DANCER, SOLDIER, SEARCHER, PRIEST (The Tablet 10 April 2004)
Father Colin McLean has a remarkable second life away from his parish. Choreographers say that his body language is mesmeric.
It was one of his earliest ambitions to dance. Instead Colin McLean became an army officer, then - briefly - a Trappist monk, and now he is a parish priest in West London. In his mid-sixties the threads of his life all came together: he started to dance, choreographers began to notice his remarkable body language, and he now performs regularly. Here is how Nadine Meisner, dance critic of The Independent, pictured him in Rosemary Lee’s work Passage. “His angular body explodes into frenetic bouts of movement, scribbling out jagged anarchic air calligraphy, the panels of his loose coat flying.”
His dancing gene surfaced early. As a young officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he became adept at reels, strathspeys and sword dances. “It was as much part of discipline as parade-ground drill and bound up with regimental tradition and pride.” While in officer training at Sandhurst, he saw John Gilpin, one of the finest classical dancers Britain has ever produced, perform with Festival Ballet. He was enthralled and wrote to the Royal Ballet, asking if he might be accepted. “They wrote me a charming letter back saying I was a little old and that it might be difficult to transfer from the Royal Military Academy to the Royal Ballet School”.
Instead he spent 25 years in army service, much of it in the Persian Gulf. He was constantly on the move: life in the mountains and the deserts catered to his restlessness. Once he visited Ethiopia’s Plateau of Lalibela, noted for its rock churches. He watched Coptic monks, carrying T-shaped prayer sticks, who danced the Psalms. They moved in canon, turning and swaying in alternate lines. It was a revelation. “I suddenly realised what the Psalms were about. The way the monks moved echoed the antiphons of the psalms themselves.”
Colin McLean is a convert –he grew up in the Church of Scotland. He remembers being very struck by a French missal, brought home by his father – an ardent Francophile. It used the text of the old Lyons rite. What struck him more than the simplicity of its liturgy, were the accompanying photographs, depicting the celebrant’s gestures. It made a deep impression: this sense of beauty would be one of his thresholds to becoming a Catholic.
Many years on, he now runs the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Fulham. A few years ago he saw a notice in a nearby community centre: Amici, an integrated dance group for disabled and able-bodied people. was looking for members. He soon found himself roped into a performance at the Greenwich Dome. Choreographers quickly noticed a very individual character to his movement. Rosemary Lee found this quality mesmeric. She said of him “he’s a real live wire. I cannot stop him moving.”
I asked Colin McLean what it was about his style that attracted others. “I don’t know”, he replied, “People say ‘I love the way you move’. I’m fascinated by others who move well, but I find it hard to receive that message myself.” McLean suffers from a chronic health problem, which had affected his attitude to his own body. Dance, he finds, has brought him a degree of healing and affirmation that he has found nowhere else. Whatever his diffidence, contemporary choreographers cast him in a steady stream of work. His body language is wiry and rubbery and he has a dramatic face. It is not hard to see how he might dominate a stage.
There has been a transforming effect on his prayer life. When at school he acted in dramatisations of bible stories. He remembers in particular playing the part of David and the biblical text ‘David danced mightily before the Lord’. Citing the Jesuit John Coventry, he insists that dance is a primal form of prayer. As a priest, he exploits the power of gesture to the full at Mass, emphasising to his congregation the prayer-enhancing qualities of bowing, kneeling, the supplicant outstretching of arms and the exchange of the peace. “Movement is my way of praying”, he told me, “If I stay still, I nod off. But I can dance joy or sorrow.”
Age, of necessity, limits his movement. But ageing bodies do not lack for theatrical quality. The integrity of a dance movement, in a diminished form and without the amplitude, can be touchingly purer and more visible in the body language of an old person, who used to dance. The best-known example of this is McLean’s great . hero, Merce Cunningham, perhaps the greatest modern dance choreographer of the twentieth century (and who like several other well-known choreographers served Mass when a child). Cunningham still appears briefly on stage to add, as it were, an imprimatur to his own dance pieces, cutting a Puck turned Prospero image as he does so. Choreographers are increasingly drawn to the possibilities of ageing bodies. Pina Bausch, the director of the German company, Tanz Theater Wuppertal, memorably put 26 elderly people on stage in a gruelling performance, Kontakthof, a brutal set of physical encounters set in a seedy dance hall. While Bausch’s take on ageing was in many ways unflattering, its message was essentially one of optimism - that the child within lives forever. For all its participants’ body limits, it compelled attention for its full two hours.
Like Cunningham, there is something too of Puck and Prospero about Colin McLean. His heartbeat is irregular, and he has recently been fitted with a pacemaker, but it has not stopped him in his tracks. He is fascinated by Butoh – a Japanese expressionist dance form, whose performers usually appear on stage with white painted faces and shaven heads. With the choreographer Nicola Gibbons of ‘Coaxial’, he is in rehearsal for a rather startling duet Half-Life, to be performed later this month in which he and a fellow-performer will envelop themselves in long long tubes of stretch nylontranslucent sheets, dancing out the tension between youth and age.
As I leave, he reaches towards his bookshelf. He reads a quote to me from Merce Cunningham, which has become a personal manifesto: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back – nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel utterly alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”
Colin McLean will dance with Coaxial at the Blue Elephant Theatre Camberwell, 28 April- 1 May. Details at www.blueelephanttheatre.co.uk.
