Words by Eoin Fenton.
Ahead of a head-spinning tour across Ireland that opens as the closing show of the Dublin Dance Festival, I caught up with the team behind the electrifying dance theatre work MOSH, which won the Best Ensemble and Best Sound Design categories at the Dublin Fringe Festival Awards in 2023. Directed by dance artist Rachel Ní Bhraonáin and choreographed by long-time collaborator Robyn Byrne, I caught up with them about the research behind making a work of dance that brings the audience right into the pit.
Q: Tell us a little bit about MOSH, how did it come about?
Rachel: MOSH is a rather maximalist dance-theatre piece with live music. It’s about moshing, the subculture and the people who do it. It’s about fifty minutes long, it’s told with a bit of humour but it doesn’t delve away from why people do it. Theres a real core question: why are people doing this? The answers vary from personal reasons to almost universal truth behind human behaviour. My aim is to not give one definitive answer to the question with the show.
Q: Was there an anxiety in presenting that subculture respectfully?
Rachel: One hundred percent! This was one of the main conversations I would have with people who were either mentoring me or collaborating with me on the work, but also just with people I would be sense-checking — people from the culture. That was the main conversation I wanted to have.
It kinda goes to the heart, like being a teenager and being asked “you’re wearing a band t-shirt, do you even know any of their songs?”. It was that amplified to the maximum fear of being a poser. I went into this owning the fact that I’m not a metal-head or a mosher. I am more and more, I’ve been living with this show for five years so as you can imagine it’s starting to become part of my life. Certainly to begin with I came from the point of view that this is not my world so let me try and understand it. I did go in with some prejudices but they’ve changed along the way. There’s a curiosity about admitting that one thinks it’s a ‘bad’ thing to do, that moshing might be a dangerous, violent, negative thing to do. Knowing that I felt that way was key to questioning my beliefs.
It’s also about finding the balance between making theatre and not making people look like they’re in costume or seem like stereotypes. But also trying to zone down this massive phenomenon into five dancers on stage is quite a tall task. There’s so much in this material that a hundred shows could be made about it. There’s so much to draw on from the subculture, so a lot of curiosity and sensitivity was needed.
Q: What was it about the mosh pit that made you want to investigate it and create a piece?
Rachel: It started with a conversation with my boyfriend Luke who went to see the band Slayer, he got a nasty injury in the mosh pit. We were just having a conversation and I realised that he had gone into a mosh pit, that he was going to do it again and put his body in harm’s way or potentially cause harm to others, where was this need to be aggressive? That was where I was coming from. He was trying to explain that he had the most wonderful night, that it’s part of the fun to be at risk. So that was where the conversation started, it was kind of a fight!
I then thought that this many people can’t be wrong, I must be wrong here. When a local funding opportunity became available I thought that if I could use the money to research anything I would research moshing. It was unfortunately January 2020 so my research largely was YouTube videos and not getting into mosh pits early on — which I would’ve preferred.
Fortunately I wasn’t the first person to look into this, there were various academic papers looking at the sociology of women in mosh pits or men and their brotherhood in the mosh pit, how people respond to each other when they move in unison. There was so much interesting academic work, and there were overlaps with a certain type of sociology called edgework that my brother-in-law just happens to lecture in. Edgework is essentially risky behaviour to feel some sense of control. There was research from a physicist as well studying how we move in groups, how mosh pits move a lot like birds or bacteria — his name is Dr. Jesse Silverberg and his words are actually presented in the show.
I got to go where others had gone before and present it in a theatrical way rather than something academic.
Q: You come from a dance/aerial background which many would also find dangerous. Do you think there’s a masochistic crossover between moshers and dancers, willing themselves to be in dangerous situations?
Rachel: What’s been interesting is finding a dancer who has regularly moshed because dancers are actually quite careful with themselves. If they’re busy they’re not as likely to put themselves in risky situations unless it’s a controlled risk like aerial. But I do think there’s an overlap between aerial and moshing, moshing could almost be categorised as an extreme sport, it’s not dissimilar because you’re putting yourself right at the edge of danger, toying with how much control you have.
Moshing is especially chaotic because there’s really no predicting what’s going to happen. With aerial you’ve rehearsed a lot, you’re in more control of the danger. So it’s a sort of sliding scale of how chaotic of an environment you want to be in [she laughs]. I think it’s a case of the thrill of surviving the thing, the adrenaline hit of it all.
When I say hit it does remind me of the aspect of touch in moshing, that moshers aren’t necessarily thinking about, they’re not saying ‘you know what I need now? To be in contact with a load of other bodies’. I don’t think it’s consciously thought about but that is one of the feedback loops, all of this touch at a rapid pace, this harming-but-not-harming respect between people. It’s very interesting.
People do take it too far, but they’re not welcome. I think in a lot of authentic spaces they are removed from the mosh pit if they’re being purposefully harmful.
Q: Moshing, when looking on the outside, seems to have a lot of ingrained rules. When you first got into the pit, what was that like? What was the process of learning those rules?
Rachel: I do think the rules are very common sense in order for it not to collapse into chaos. You pick people up off the floor; if you leave them on the floor someone else trips over and falls and breaks their nose. The rules have formed because it allows it to keep going. It’s the same as being the person surrounding the mosh pit, being the person who pushes people in, you’re keeping the people behind you safe but also keeping the energy in.
I was in a mosh pit when I was a teenager and that’s what actually put me off them, because I didn’t understand what was happening and was accidentally in the middle of a wall of death. It was a really small teenage alternative night, I didn’t know why the people in the room had split in half and were running at me.
