The Brush that wished to Dance

Copywrite © Composed by Ronan Regan

This is a fun, imaginative short script, based around the Brush Dance.  It is essentially an entertaining conversation between two verbose inanimate objects who happen to not only speak but seem to be addicted to words of a large nature and who also possess a love of rhetoric and philosophical enquiry.  They are also wont to throw in the odd stereotypical French phrase as well as jumping genres wily nily, employing both blarney and old English logorrhea with ease!   They are a brush, called 'Bertrand Brush' called after the philosopher Bertrand Russell and a pair of shoes with a penchant for dance named 'Shuffle Shoes'.  The exchange eventually culminates with a dancer, who Shuffle Shoes simply calls his 'Benign benefactor' and his friend the great accordion player called Paulo - (much to the trepidation of Bertrand Brush - who wishes to dance but has never danced before, and is somewhat nervous about trying it) a brush dance ensues - at which point the script for the short movie quits. 

The brush dance is a very strong tradition local to Galway and many parts of Ireland.   

Title:  The Brush that wished to Dance

Characters:  A pair of shoes 'Shuffle Shoes'; a brush 'Bertrand Brush', a dancer 'Benign Benefactor' and an accordion player called Paulo.

 

Brush:  Good morrow to you 'shoes'. Pray tell what is your favoured modus for carrying out your duties as a pair of shoes?  Do tell, do you prefer to be worn while sitting, standing, strolling, strutting or speeding laterally?

Pair of shoes: (taken aback) My word a talking brush; not something that I can easily brush under the carpet....and indeed many may counter that there are a pair of us in it!.....however, your tone is polite and without effrontery and your enquiry civil.  I will oblige you with an intelligible answer should my nerve recover sufficiently.  It is well I like the expanse of those nodes of transportation that you lay mention of above.  And verily have I enjoyed with easeful alacrity the ferrying forth of my benign benefactor visa vie those very modalities.  All that aside, and in truth, I must confess, principally toward having a penchant for dance!

Brush:  Mon dieu, a penchant for dance, but that itself, is it not most dangerous?  Have you never felt frayed, worn out, felt as if you your very sole hath worn itself thin?

Pair of shoes: Come, come, now, dear brush, why not at all....did I not my name take from this very passion, and though wary at first, contrary to feeling worn, I take a fright of delight from such skite and caper and thus have I come to be known throughout the parish and beyond as 'shuffle shoes'.

Brush:  Shuffle shoes, oh how delightful.  Would it disturb you to hear me exclaim that I have long harboured a desire to transcend my prosaic modus operandi, nay shift work, supplanting the very dirt and dust of our damp earth and it's masterful channelling toward the celebrated dustpan.  Just so, to leave this noble work in the dust, so to speak, to eclipse it - once, to dance to the rousing reel 'Down the Broom', just once to dance in percussive discourse with a human being - who of course; now that I see things more clearly; would be under the permissive sway and choreographic direction of one such as yourself Shuffle Shoes!

Pair of Shoes:   By and by, have I heard of a brush such as yourself!  Yes indeed, you ring a bell in the inner alcove of my membrane....I recognise the artful mastery of your abstract supposition. Would you by chance be the imminent Bertrand Brush, named after the great philosopher Bertrand Russell?

Brush:  Sweet Shuffle Shoes, as Mr. Russell himself would have said: everything is indeed vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, but on this occasion I must acquiesce to your penetrating perception;  indeed I am he of whom you speak.

Pair of Shoes:  Benevolent Bertrand, had I legs to call my own, they should surely turn to jelly at this juncture in our jolly discourse so as to satisfy Aristotle's proclivity for neat and fitting metaphor.

Brush:  Oh please do not seek to vex me by speaking of Aristotle, on too many an occasion have I failed to make Aristotle's theory of universals clear; let us be clear; because it is not at all clear!

Pair of Shoes:  Whist, le do thoill, curtain your curmudgeon, oh bad-tempered Bertrand, my benign benefactor approaches with a bounce, and what's this....he walks in concert with his good friend Paulo who is a musician of note; indeed of many nuanced notes; perhaps we shall at last perform the Brush Dance!

Brush (mumbling and fussing nervously to himself as the benign benefactor (dancer) laces up his shoes and Paulo readies his two row):  Oh goodness me, oh dearie me, sacrédieu...the poetic acrobatics I sometimes speak are just now slowed for my soul is meek..... oh my dear deceased Yeats, how indeed can we know the dancer from the dance!!

Brush Dance ensues :-)   

Copywrite Ronan Regan 3 August, 2016

why the Irish dance that way

In Spring 2006, Producer Seamus Byrne of Zanita Films, Writer/Director Nick Kelly and Choreographer Rónán Regan won the RTÉ / Arts Council 'Dance on the Box' award.  'Why the Irish dance that way' premiered on John Kelly's RTÉ programme 'The View'.  It was accepted by many prestigious film festivals, including Montreal, Sydney, Berlin, Clermont-Ferrand and the Dresden International Short Film Festival in 2007 .  It was one of 9 shorts selected by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA in 2007) for Shortfest: Outstanding Shorts from The International Festivals, and in March 2008 it won First Prize in the Chicago Irish Film Festival Jury Awards.  'Why the Irish dance that way' was later incorporated into an ad series on RTÉ (2011/12).