Father Colin McLean has a remarkable second life away from his parish. Choreographers say that his body language is mesmeric.
It was one of his earliest ambitions to dance. Instead Colin McLean became an army officer, then - briefly - a Trappist monk, and now he is a parish priest in West London. In his mid-sixties the threads of his life all came together: he started to dance, choreographers began to notice his remarkable body language, and he now performs regularly. Here is how Nadine Meisner, dance critic of The Independent, pictured him in Rosemary Lee’s work Passage. “His angular body explodes into frenetic bouts of movement, scribbling out jagged anarchic air calligraphy, the panels of his loose coat flying.”
His dancing gene surfaced early. As a young officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he became adept at reels, strathspeys and sword dances. “It was as much part of discipline as parade-ground drill and bound up with regimental tradition and pride.” While in officer training at Sandhurst, he saw John Gilpin, one of the finest classical dancers Britain has ever produced, perform with Festival Ballet. He was enthralled and wrote to the Royal Ballet, asking if he might be accepted. “They wrote me a charming letter back saying I was a little old and that it might be difficult to transfer from the Royal Military Academy to the Royal Ballet School”.
Instead he spent 25 years in army service, much of it in the Persian Gulf. He was constantly on the move: life in the mountains and the deserts catered to his restlessness. Once he visited Ethiopia’s Plateau of Lalibela, noted for its rock churches. He watched Coptic monks, carrying T-shaped prayer sticks, who danced the Psalms. They moved in canon, turning and swaying in alternate lines. It was a revelation. “I suddenly realised what the Psalms were about. The way the monks moved echoed the antiphons of the psalms themselves.”
Colin McLean is a convert –he grew up in the Church of Scotland. He remembers being very struck by a French missal, brought home by his father – an ardent Francophile. It used the text of the old Lyons rite. What struck him more than the simplicity of its liturgy, were the accompanying photographs, depicting the celebrant’s gestures. It made a deep impression: this sense of beauty would be one of his thresholds to becoming a Catholic.
Many years on, he now runs the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Fulham. A few years ago he saw a notice in a nearby community centre: Amici, an integrated dance group for disabled and able-bodied people. was looking for members. He soon found himself roped into a performance at the Greenwich Dome. Choreographers quickly noticed a very individual character to his movement. Rosemary Lee found this quality mesmeric. She said of him “he’s a real live wire. I cannot stop him moving.”
I asked Colin McLean what it was about his style that attracted others. “I don’t know”, he replied, “People say ‘I love the way you move’. I’m fascinated by others who move well, but I find it hard to receive that message myself.” McLean suffers from a chronic health problem, which had affected his attitude to his own body. Dance, he finds, has brought him a degree of healing and affirmation that he has found nowhere else. Whatever his diffidence, contemporary choreographers cast him in a steady stream of work. His body language is wiry and rubbery and he has a dramatic face. It is not hard to see how he might dominate a stage.
There has been a transforming effect on his prayer life. When at school he acted in dramatisations of bible stories. He remembers in particular playing the part of David and the biblical text ‘David danced mightily before the Lord’. Citing the Jesuit John Coventry, he insists that dance is a primal form of prayer. As a priest, he exploits the power of gesture to the full at Mass, emphasising to his congregation the prayer-enhancing qualities of bowing, kneeling, the supplicant outstretching of arms and the exchange of the peace. “Movement is my way of praying”, he told me, “If I stay still, I nod off. But I can dance joy or sorrow.”
Age, of necessity, limits his movement. But ageing bodies do not lack for theatrical quality. The integrity of a dance movement, in a diminished form and without the amplitude, can be touchingly purer and more visible in the body language of an old person, who used to dance. The best-known example of this is McLean’s great . hero, Merce Cunningham, perhaps the greatest modern dance choreographer of the twentieth century (and who like several other well-known choreographers served Mass when a child). Cunningham still appears briefly on stage to add, as it were, an imprimatur to his own dance pieces, cutting a Puck turned Prospero image as he does so. Choreographers are increasingly drawn to the possibilities of ageing bodies. Pina Bausch, the director of the German company, Tanz Theater Wuppertal, memorably put 26 elderly people on stage in a gruelling performance, Kontakthof, a brutal set of physical encounters set in a seedy dance hall. While Bausch’s take on ageing was in many ways unflattering, its message was essentially one of optimism - that the child within lives forever. For all its participants’ body limits, it compelled attention for its full two hours.
Like Cunningham, there is something too of Puck and Prospero about Colin McLean. His heartbeat is irregular, and he has recently been fitted with a pacemaker, but it has not stopped him in his tracks. He is fascinated by Butoh – a Japanese expressionist dance form, whose performers usually appear on stage with white painted faces and shaven heads. With the choreographer Nicola Gibbons of ‘Coaxial’, he is in rehearsal for a rather startling duet Half-Life, to be performed later this month in which he and a fellow-performer will envelop themselves in long long tubes of stretch nylontranslucent sheets, dancing out the tension between youth and age.
As I leave, he reaches towards his bookshelf. He reads a quote to me from Merce Cunningham, which has become a personal manifesto: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back – nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel utterly alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”
Colin McLean will dance with Coaxial at the Blue Elephant Theatre Camberwell, 28 April- 1 May. Details at www.blueelephanttheatre.co.uk.
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