When I went back as an adult I went to observe how people had dressed, how they were behaving, just the general atmosphere of the room. The second band was really good so I put away my phone — where I was trying to write my notes really subtly — I stood up and was bopping along. Two teenagers then got into the centre and just started going for it, hitting into each other and swinging their arms and stuff. More and more people joined and I had unknowingly drifted so I was the person on the outside. People would just come flying at you, you have no choice but to put your hands up to stop them. As soon as they touch you, you get the urge to push back, so suddenly I was involved.
I then just got braver and sort of thought about what would happen if I stepped into this. And I had so much fun, I had to leave because I was laughing to the point that I couldn’t really breathe. You’re getting winded and I was laughing so I felt like I was going to faint. So I got out, took a second, and got back in. What I appreciated is that because I had a smaller frame than a lot of the other people in there I noticed people would bump me just that bit less.
That rule of not needing to give people equal levels of force, to me, feels like a direct link to something along the lines of contact improv. You understand the bodies that are coming towards you and you don’t give equal force to everybody, you respond respectfully. I had a great time! At a festival I got into a much bigger one, a circle pit, where you run almost like a herd which was unbelievably good fun. It was right on the edge and a little scary but it was a really positive atmosphere. You can also pull out as you need to, you lean your body back and the crowd just absorbs around you.
I just love all this information, that among people who aren’t dancers they’re using the same phrases a contemporary dancer would say, I mean ‘lean your weight back and get absorbed out’, it’s so interesting!
Q: There’s a very distinctive somatic knowledge that comes with moshing. In working with Robyn, how did you transfer that knowledge into dance material?
Rachel: Initially I thought that I would be doing all of the jobs, that I would write and choreograph. As it developed into a work of dance and theatre I knew we needed a director. I wanted to direct but I needed someone who could be solely focused on the choreography. Me and Robyn have worked with each other a lot, I really love her style so we just had the most generative meet-ups. I would show her the prompts that I was basing things off of and she would do her own research, try and infuse moshing with really intricate moments of choreography.
Q: Robyn, how did you go about translating Rachel’s research into movement research during the development process of this work?
Robyn: I got into the studio on my own and started headbanging! But I quickly realised that working alone wasn’t the most effective way to explore something so fundamentally collective and relational. So I began thinking more structurally, and ended up getting quite nerdy and mathematical with one particular section of the piece.
That section comes at the end of the show. We called it BIMLOP, after one of the voice recordings in the show where a mosher talks about “being in the middle of a load of other people.” The section is physically intense and quite complex in terms of timing and coordination. I treated it like a score, writing out each dancer’s part individually as if they were musical lines. I then recorded myself performing each of the five parts separately and overlaid the videos to test whether the section would hold together spatially and rhythmically once we were all in the studio. It became a kind of choreographic puzzle, built out of rhythm, pattern, and layered intention. It was a lot of fun when we finally got into the studio with the five dancers and realised it was going to work.
Rachel’s script and initial ideas offered a rich pool to draw from — both emotionally and conceptually. Often in dance, research begins with images, video or poetic fragments, so having a full script with such clear thematic material gave us a strong foundation. That interplay between written word and physical response shaped much of the early development work. Rachel knew what she wanted for many of the sections, so play became a big part of the process. There was a lot of trial and error — there’s only so much you can explore alone — but once we all got into the studio together, things began to click quite quickly.
Q: Are there any crossovers with existing choreographic practices that impacted your own process in making the dance material for MOSH?
Robyn: Absolutely. While MOSH is rooted in a very specific physical world, one that draws on the raw, chaotic energy of mosh pits, there were still several existing choreographic practices that influenced how I approached making the material. For one, I drew a lot from compositional tools often used in more formal or contemporary dance settings, particularly in the way I structured the group sections. For the final part of the show, I essentially treated the movement like a musical composition: writing individual parts for each dancer as though they were instruments in a score. This very methodical, almost mathematical approach to building group movement is something I’ve used in the past, but it took on new meaning here, especially when contrasted with the unruly spirit of the content.
At the same time, I leaned heavily on improvisational and contact-based practices, tools that help dancers stay hyper-aware of each other in space and that build trust. Those practices were essential for helping the dancers connect with the physicality of moshing, which involves a lot of risk, instinct and spontaneous interaction. Even though the energy felt wild and unscripted, we relied on techniques that are grounded in safety, consent, and mutual responsiveness — things that are deeply embedded in dance training.
And of course, the integration of external source material (Rachel’s script in this case) is a crossover point too. It’s not uncommon in contemporary choreography to draw from text, poetry, or visual media, but having such a dense and emotionally charged script gave the process a unique dramaturgical depth. It meant the movement didn’t come from abstract ideas, but from something specific, lived and felt. That connection between language and body became a key part of the process.
Q: Have there been any surprises in the studio while creating the piece? Any converts who might now head to the pit?
Robyn: We had a lot of laughs making the show. There’s something about asking a room full of highly trained dancers to throw themselves around in a controlled kind of abandon that creates a joyful tension between discipline and disorder. Every day in the studio, something surprising happened. It was really exciting to watch that unfold.
There are definitely a few of us who would jump right into the middle of the action, and some who would very respectfully stand at the back and enjoy it from afar.
Rachel: I think I’m a big convert after living with it so intensely. I like to think a few of them have been converted. I’ll remind some of the dancers who think that it’s not for them that they have moshed more than they realise. I play a lot of nu metal especially as dancers come in for rehearsal, it’s my way of subliminally messaging them I suppose.
MOSH performs in Dublin on the 23rd and 24th May as part of the Dublin Dance Festival (13th-24th May).
MOSH then tours to Galway (28th May), Cork (6th+7th June), Longford (11th June), Clare (18th June), Donegal (5th July) and Waterford (10th+11th July), with more dates to be announced. For more information and booking look here: https://www.rachelnibhraonain.com/mosh. Header image by Amanda Alexander.