Belfast International Arts Festival asked me to write a blog post for their website.  This is what I wrote:

05 October 2016

When I think of the choreography of The Casement Project, I’m trying to pay attention not only to the energy and movement between dancers in a studio or on a stage.  I’m also thinking of where those stages are and where else The Casement Project can show up, whether that’s on a beach in Kerry, in the British Library in London, in a club in Kilkenny or in a studio in Dusseldorf.   This a choreography that happens across national boundaries and in different media.  Like Roger Casement, it’s a choreography that is mobile, multi-faceted and complicated!

Bringing The Casement Project to Northern Ireland was part of my plan from the beginning. Though he was born in Dublin, Casement’s family connections to Belfast, Ballymena and Ballycastle were strong and his travels, political and personal, brought him back often.  He wanted to be buried overlooking Murlough Bay but when his bones were eventually repatriated in 1965, the British Government made it a condition of their release that they be buried in the Republic.  Though Casement is renowned for his words – his reports denouncing human rights abuses in the Congo and in the Amazon, his poems, his letters, his diaries – his body, what it did and where it went, both in life and in death, has always been hugely political.  It’s for that reason that I’ve found Casement such an important resource for thinking about the body in this moment of centenary commemoration, one hundred years after the Easter Rising and one hundred years since the midpoint of WW1.

Butterflies and Bones doesn’t try to tell Casement’s story.  I value the liveness and surprising potential of bodies too much to try to tie them to a single narrative.  And by making work in this way, I’m asking an audience to get involved, to bring their own perspectives, imagination and perceptions so that we can build something new together.  Butterflies and Bones  draws on detailed research into the complexities of Casement’s legacy to address contemporary questions of who belongs in the collective body, whose bodies have rights, what bodies are kept at bay.  Casement’s international humanitarianism reminds us that we cannot think about the flourishing of a nation, without thinking of our responsibilities to those who exist beyond our borders.  Post-Brexit Northern Ireland feels like an important place to be engaging with these ideas.

The Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival is also an ideal context for us to performing in.  I’ve presented work in the festival twice before: once thanks to a commission from Maiden Voyage Dance Company and, more recently, a solo I danced called Cure.

This year’s programme has important and sustaining lines of kinship between Butterflies and Bones and some of the other events. There are obvious connections to The Fever: Roger Casement in Dark Places, especially since we’ve learnt so much from Colm Tóibín’s work on Casement and had the privilege of having Olwen Fouéré read Fintan O’Toole’s The Nightmare of Empire for our Wake for Roger Casement at Kilkenny Arts Festival earlier on this year.  But there are other kinships too: to the sweaty physicality of Jan Marten’s exciting Dog Days are Over and to the queer delight and challenge of Taylor Mac.  I hope audiences will feel these lines of kinship that foster a community through the festival and beyond.

Fearghus Ó Conchúir on Butterflies and Bones.

Thanks to Kilian Waters of Shoot to Kill Productions for editing the video and to everyone who danced with us on the day.

All kinds of people have contributed to The Casement Project.  It’s important that we communicate and connect with a wide audience and having a good website is an essential part of being able to do that.  A website provides people with information, it gives them a sense of the project, it’s a document of what’s happened and, as a result,  it’s an integral part of the project in its own right.

I’m delighted that the Realex Web Awards 2016 have recognised the great job that Karen Hanratty and the team at Pixel Design have done on thecasementproject.ie.  It won best microsite in this year’s awards – thanks to its superb design, and to its content too, I’d like to think!  Karen designed my personal website www.fearghus.net and I appreciate the time she takes to listen to how I wanted the website to reflect the values of the whole project, as well as being functional and accessible.

Thanks to Annette Nugent and Kate O’Sullivan who are looking after  The Casement Project‘s communications and who helped shaped the website too.

Photo Annette Nugent

In the second of The Casement Project‘s appearances at Kilkenny Arts Festival, I shared a platform with journalist, Fintan O’Toole (who has written extensively about Casement), Dr. Barbara Dawson (Director of The Hugh Lane where two Casement exhibitions are running) and Prof. Roy Foster (historian and friend of The Casement Project). We were invited to have a public discussion about Casement and his legacy under the title of Body of Evidence.   It was good to be able to talk about the history as inspiration, but also to recognise what is distinctive about an artist’s response to inspiration, and in particular my focus on the body – in its joy and pain – as a way of drawing contemporary resonance from Casement’s life and afterlife.

While the panel took Casement’s homosexuality as a fact, when Fintan, as chair, opened the discussion to the audience for questions, the first intervention was from a man who, seizing the microphone and making his way to the front of the room, clearly disagreed that Casement was gay and that the ‘Black’ diaries are authentic. He took exception to my description of the post-mortem examination of Casement that describes the dilation of his anus, pointing out that all our orifices would be dilated after a hanging. I don’t disagree with him, and wasn’t offering the post-mortem as proof of ‘the practices to which it was alleged the prisoner in question had been addicted’. Instead, I was interested in the invasive treatment of Casement’s body and in the subsequent discussion of that physical probing at the highest levels of British government.

Having Roy Foster next to me to deal with the majority forensic, historical conclusion that the diaries are genuine made me relaxed about the attack that this gentleman offered. I felt this man’s objections were particularly aimed at me, whom he addressed as Mr O’Connor, or, more particularly, aimed at my focus on the physical and sexual in Casement. Fintan O’Toole was a fierce defender and chair and refused to have the Q&A derailed. The audience was not sympathetic to the interruption either, especially when Roy Foster made clear the majority historical opinion. However that majority opinion is not total and it remains fascinating to me that Casement can provoke controversy and strong emotion one hundred years after his death.

In the company I was privileged to share at Kilkenny Arts Festival, both at The Wake for Roger Casement and at The Body of Evidence talk, I felt the kind of solidarity that makes it possible to brave the work that remains to be done around the body in Ireland.