You have your own personal history with “The Aeneid,” tell us a little bit about that. 

One of my first jobs coming out of my training in Rambert was at La Scala in Milan. Coming from Ballymun in Dublin, which is quite working-class, I was lucky to have parents who allowed me to go into ballet—they hadn’t a clue really—and I found a teacher who got me to London. I was suddenly in Milan in this production of “The Trojans” by Berlioz. Karl Lagerfeld was doing the costumes; it was full of this grandiose operatic madness—it was beautiful! I was blown away by the epicness of everything. In Ireland we think very big, but our infrastructure doesn’t always allow for that type of big thinking. It was nearly thirty years ago, and it stayed with me.

That was my ideal epicness, but as I went and started making choreography much later my themes were very autobiographical. More recently I was caring for my mother who had dementia and I started making work from that perspective, it really helped us get through that whole thing. That led to me doing collaborative work with Marie Brett, a visual artist, who was doing work about this oncoming legislation, the Assisted Decision-Making Capacity Act. It was very visually focused; we had all these interviews with carers across Ireland who shared the same story as me. That made me start to think a lot about care.

Then I started working with [performance art group] ThisIsPopBaby. We were dealing with chemsex and drugs within the queer community. Looking at care in a queer context, which resonated with my role as the carer in my family who was also the queer person in the family. So it all worked its way from the more personal to the wider: care, care in the community, care within legislation—which is a very odd thing. That brought me back to the epicness of “ The Trojans,” this very big, romantic, very long opera. 

So, why “The Aeneid”?

I wasn’t so interested in the romantic story between Dido and Aeneas but the epic experience while at the theatre. I read The Aeneid and as I was reading it, and I don't want to be reductive about it, I felt that all the stories were so petty! We’re still doing the same things. It could almost be composed of storylines from Murder She Wrote. I think one of the things that struck me apart from the continuing of this pettiness and war was how the value systems of the time were quite different. It’s very much about fate and destiny and the greater good, setting things up so our future might be better. And I feel we live now in a society where everything is so immediate—with our politics but even to Instagram and social media. Everything is more immediate, we don’t often consider the bigger picture. Even in civic manners, and public behaviour. 

What also interests me is that it is basically a book of propaganda for Augustus Caesar. To recount the founding of Rome by the Trojans and how it led to the wonder of the Caesar. Sort of like how Dante’s Divine Comedy is bitching about people living in Florence at that particular time! (He laughs) The Aeneid is like that. We need to see a connection to the past, at our common traits, but also looking at how values have changed, and how we might reassess that.