Yearly Archives: 2023

It’s an honour and frankly a buzz to have Abú be presented in the Art of Sport exhibition, curated by Anna O’Sullivan, at the Butler Gallery as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival this year. The exhibition features beautiful work by a range of major international artists from Ireland and abroad, including Paul Pfeiffer, Julian Opie, Amelia Stein, Colm McAthlaoich, Dorothy Cross, Mandy O’Neill and Martin Parr. To have our dance work there, presented with impact on specially constructed screens and with Murli’s music filling the gallery, is testimony to the ability of dance to resonate with a wide range of audiences and in the most refined of artistic contexts. I’m also pleased to be able to show that work that’s created out of sensitive local and specific engagement can take its place in a global cultural conversation. Hurray for Abú and everyone who helped make it.

Anna O’Sullivan hosted an Artists’ Talk with Colm McAthlaoich, Mandy O’Neill and me as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival. I enjoy these talks when artists find unexpected connections between their different approaches, and when audiences offer new perspectives on what we’ve made and so it proved for me on this occasion too.

As the first phase of Step Up 2023 comes to an end this week, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a curator of the programme. Step Up was established as a partnership between the Arts Council, Dance Ireland, Dance Limerick and the Irish World Academy as a way to introduce to the dance community in Ireland dancers from the country who, at that point of necessity, would have had their dance training abroad. Trained in schools in the UK and across Europe, the risk was that generations of dance talent would establish their networks abroad and never connect with the vibrant dance community and its audiences in Ireland. The programme has had a variety of curators over the years, each bringing their own perspectives and responding to the changing needs of dance. When I became curator in 2021 at the invitation of Jenny Traynor, then director of Dance Limerick where Step Up has been mostly based, I wanted to underline again the founding intention of Step Up to be a project that would connect early career dance professionals in and from Ireland to the community there. I use the language of ‘early career professionals’ deliberately since not everyone who is entering the profession is graduating from conservatoires and I want Step Up to be an opportunity for all kinds of dancers for all kinds of backgrounds. It’s been fascinating to find talented applicants who have maintained self-directed dance training alongside other studies or who have come through dance styles and backgrounds that don’t necessarily get validated in contemporary dance training. I don’t assume that applicants will be young, since I want to hold open the possibility that people might be discovering dance and could enter the professional world at any age. And ‘professional’ is an important word, since we expect applicants to have trained – whether formally or informally – to a level where the are able to work professionally. But with that expectation of the dancers, I worked with Jenny to ensure that the dancers would now be paid for their work in the programme. Even though Step Up is a professional development opportunity, there will be people who could never take up such an opportunity if their time wasn’t paid for. And as professionals they deserve to be paid professionally.

It has also been important for me that Step Up offers early career professionals the chance to focus on being performing artists. The funding system in Ireland has tended to prioritise creative artists in a way that has incentivised performers to make work rather than see performing as a viable skill, craft and art that can be deepened and enriched with experience and opportunity. I’ve wanted to underline that contributing the performer’s art to the creative process makes work better for choreographers, audiences and other participants. That’s not to say that the dancers who have taken part in Step Up over the years haven’t also had choreographic practices that should be encouraged and developed. But I’m proposing that Step Up is a place to dancers to practice their skills as performers, in creation and in performance.

One of the skills that I’ve found valuable in performers that I’ve worked with over the years is an understanding of the context in which they are dancing. Some aspects of the performer’s life can encourage us to think of it as separate from other parts of society. We can often find ourselves making work in closed studios, meeting audiences at the end of processes and sometimes only sensing those audiences as presences in the dark beyond the glare of stage lights. I realise that this is not the case for the kind of work that many artists want to make but it can be a default approach in the way we’re trained for our work. Therefore I’ve tried to use Step Up as an opportunity for the dancers to learn about working in a particular context. With my choreography last year, our goal was to understand the supporters and players of Gaelic games, especially in Limerick where Step Up was based. And this year, with the choreographer Maria Nilsson Waller, the focus was on the river Shannon and the flow of life around it. Both projects asked the dancers to connect with local communities as inspiration, creative informants and ultimately as audiences – engaging with people in this more rounded exchange that shifts what can sometimes be a passive one-way audience relationship.

