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.

My first dance outing of 2018 was a weekend rehearsal in Dublin for An Táin. I hadn’t been in the Dance Theatre of Ireland studios for years (since working Dublin Youth Dance Company for Open Niche, perhaps?) but it was great to be in the light-filled studios with the energy and skill of the musicians playing with Lorcán MacMathúna. Daire Bracken, Martin Tourish and Eamonn Galldubh are all accomplished individual musicians and it’s interesting to hear how they work out their playing together, especially in this context, where, like me, they are serving Lorcán’s singing rather than foregrounding their own musicianship. I found that I was fitting my dancing with their instrumental interludes rather than trying to dance while Lorcán sang, so as not to split an audience’s attention.

Carrying the spirit of transformation from The Casement Project, I’m also enjoying letting the multiple characters, animals, atmospheres and emotions from An Táin pass through my choreography without trying in any way to represent the narrative. Lorcán’s singing does that but there’s something beyond the details of that ancient narrative that I want to embody for a contemporary audience. After our rehearsal together, I’m reassured that I’m on the right track. Cífimíd.

I was in Paris at the beginning of December thanks to a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais and at La Briqueterie, the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique du Val de Marne. Every year, the CCI supports Irish artists with residency time (and in the case of visual artists, studio space) in its beautiful premises in the centre of Paris, behind the Panthéon and in the heart of the Sorbonne University quarter. For me, after The Casement Project and the submission of my PhD, I knew I would value some time to begin the process of discovering what route to follow next in my work. So I was grateful to have been awarded a CCI residency to start that process.

Many of my fellow artists in residence were in Paris for the maximum residency awarded of three months and their residencies were coming to a much-regretted end by the time I arrived for a two-week stint. (I’m back again in 2018). Their immersion in Paris life made me think that my two-week residency was a bit too focused, especially for someone keen on discovering a new route ahead. Though I have performed Cure in its gallery and used one of its lovely rooms as a rehearsal space, CCI doesn’t have a dance-dedicated studio so I was very happy when La Briqueterie offered a week in its beautiful studios in Vitry.

I got to know La Briqueterie when I was Curator at Firkin Crane and we tried to develop a Creative Europe project as part of a wider partnerships of venues. I was impressed by its facilities then but even more so when I arrived and was handed a key to a big studio for my exclusive use between 10am-10pm on weekdays and 10am-6pm on the weekend. It felt like such a luxury to be in a building dedicated solely to choreographic development. While I might have benefited from some time to muse, I also wanted to use the time to work on material for An Táin, a collaboration with sean nós singer Lorcán Mac Mathúna who has written a song-cycle based on the old Irish myth of bulls, greed, Cúchulainn, Maedbh, magic, blood and civil war. I will dance with Lorcán’s live music in a performance at The Model Gallery in Sligo, where Louis le Broquy’s beautiful ink illustrations of Thomas Kinsella’s translation of An Táin will be installed. In his note to the translation, le Broquy considers his drawings to be modest interventions in the text and, after a busy period of foregrounding dance in a deliberately visible way, I’m choosing a more modest approach for this project too. It’s not mine to lead. The focus should be the singing. I will be adding something, but not trying to pull primary focus.

Though I only had the studio at La Briqueterie for a week of my two in Paris, the second week was largely given to preparations for my viva, scheduled for the Tuesday after my return from Paris. I could still enjoy being in the city, enjoy the cycle to La Briqueterie, strolls in the Marais and a visit to the Louvre, to which I hadn’t been since my first trip to Paris as a teenager on school trip with Mr. Shanahan. When people complimented me on my reasonable French, I saluted Mr. Shanahan’s uncompromising Francophilia that gave me such a good grounding in the language. The Louvre trip with its martial figures from various cultures provided some interesting material for me to incorporate into my studio research for An Táin. I remember that similar figures from the Pergamom Museum on antiquities in Berlin shaped some of the Cosán Dearg solo that, through multiple transformations in the bodies of other dancers, still resonated in Butterflies and Bones: The Casement Project. I continue to circle close to fertile territory.

That second week in Paris also introduced me to the very impressive Irish Embassy there. The embassy is in an ornate building just next to the Arc de Triomphe and as residents at the CCI, we were invited to a reception there to mark the launch of a book about Paris’s role in supporting Irish creativity. The reception was on the evening of the day the UK yielded to what were effectively Irish concerns not to have a hard-border between the Republic and Northern Ireland post-Brexit. I was surprised, following a 2016 in which as regular guest of the Irish Embassy in London, I’d heard all the rhetoric of positive Anglo-Irish relations, to find (not from the Ambassador of course), a barely disguised glee at the UK’s weakened position and the positioning of France as Ireland’s most significant (and geographically) closest cultural ally in Europe. Given that my PhD addresses questions of cultural diplomacy and nation branding, I found it fascinating to be part an artist at the Embassy on that evening and to contemplate the increasingly important role the CCI will play as one of Ireland’s two official cultural centres abroad. And that fascination has made me want to spend some more time in Paris figuring out what dance can do with this shifting geo-politics – which is, I guess what An Táin is about too.

