DDF Blog: Q&A with Emma Martin

Moving through a shifting landscape of rambling houses, dance halls, dream sequences and imagined rituals, the work moves between the mythic and the everyday, asking what it means to gather together in a moment marked by uncertainty and fracture. 

Ahead of the world premiere, the DDF team travelled to Galway to visit Emma Martin and the cast in rehearsal, getting an early glimpse into world of Soft God.

We spoke with Emma Martin about togetherness, invented folk dances, the loss of faith, and what audiences can expect from this new work.

Can you tell us a little about Soft God? What kind of world are we entering?

The world of Soft God is set up as a kind of rambling house, which is an Irish cultural tradition where people would gather to share music, dances and stories, and they acted as a repository for culture and folklore. Ours is an experimental version of that, where the performers offer themselves to each other and to the audience.

There’s something about the idea of togetherness I wanted to explore, and to offer an imaginative space for audience and performers, to touch a shared feeling, that’s both familiar and unknown.

This is an exciting world premiere, what sparked the initial idea for the work?

The last piece I brought to the dance festival was Night Dances, which was loud, muscular and shiny, and with this I felt the need to explore the opposite of swagger and certainty – vulnerability, which feels so right in this moment. Soft God came about as a question about the loss of faith: in religious belief, in art, in politics. So the work isn’t declaring something, it’s a work about believing in each other.

The show moves between the mythic and the everyday. How do those elements interact in the choreography?

The dances in this piece could be described on the one hand as strange, invented kind of folk dances crashing into a kind of ‘ballet dragged through the ditches of time, backwards’, with some extremely stripped back explorations of social dancing.

What do you hope audiences experience when they encounter Soft God?

A world of sincerity, humour, and imagination, where the audience can enjoy seeing a beautifully diverse collection of performers, with extremely different backgrounds and dance histories, share themselves.

If you had to describe Soft God in three words?

Mongrel, messy, poetic.

Bonus: Your last time at Dublin Dance Festival featured a horse on stage, should we expect any unexpected visitors this time?

Might have something up my sleeve.*

(*We’ll admit this answer made the DDF team slightly nervous.)

Soft God runs at the Abbey Theatre from Thurs 14 – Sat 16 at 7PM.

A big thank you to Emma Martin for sharing this glimpse into the world of Soft God, offering us and audiences something beautifully messy, vulnerable and imaginative to look forward to.

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