In both instances the creative process has invited the dancers out of the studio, asking them to adapt to dancing in different physical and social environments, developing a sensitivity that has an impact on physicality and performance quality. It’s important for me that dancers understand the value of their choice to dance in the world but unless we are brave enough to interact with the world around us in ways that allow direct input and feedback, then we don’t get to learn that value. I’ve seen the impact on dancers of finding why dancing matters to them and why it matters that they dance in this world. It changes how they show up in performance on stages and off, perhaps giving a confidence or at least a clarity of knowing why they are dancing. It’s that clarity and knowledge that I seek for myself and that I hope Step Up, under my curation and with the team that enables the programme, helps the dancers to find for themselves.

Congratulations to the Step Up 2023 dancers – Ben, Fionnuala, Ghalia, Jessie, and Saoirse – , to Maria and her collaborators, to the teachers who shared not only their dancing but their life experience, to Mufutau and Finola who led brilliant masterclasses on the Ultima Vez and German Tanztheater repertories, to the Dance Limerick team, to Ella as producer and Lucia as lynchpin and rehearsal director and to all the people who shared their ideas and support with the project this year. Step Up 2023 isn’t finished yet but it’s had a great start.

Thanks to Dance Limerick and photographers Maurice Gunning, Stace Gill and @iaramphotos for the photographs

This week in the STAC Chapel in Clonmel, I had a public “artists’ conversation” with Austin McQuinn a visual artist and performance maker. Austin’s solo show at the South Tipperary Arts Centre STAC is entitled Some signs are secret, some manifest and features a large sculptural work that resembles a Norman tower but covered in hundreds of Aran sweaters sewn together into a single enveloping piece, as well as paintings/collages made on, and in relation to, found often discarded prints.

Some of the prints are of religious scenes (Austin retains the titles of the original prints even if the images are completely transformed by his intervention) but most are images from the Victorian war painter Elizabeth Thompson, who became Lady Butler in Bansha, Co. Tipperary. Austin’s work often engages with found materials.

As well as the painting and sculpture, Austin makes live performance and when I met him today he had completed a 24 hour performance, Imperial Lunatic, in the STAC Chapel, which was formerly the garrison chapel of the Kickham Barracks. Chalk from his performance was still visible on the floor in front of us. It was in that chapel, before the barracks was redeveloped as a civic space for Clonmel that I met Austin after a long hiatus, when he came to see me perform Unreeling in the Tipperary Dance Platform, in 2021. Seeing him in the audience before the performance that day, I recognised how Unreeling and all my dancing is a celebration of having survived our shared history, some of which relates to being gay boys in an Irish boarding school in the 80s. I appreciated his presence at the performance as an act of support and solidarity and so I was delighted to be invited back to the same chapel that had since held his solo performance to talk about our histories, our futures, our inspirations and our routes to working expressively through our bodies.

The conversation covered a lot of territory but I was often drawn to the fact that we were pointing to places in the space where significant events happened: I pointed to where he was sitting when I performed, he gestured to where elements of his recent performance happened, we could locate where we spoke after the show. The space was charged with these memories that are presences now as real as the chalk that still marked the floor, presences that claim space alongside the official military and religious narratives in the chapel’s history. We, as many others have and will, are making different stories and experiences material in the chapel and in ourselves, working with histories that have been lived through us but that exceed us as individuals.

I’m grateful for the opportunity this encounter and re-encounter has provided me to think about the path we’ve traveled so far, so that I can see a little more clearly why it matters so much to me to keep dancing myself and to keep making dancing possible for others.

Thanks to a residency opportunity from Dance Ireland, Isabella and I have spent a couple of weeks of research together at Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig. We applied for the residency time to deepen an investigation of how two queer dance artists in Ireland choreograph new arrangements and interactions of their bodies beyond the familiar patterns of heterosexual or homosexual desire. We also wanted to keep investigating what presentation formats would best support an audience to engage with the choreography.

