A Choreographic Archive of Ireland's Recent Pasts: Iterative Contemporaneity in CoisCéim Dance Theatre's <i>Palimpsest</i> (2024)

Staged as part of Dublin's St Patrick's Day celebration 2024, CoisCéim Dance Theatre's Palimpsest weaves together an embodied assortment of Ireland's recent pasts. From the War of Independence and women's suffrage to the post-2008 recession and the Troubles, significant historical events and Irish imageries are interwoven with the mundane, quotidian scenes of contemporary life and fleshed out through the ensemble of dancers’ collegial yet idiosyncratic bodies and movements. This article contends that through its defigurative choreographic archiving, Palimpsest stages the iterative contemporaneity of Ireland, where the past continues to frame present experiences and the present is incessantly conflated with the past. Focusing on the dramaturgical structuring, the article first examines how, instead of a chronology, the narrative episodes in the show are encountered through motifs that remain relevant in contemporary Ireland, creating a stream of scenes to open up contact zones between the historical and the contemporary. These motifs of gender, religion, emigration and immigration, and social class, among others, oscillate intersectionally via the dancers’ bodies, which disturb cultural inscriptions and generate new meanings through eclectic movements and fluid corporeality. The essay explores how choreographic movements and the dancers’ embodiment fosters a kinaesthetically empathetic co-presence between the performers and audience, and injects liveness into the archive. Based on these analyses, this essay investigates how Palimpsest presents an Irish history as iterative contemporaneity, which is both remembered and lived, past and present, here and elsewhere, and both consistent and fluid.