blue came from.

I got a ballet studio to myself in my hometown because the kids weren’t in class during lockdown. What came out was that I wanted to practice ballet. Which I normally wouldn’t do. But I guess there was a real sense that nobody’s looking. And then, of course, that got boring after a while because lockdown went on and on. So then I started to set material to Maria Callas and Sergei Rachmaninoff, using very dramatic music just to make me practice, because pure improvisation everyday was getting a bit tired. And that’s where part one came from. Practicing.

Rail: I’m also curious about how the text developed and when it was layered in?

Doherty: Very early on I had part one, my version of ballet—unison movement, like a machine. And I knew that the third act was this type of movement I’ve developed, Strings, which is like a physical state, like meditation. I would say all these things to try and make well-trained dancers be a bit lost, like toddlers. And to allow that to be emotional. I wanted them to fade into the back of the stage and take the light with them until they just start falling around.

I was also researching blue, the color of the suits. People in India were making that color for a long time. The dye was poison in their skin, very cheap and sold on the silk trade everywhere. Then it became expensive, and it was the royal color for the navy. Because I was researching all that, then the news, the lockdown, and Boris Johnson and Brexit, I started writing a rant. I also became pregnant.

And then, this was the biggest budget we were ever given. How many dancers do you want? I said twelve as a joke, thinking they’d say no. It was all this ego, like, I’m so lucky, this is amazing. But what do I do with this? The world’s burning. I felt guilty. Maybe? I don’t think that’s gone away.

Rail: In addition to the text there is this really saturated, beautiful blue projection of blood and the gunshots that summon it.

Doherty: I’ve always had a thing about paint or blood moving to the music properly. When I started writing the speech, I was not feeling good, and I was trying to make art about it to make myself feel better. The image that was coming up was violent: kill them, shoot them. One of the original ideas for Navy Blue was that the dancers would do part one in a loop. I would roam around the audience saying the speech, and then to the audience, “which one do you want? the little one?” And I would shoot. Because I was also trying to make it like a Quentin Tarantino movie. But violence on film is much different than violence in the theater. That wouldn’t have been fair on the audience to do that, so we didn’t, and it’s a good thing.

The way that it happens in the show, the gunshot isn’t a clear gunshot. The enemy or the threat is invisible. It’s sickness as well. It’s just a general existentialist dread. The gunshot lands very differently in every country.

Rail: Well, you could say America has a unique or perhaps, specific, relationship to guns and gun violence…

Doherty: When we went to Jacob’s Pillow, they had asked us to take the gunshots out. We didn’t, but nobody had ever asked that before. It’s just so present in America. It’s close. They were just trying to protect their audience. When we did it in Belfast, that was a whole other thing—all those people in that room had seen that terror. And in Germany, the uniforms, that was a whole other thing. I stand by and I keep it, but each country has its own frame of trauma and violence.

Rail: Likewise, there are a couple of gestures that appear frequently in the work that confer multiple meanings depending on the cultural context: a raised fist and a sweeping arm motion, the index finger pointing. What sensibilities are they coming from?

Doherty: The fist thing always comes out of my body. In Navy Blue, there’s the relation to workers’ strikes but also, I’ve got some postcards at home of these Chinese communist ballets. I was into this kind of unison sacrifice, or compromise. But dancers started to ask me about it because it meant very different things to them. The Black dancers were like, “Why are you doing that?” I never thought about it in reference to the Black panther or Black power movement in the US, because I was just my wee Irish self in the studio, on my own in Ireland, and it was more connected to personal will, like, “I’m gonna keep trying.”

We had a big, long discussion. There was a bit in it where we kind of go like that [Doherty demonstrates an extended arm waving from her side to over her head]. I was trying to look at the stars, but they were like, “No, this has a bit of Hitler vibes.” We had to really work on the elbow and if we do that (softening at the elbow), are you more comfortable with that? Do you want to make it about your back? Feel where in your body it feels sincere and move away from the symbol you don’t want to be. So there was a choice.

Rail: I could see those slight variations and it made me curious.

Doherty: It’s not the same for everybody, and I needed to let the dancers have some autonomy. For me, the beauty in part one is that they have the autonomy, so you see the dancers as people. Because when you make a unison ballet phrase there’s something—I’d call it evil but it’s not—that really grows in you as a choreographer on the outside where you want to clean it and make it exact, like Jiří Kylián does. There’s something very satisfying for the choreographer and the audience. But I don’t think that’s so healthy for us to be looking at that. I figure it’s better for us to try and love a bit of mess and see people. It’s landed really well in some places; it depends on who is in the audience. I’ve had a few people be like, “it’s not messy enough for it to mean what you think it means,”—it either needs to be way more clean or way more messy. Giving them just a bit of autonomy is uncomfortable for dance people to look at.

Rail: You make an interesting point about the appeal of unison—maybe we should question why we’re drawn to it?

Doherty: It’s so satisfying to watch though, isn’t it? The musicality and hard work that goes into it. But in part three when the dancers are doing Strings, the whole thing of Strings is they don’t play with form, they play with feeling. And I would kind of shoot myself in the foot if I didn’t keep a little bit of that in part one too.

Rail: Navy Blue raises a lot of questions about what we are doing with our time on earth… more generally: “What the fuck?” [A question asked in the voice over.] And more specifically: “what is the point of making a dance?” [A detailed budget for the production is read one line item at a time.] How do you continue to reckon with that? Are those questions still driving you?

Doherty: I think there’s love at the end. I was clear about that with Bush Moukarzel, who helped me write the speech, and Jamie xx, who did the music. I was able to make a good base of dread. So, I said to Jamie, “You’re gonna have to make the end of it hopeful because I have no idea how to do it.” And I said the same to Bush. It starts like Moby Dick dragging you down, but then the dread evaporates at the end again. Hope. Yeah, love each other. Just keep trying.

At the moment, I’m really wondering whether to stop. I’ve been quite seriously thinking about that since 2020, and Navy Blue was supposed to be my last dance. And now I’m kind of doing that again with Specky Clark, which is set to premiere in November. I always said that, but I can feel it in my gut now. I think it’s just about being a mom and running a company and I just, I don’t know if I can, it’s too much. That’s my big question at the moment. Having fun and laughing with your friends or your dance people or your family, all that keeps you going, but there’s always a big “What do I do next?” in everybody’s life. I don’t know if I’ve answered that yet.