It’s almost twenty years since I first visited the Tyrone Guthrie Centre when I attended a Dublin Fringe Festival workshop called Thread (a forerunner of the current Make artist development programme). The workshop brought together artists of different disciplines among whom were filmmaker Oonagh Kearney, composers Julie Feeney, George Higgs and Áilís Ní Riain, theatre-maker Jason Byrne and actor Dónal Toolan. It was from work that I started there with Jason and Julie that Cosán Dearg subsequently grew and I’ve continued to have a sense of kinship with the other artists as they’ve developed their singular creative careers. (Dónal’s death in 2017 was a huge loss to the arts and to disability rights in Ireland).

It may seem superfluous to refer to this history, but I am increasingly aware of how much of my experience of people and places I carry with me when I dance. And I want to recognise and also honour those experiences, especially when I return to a location, where the energies of previous visits, crossings and connections offer a potent material to work with. Dancing is liveness – aliveness – and when I dance now, I am dancing as I am, mindful of the experiences – conscious and unconscious, physical, emotional, historical and environmental – that shape that sense of the dancing I am. Tearmann Aiteach is a project that creates space for that engagement with the I am, the I that is being created, with the more that I that has created it and with the other than I it might be and could become. Tearmann Aiteach/Queer Sanctuary is a space for transformation, for the becoming of other possibilities, recognising the material that I and we bring into the dance sanctuary.

The we is important because the space Isabella and I are creating is one that happens between us, made possible because of some physical resonance between us that isn’t dependent on a long history of working together. In fact our two weeks in Annaghmakerring have been the longest stint we’ve spent together. Until now we’ve built our performance on the lightest of interaction between our separateness. We’re drawing on the resonance between the solos I made for each of us (and in Isabella’s case remotely via Zoom) and to which audiences at Uilinn drew our attention. Having layered those solos on top of each other for our performances at Originate in the Dublin Dance Festival and in John Scott’s Dancer from the Dance Festival, we are encouraged by audiences that have been willing to follow us in the space of possibility that our dancing is trying to make and maintain. And though I initiated the solos, what happens now is a shared endeavour between Isabella and me, and between us and the collaborators and audiences we are drawing into the experience.

While not aiming for a homogenous physical aesthetic between us, it was good for us to gain a deeper understanding of our similarities and difference so that we can support one another more effectively in the ongoing work. Part of the benefit of Tyrone Guthrie was the physical environment where we could explore the stimulus provided by a natural environment – by forest, field and especially the lake. Swimming in the lake offered us a bracing physical experience that activated our bodies and released unexpected creative possibilities. Being in the lake was also a useful metaphor for our work: our daily swim (for me more of a dip) became part of a practice shared together, a challenge, but also a reward, something we did differently but together, something where our separateness was contained by the lake with its thrills and danger, something which occasionally inspired others as our fellow residents joined us, made confident by our presence and example. In this way, working between the comfortable studio and the readily accessible outdoors allowed us to integrate embodied reflection on the interface between human and non-human life under the rubric of queer sanctuary.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fearghus O'Conchuir (@followfearghus)

The company of other artists at TGC gave us an opportunity to share our practice as performance. The opportunities we took to invite others into the process highlighted the importance of performing as part of the deepening of the practice and research, rather than as a single end-point and destination. And as a result it indicates that the future of the work lies in expanded formats that are anchored and energised by performance and invite exchange. With a residency at Dance Limerick in January and an opportunity to present work at What Next in Limerick in February, we have come from this period of residency with a strong choreographic structure that we already know engages audiences. All of this is hugely beneficial, especially at a time when, thanks to my role on the Arts Council, conventional project-based resources are not available to us. The restriction however has allowed us to develop this work slowly, sustainably and pleasurably without some of the market-driven responsibilities of the project-funded approach. That sidestepping of the market doesn’t mean introspection however. Our aspirations for Tearmann Aiteach are to create shared spaces for flourishing and we’ll continue to develop those aspirations whenever we can. Performing in the studio at Annaghmakerrig for some of the other residents opened the sanctuary. We are starting to think about a format for sharing the sanctuary, a residency, a practice, performance, for queer-identifying artists and for others happy to enter that space of queering.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fearghus O'Conchuir (@followfearghus)

If it’s something you’d be interested to hear more about, do ask. We’re looking for the practical structures and partnerships that could support that space.