One of the themes of my residency is refuge and I’ve been wondering where my refuge is on the site. The viewing platform in the Engine House has quickly become that place for me since it has a beautiful view, there’s some space (enough for me to warm up), it is not too busy during the weekdays (but still has enough traffic to allow for some interesting conversations), it has a metal floor that is much more comfortable and forgiving than the tiled floors below and it has wifi. I’d like to have a sign that welcomes people in when I’m warming up there. I want people to feel that my work there is as natural and/or surprising as the Thames Water workers or the flora and fauna outside. And it’s also important to acknowledge that as a human I need a place to shelter, to rest, to prepare, to process. Though I’ve always been keen to bring dance beyond its comfortable familiar settings, the resilience that requires has to be supported by some care and respite.

The success of the Wetlands opening in terms of visitor numbers means that it’s not necessarily helpful for me to attract many more people to it. However, it’s important that my work and that of the residency is visible. A mixture of visible and invisible therefore. When I mentioned this to Emma, the London Wildlife Trust Reserve Manager, she told me of the newts onsite that are undetectable to predators above because of their camouflage colouring but that have brightly coloured under-sides that they can expose to attract potential mates – safe and flamboyant. How can I be similarly discreet and attractive?

I started my stint as Artist in Residence at Walthamstow Wetlands on 2 May. The beginning wasn’t as smooth as I’d planned, though a bit of friction is always informative.

I’d been telling everyone how pleased I was that I could walk from my home in Walthamstow to work in Walthamstow – a rare convenience, and one that relies mostly on my accessing the Wetlands through the Copper Mill Lane entrance. Unfortunately the gate was closed because of Thames Water works on site and so I was confronted by the perimeter of the reserve, the long expanse of fencing that protects the sanctuary, the border that makes the Wetlands site possible as a place for refuge for wildlife.

In Of Hospitality Derrida recognises that hospitality and hostility share a common etymology because he wants us to recognise that absolute hospitality has its limitations.

From a deconstructive perspective, hospitality is necessarily ‘contaminated’ by law, system, and calculation, and this contamination is emphatically not understood as an unfortunate loss of ideal purity.

Mustafa Dikeç, Nigel Clark, and Clive Barnett, ‘Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time’, Paragraph vol. 32, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1-14, p. 9.

The notion of hospitality already implies that the host has territory, property and resources to be able to offer hospitably to others. Therefore, the borders that separate self and other, familiar and stranger are also a necessity to the ethical relationship of hospitality.

This respect for the other’s space, the other’s difference, is something that I’ve felt on the Wetlands. I’ve noticed many solitary walkers, anglers, birders and of course, the solitary (for the moment) dance artist. Though I’ve adopted what I think of as the Irish custom of greeting the people I pass on my travels around the site, it is clear that many are there for solitude and that I should respect that.

And I also noticed that for the goslings, barriers and borders are pretty porous.

Today my appointment as the next Artistic Director of National Dance Company Wales was made public.[Press release here] It’s a relief to finally be able to let people know what I’m going to be doing. I can’t tell if you’ll be surprised. Surprise is not a bad thing. It’s the ability to respond to surprise – the surprise of other people, the surprise of our ever changing bodies, the surprise of living – that has always drawn me to dance since Adele Thompson who was giving a workshop on behalf of LCDT when I was still a student at university told the assembled dance amateurs that one of the challenges of being a dancer is that each day you deal with a new body. Each day you have to figure out how to address that body to the choreographies it was involved in before, or to make something new. And that constant opportunity to learn, to adapt, to figure out a way through hooked me, guaranteeing that I could never be bored in an art form that acknowledged the fundamental necessity of surprise.

What might be surprising in my becoming Artistic Director of NDCWales is that I’ve been what we call an independent artist for all of my career so far. Of course, as I’ve written elsewhere independence is a fiction. We’re all interdependent. But while I’ve worked with all kinds of institutions and organisations as artist, board member, client, coach etc., I’ve not been employed inside them. It’s a kind of relationship I’ve often called Fleadership, a kind of leadership that doesn’t have the heft of the Elephant, a heft that we need to beat great paths through the undergrowth. However Fleadership is mobile, capable of prompting the Elephant to shift, capable of carrying information from one place to the next.

With The Casement Project I had the opportunity and the resources to work with a brilliant team to realise a project of a larger scale over a longer time period. And I loved the increased impact, how many more people could connect with the work and how the work could grow over time.

Back in Paris, I’ve been looking at the portraits that Conor Horgan took of me here before Christmas. He had asked that I be sweaty for the shots, as he had seen me like that one afternoon when I was rehearsing at the CCI. I was very happy to see myself differently through his frame. The portraits have made me think about the valorisation of effort, the demonstration of work, which of course, is not the same as achievement. While I was in Paris before Christmas, I ‘made good use of my time’ in the studio. It was a gift, literally a gift, to have space in the studios at the La Briqueterie and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. So I sweated each morning in the studio. No one who has been in a studio with me will be surprised to read that. I enjoy the sweating, or at least the rousing of energy in my body that leads to sweating. And maybe I know that something has happened when I’ve sweated. And that I will be capable of doing more because I’ve kept working at some of my physical limits.
And I’m also questioning this attachment to showing that I’m working hard.

During the second stage of my residency at CCI and at La Briqueterie, I’ve been ill and so I’ve not had the energy to sweat. Despite feeling weak, I’ve still gone to the studio because I think there’s work to be done to understand what my creative physicality could be when I’m not sweating. I haven’t loved being sick – it’s prevented me from enjoying the culinary delights of Paris and from getting around the city as much as I’d have liked. However, being able to be in the studio when I’ve had little energy has been productive. I’ve had to be patient, slower. And that has brought me in directions I might not have otherwise found.

I can’t see myself forgoing the pleasures of sweating completely, but there is something to add to the range of energetic possibilities. Thanks to Conor for prompting that realisation.