I was lucky to be at CCI with a bunch of engaging, talented and above all friendly artists: Karl Burke, whose photographs enliven this post; singer and composer, Adrian Crowley;contemporary art jeweller, Genevieve Howard and photographer and filmmaker, Conor Horgan. Though I didn’t have as much time to hang out with them as I would have like, I did want to make some artistic connection with them before I left. Karl and Conor both took some photographs of me and I listened to Adrian’s music as I worked in the studio.
And on the one of the last days, I asked Genevieve if I could dance with some of her work. She was very generous but reminded me the as the pieces are made of paper, my sweating would destroy them. Hence you can see in the photos my minimal movement with the jewellery and and the prophylactic hoodie I’m wearing. But this restriction was productive, as was the knowledge that Genevieve’s work is a translation into 3D of musical scores. Therefore to touch the pieces is already to sense the information coded into them and to be in human/non-human dialogue.

Tanztendenz is a cooperative of Munich choreographers that I came across when I was curator at Firkin Crane and we were discussing a possible Creative Europe application. One of Tanztendenz’s projects is a workshop for choreographers from Germany and abroad. The artists are hosted for a week and stimulated with a ‘mix of practical exercises, shared excursions and public lectures’. Most daringly, there is no pressure for any particular outcome from this gathering and stimulation of choreographers. It’s a gift.

This year’s atelier, titled ‘spaces we live’, seemed particularly relevant to me, given I’ve recently completed my PhD in Geography. So I was very happy to accept Micha Purucker‘s invitation to attend. Though we’re nearing 2018, I’m still in the wake of The Casement Project. For most people, I’m sure it will have been associated with 2016, but for me it has continued. It continues. There’s still grant-related admin going on. I’m Roger Casement is still being screened. People are still writing about the work. And of course, it featured in my PhD thesis. So it’s still very present in my mind. And holding it there has been tiring. As I begin to clear the space to listen for what impulse to follow next, the gift of input and stimulation without the obligation to produce immediate output is precious and hugely appreciated.

Our programme in Munich started with a Bavarian brunch of white sausage. Of the Munich choreographers, Stephan Herwig, Ceren Oran,
Moritz Ostruschnjak, Micha Purucker and SabineHaß-Zimmermann were our hosts and the international guests were Karolína Hejnová (Czech Republic), Mario Lopes (Brazil), Akemi Nagao (Japan/Berlin), and Laura Pante (Italy). After brunch, we headed into the city in pairs, following instructions for a dérive designed to take us off the beaten track: find a sound that catches your attention; walk in that direction for 15 minutes; follow the direction of the next red car you see; get on public transport and get off after 5 stops etc. The walk connected me to similar walks in unfamiliar cities that became my Bodies and Buildings research and the joint research of the E-motional Bodies and Cities. So as I discovered a new place, I brought with me connections to other people and places still palpable in my body. I was in a pair with Micha, so benefited from his local knowledge even as we let the randomness of the instructions dictate our journey. I also benefited from listening to another experienced choreographer open to the fundamental questions of what next.

Because Munich was preparing for the winter, many of the city’s statues were covered against the snow and the fountains switched off. I found the image of a dormant fountain resonant as I imagined a period of creative dormancy for myself – always with a sense that there is a spring ahead.

In the subsequent days of the atelier, we traveled into the snowy Bavarian mountains, seeing Weiskirche, a roccoco church whose trompe l’oeil decorations reminded us that the virtual reality we would hear about and experience in Dominic Eskofier‘s later lecture had already been absorbed into our cultures. Dominic is quite the evangelist for VR, seeing it as a democratising tool where social and economic barriers in the organic reality can be overcome. Resistant to the war-inspired VR games, I was nonetheless charmed by the Tilt Brush tool that allows you to paint – actually sculpt and choreograph – in 3D and walk around your sculpture. We had lectures from astrophysicist and journalist, Franziska Konitzer, from philosopher Marcus Steinweg, from cinema programmer and theorist Lars Henrik Gass and others (I had to leave before the end of the atelier unfortunately). We had a private screening of films in the bijou Werkstattkino and saw the disturbingly brilliant Abendland, a documentary about what’s going on at night-time across Europe.
It trains the camera on a rave, a ICU ward, a crematorium, the European Parliament, the policed borders of the continent and many more locations, holding each equally, without comment and allowing the viewer to draw conclusions about connections and disjunctions. I appreciated this artistic strategy of making a frame to hold diversity. It reminded me of what Dan and I did for Tattered Outlaws of History or indeed the frame of Féile Fáilte. I was struck by the process that enabled the filming of Abendland. Apparently the director was also the cinematographer, so a very small team was involved in infiltrating this variety of sometimes intimate, sometimes formal locations. I thought of the relationships necessary to negotiate access and recognised in all of this the kind of choreography I’d like people to see in my work. Abendland does all of this with particular brilliance and I count seeing it as one of the memorable moments of my Munich trip.

Of course you never know what the outcome of something like the Tanztendenz Choreographers’ Atelier will be and Tanztendenz is brave in continuing to make an argument to funders for the necessity of such a gift without strings attached. I came away from the atelier buoyed by the generosity, delighted to be introduced to a new group of creative individuals and also clear that I needed more of the kind of absorbing and processing time that the days in Munich offered me. Fortunately, just ahead is another gift – a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, with a studio residency at La Briqueterie, that I hope will provide some more of that space to listen to what next.