In Dublin 8, an experimental theatre production explores the many desires of its performers

They were two weeks out from opening night.

But it is just the second day of rehearsals, Maud Hendricks told the room. “So at this rehearsal, there is nothing that can go wrong.”

This wasn’t about performing an end product, she said. “I would prefer that you stay with your investigations.”

The performance space in the spacious Bay One in The Digital Hub off Thomas Street fell quiet.

Six performers shuffled around a black mat at the centre of the room and warmed up, all cast members of Global Desires, the latest production from Outlandish Theatre.

Luca Pierucci strode about on the mat, his head shaved, in a long red dress. He had his eyes closed and made tai-chi-like shapes with his hands.

Behind him, Joan Somers Donnelly, in a baggy black tracksuit, stretched her legs.

Larry Cunningham, in an orange apron, a paddy cap over his grey hair, wearing white gloves, arranged pots of leafy plants in a wooden crate on wheels.

Hendricks approached Cunnigham.

They chatted for a few moments and then she said to the room: “Larry is going to fight with the paper bag today.”

Coexisting and colliding

Global Desires jumps across media and draws in film too, says Hendricks, who cofounded Outlandish Theatre with performer Bernie O’Reilly.

But this session was for the segment of experimental dance and movement, made of solo performances all unravelling at once.

“Everybody got their props?” she said. “Just remember what the 30 minutes felt like yesterday. Pace yourself. Use your passion. You’re after something. Everyone has their own journey within that.”

She set the timer on her phone for 30 minutes, and started the clock.

Pierucci skipped around, greeting crew members as if they were an audience just arriving.

“Good evening everybody, welcome,” Pierucci said, almost singing. “Oh, you look amazing.”

As he continued to engage the largely empty wooden benches where the audience would eventually sit, Polina Cosgrave knelt over a white body bag, wearing a wedding dress.

Other characters in the performance were acting out their own desires to dance, to play and to not get comfortable, they said later.

Cosgrave plays a version of herself: a Russian poet living in Dublin 8 who desires world peace.

The hope for peace and an end to conflict is intended, in the performance, to reverberate against the desires of the other performers, says Hendricks. “Those are the more bodily desires, the more everyday desires that we encounter.”

As Cosgrave monologues, conjuring up memories of wars, drones and a childhood sweetheart, Cunningham tends to his plants, laying them out on the stage.

Pierucci dons a rubber Dobermann mask and squats, clasping his hands together.

Under the dog mask, he adopts a New York accent. “I wanna tell you what’s on my mind,” he says. “When I was a kid, I got struck by the tragic side of being a man.”

Each pause between his frank confession is followed by a moment of silence, drawing laughs from the crew as he delivers this sobering reflection beneath a comical headpiece.

From time to time, Hendricks interjects. The audience will be all around, she says. “Remember, it’s 360. You’re all focused to the front.”

David Ferreira-Alves, dressed only in blue and shoeless, peels yellow tape off the ground.

Dancer Clara Fitzgerald whoops, stomps and waves her hands about to the sound of nothing.

It’s about releasing a trauma, she says. “It’s unstructured, because that is what the desire is. It’s not structured. It’s just in the moment I need the conditions to be right to let me go. I’m disconnected from my head.”

Cunningham, like a mute Beckett character, climbs into his wooden box, playing dead, and is wheeled about by Ferreira-Alves, before later coming back to life to wrestle a brown paper bag.

Cosgrave addresses members of the crew. She calls one “God” and another “Maxim Gorky”, the Russian playwright whose 1905 play Summerfolk is tied into the experimental drama.

Cosgrave holds intense eye contact, delivers long passages in Russian, and furiously bellows “fuck you Gorky” repeatedly, while Ferreira-Alves barks “fuck you” back.

The performance evolves into a cacophony of individual stories, unrelated but occupying the same space, colliding.

Each performer chases desire down their own path, says Somers Donnelly, after the rehearsal.

“It leads to these happy and unhappy accidents, because it reflects the fact that someone else’s desires can impinge on another,” she says. “So it’s interesting in that we’re crashing, sometimes literally, into each other.”

“Can the desires coexist when there is a tension between different types?” she says.

The theatre of what not to do

The starting point of Global Desires was in 2017 when Outlandish Theatre was invited to use the Rita Kelly Theatre in the Coombe Hospital, says Hendricks.

“It was built for the pantomimes for the staff,” she says, of the space.

Every Wednesday, they held an “open theatre practice”, inviting the public to come and create work, she says, and to experiment.

The underlying philosophy to the workshops is “via negativa” or the study of what not to do, she says. “You find out what something is by discovering what it isn’t.”

That involves performing around a theme and presenting it to peers and audiences for feedback, she says.

They work like that for a year, she says. “The first six months is open to everybody, and after six months we ask if they want to continue to make your performances as part of our general performance.”

Global Desires was workshopped over two years. A work-in-progress staged last year, as well as a presentation of the source material, Gorky’s Summerfolk, she says.

“This year it’s developed more into this experimental letting-go of the classical text, but still working with the idea of Gorky 100 years ago,” she says.

Written in 1904, Gorky’s play dramatises the excesses and apathy of Russia’s bourgeois social class as they sense imminent revolution.

His characters are opposites of those devised by the Outlandish performers, with Gorky’s central character, the lawyer Basshof, saying, “We have many opinions… But when it comes to wishes – defined and strong – we don’t have them at all.”

Gorky’s writing seemed to fit well in a Dublin 8 context, as an idealist who wrote against the Russian regime, she says.

Once the 30-minute bell sounds on Hendricks’ phone, the cast slowly come out of character and unwind, sitting down on the rows of audience benches.

Each of the performers has been working on their idea for between one and two years, says Hendricks. “Maybe everybody here can say what their desire path is.”

Clara Fitzgerald says hers is simple. She just wants to dance “and find the right conditions for me to be able to just release into dance and rhythm”.

To play, says Ferreira-Alves. To perform until he finds his authentic self, says Pierucci.

Living in a peaceful chaos alongside nature is Larry Cunningham’s desire, he says. “That’s until I see an artificial plant and I’ll lose it, go back into my meditation to make me feel better, get away from what’s going on around me.”

Somers Donnelly says she was looking at queer desire. “It was about taking off the baggage of things that have been put on me that invisibilise that.”

Cosgrave says her desire for world peace may be impossible. “But I still want to attempt it.”

Global Desires is scheduled to run at the Dublin Theatre Festival from 10 to 13 October with its preview on 9 October.