As part of the Centre Culturel Irlandais’ programming for the Paris Olympic year, its director Nora Hickey M’Sichili  has assembled an exhibition on Gaelic Sports in the centre.   It’s the third in a series of art and sport exhibitions she’s programmed there this year and the Gaelic Games focus meant she invited me to present my GAA dance films, Match and Abú alongside beautiful work by photographer Amelia Stein, designers Camán and Co., sound artist Úna Monaghan, photographer Paul Carroll and visual artist James L. Hayes.  It’s always a privilege and a pleasure to insert dance into these contexts and I was delighted to have Match and Abú resonating with the work around it, whether it was the shared warrior attitude of Erin, the young camogie player in Abú, and the soldiers in Amelia Stein’s portraits, or the green grass of pitches in Paul Carroll’s photos and Croke Park in Match, or indeed the vibrant team colours in Camán and Co’s design and the kit on the dancers.

For the exhibition opening, Nora invited me to present with visual artist Gabriel Schmitz again another version of the dance and drawing encounter we had performed for an invited audience at CCI in June.  I realised as I was preparing to introduce the event that I’ve known Gabriel since before I started dancing.   We were first introduced by my long time friend, the sculptor Tove Hirth when she and Gabriel were both studying at the College of Fine Art in Edinburgh and I was at Oxford.  Our paths crossed through Tove over the years but it wasn’t in dance until much later.   In 2011, when  I was presenting Tabernacle in Barcelona, where Gabriel lives, he came to sketch some of the rehearsals and produced some beautiful paintings with images from the work as inspiration.  He continued working with other dancers subsequently and gradually developed a practice of live sketching alongside dance improvisations and performances.  Among the dance artists he’s worked with is Elena Giannotti who was in the Tabernacle rehearsals he first visited.  You can read some of his text on dancing and drawing in the 2018 entry here:

To paint or draw a dancer is a challenge. And I am not speaking of rendering anatomy in a convincing way, nothing could interest me less. I am speaking of the attempt to catch a glimpse of what is behind the appearance of things. Dance as I experience it comes close to naming the unnamable, rare moments when the veil falls away and the essence of things surfaces, a kind of truth that does not filter through reason. Raw material.

Also among the dancers Gabriel saw in Tabernacle was Matthew Morris whom I could see  on the screen in Match as I danced at CCI.  I’m increasingly aware of and sensitive to these links across time and space that traverse my dancing body.  Remembering and finding again people and experiences that have shaped who I am as I move now.

Standing in the middle of the Gaelic Sports exhibition, I felt strongly that though I hadn’t yet started my dance training when I met Gabriel, I had been trained by the GAA environment I grew up in and that I could feel from the variety of work around me.  I’ve been shaped by a culture, by habits, by practices and the movements and emotions they evoke.  I try to recognise and move with all of this legacy as I dance.

And as a more concrete nod to that legacy, I wear the Cork jersey that we bought for Match almost twenty years ago.  I didn’t wear it n the film but we did use them in our live performances.  The jersey has been to Italy, China, London, Cyprus, Spain and now France.

The photos above are from Olivier Debienne.  And this video is from Iranian choreographer and film-maker Tanin Torabi, whom I haven’t see since she did her MA in Limerick.  More connections across space and time.

What a poet can establish in the act of writing a poem is something a reader can get from the completed work, that is a realisation that as persons and as peoples we can get further into our selves and farther out of ourselves than we might have expected; and this is one of the ways that poetry helps things forward.

Seamus Heaney “Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain”, Finders Keepers p. 377

Heaney’s work resonates with many people. My particular connection is not only through the poems learned, parsed and analysed in primary school and secondary school (the “poppy bruise” on his dead brother’s temple imprinted itself on my memory). But through Heaney’s time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford while I was a student there. I didn’t study Heaney as part of my course – nothing quite so contemporary in our survey of English Language and Literature. But Heaney was a good friend of my Old English tutor, poet, Corkman and gentle saviour, Bernard O’Donoghue. I think that’s why as Professor of Poetry, Heaney became an honorary fellow of my college, Magdalen. And I remember being invited to an honorary lunch on his appointment. I have no epiphany or personal revelation to report in being so close to literary greatness. It didn’t help me gain access to his oversubscribed lectures and indeed by the time Heaney’s professorship finished in Oxford in 1994, I was already completing my first year as a dance student at LCDS.

So it’s in retrospect and at a distance that I appreciate this proximity and the many aspects of Heaney’s reflections – on Irishness, in Britain, on art’s navigation of personal and cultural identity, on the responsibility of art to impulses that aren’t about contemporary politics – that help me make sense of what I experienced in Oxford, and that I continue to work on as an artist today.

In the quote from “Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times”, I can easily substitute dance for poetry (another poet, Thomas McCarthy, told an event at the Firkin Crane in Cork that dance and poetry emerged together in the rhythmic songs and movements performed or expressed around campfires by our ancestors). I may quibble with Heaney’s valorisation of forward movement: it’s perhaps inevitable in the progression of the poetic line (though rhyme so often takes us back in poems as much as forward, with its echoes of the past), while dance can go forward and back, progress sideways, upwards and downwards. But mostly I’m heartened by the combined aspiration of deeper inwardness and farther beyond ourselves, through others that his prescription for artistry proposes.

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