When I saw the call for artists to participate in the Mind Your Step project, I was worried that it didn’t seem to acknowledge the work of dance artists and others who had linked choreography, urban planning, regeneration, architecture and social change in the context of Dublin Docklands. From Liz Roche’s All Weather Project commissioned by Dublin Dockland Authority’s in 2006 to Ríonach Ní Néill’s and Joe Lee’s recent multi-award-winning film, Area, there have been dance works made in and aware of the context of social and urban transformation. 
My concern to recognise and remember this existing body of work is probably selfish since, as Artist in Residence for Dublin City Council in 2007/8, I focused on the relationship of bodies to buildings in the context of rapid urban regeneration, primarily in that Docklands area but also in Berlin, Beijing and Shanghai. (This blog documents much of the work) It was a period of very valuable research for me that resulted in a variety of work, not least Three + 1 for now, a film installation made on wasteground near Sherriff Street, and Niche, the stage work that grew from that material. For that reason I proposed to revisit an extract of Niche for Mind Your Step and found the organisers (http://remindyourstep.org/team/) both positive and generous in their response and support for the proposal
It’s been interesting, in revisiting the sites where I worked in 2007/8, to see what’s changed and what remains the same. Ellie Creighton (a producer, communications expert and dancer in DYDC when they took part in Open Niche, as was Jessie Keenan, another of the choreographers in the Mind Your Step performance) who helped locate performance sites for Mind Your Step, has told me of the challenges in getting property owners to allow access. Health and safety, public liability insurance etc. is one barrier, as it would have been in 2007. However, the main reason they are less helpful now is that, after years of properties remaining empty or unfinished, nascent economic recovery means that those properties have a value again as the potential of their commercial use is increased. Of course, we didn’t ask for permission to use the sites where we danced in 2007. We didn’t have institutional responsibilities and besides we weren’t organising audiences for performances with attendant public liability. Moreover, part of the intention of the work in 2007 was to test what possibilities were available for human creativity in the financial and social choreography that the redevelopment of the Docklands entailed. We made Three + 1 for now on wasteground that in 2008 was surrounded by encroaching development. Beside it was a single detached house which it seemed someone had refused to let the developers demolish. What surprises me is that both the house and that wasteground are still there, while many of the new build retail spaces surrounding them have been empty since their construction.
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