Fearghus Ó Conchúir Choreographer and Dance Artist
July 31, 2016

Ste Murray’s photos of Féile Fáilte

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Ste Murray has been documenting The Casement Project from the outset.  His photos of Féile Fáilte give a flavour of the atmosphere, activity and beauty of the day.

You can view a selection here

July 30, 2016

Press shots from Féile Fáilte

Having rehearsed until after 11pm the previous night and knowing that we would be active again until midnight that day, I was a little reluctant to get myself and the dancers to Banna for a press call at midday on the day of Féile Fáilte.  I knew the day would demand sustained energy and I didn’t want to find myself empty by the time we got to performing Butterflies and Bones.  However, as we drove out to the beach, in the sunshine and arrived to see our Féile Fáilte encampment, I was immediately energised.  And I was reassured that the press photographer was Clare Keogh, whose photographic collaborations with Laura Murphy I’ve admired at Firkin Crane over the years.  She knows dance, knows the artistic sensibilities of the choreographers that she is working with, and she knows what the media would like.  She cajoled us into something that felt true to the work, but was sufficiently glitzy for media attention.  And not just us either: John Scott’s IMDT, Siamsa Tíre, the Rusangano Family and some of our Casement Project and Project Arts Centre team too

You can view them here

July 17, 2016

‘We are Orlando and we keep dancing their dance’ by Theo Clinkard

Theo wrote a beautiful and thoughtful blog post for SoutheastDance about his response to the Orlando shootings and how it affected his dancing in Butterflies and Bones

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Theo Clinkard on the shoulder of Philip Connaughton in Fearghus O’Conchuir’s The Casement Project. Photo by Stephen Wright.

 

We are Orlando and we keep dancing their dance
Written by Theo Clinkard

Omar Mateen’s unspeakably hateful act took place in Orlando but the repercussions were felt deeply around the globe by the LGBT community and those who know that love is love.

In the aftermath of events such as this, it appears that the wound deepens as the finer details emerge. Initially the numbing shock of it all was hard to compute; we reported it as ‘news’ to each other, citing the few abstract facts available to us; a location and a toll which gradually increased as the day went on. But as figures became names, names became people, people became lives, everything shifted; the tragic event was humanised and news became perceived experience. Hearts grew heavy before rage burned bright. Before long, forty nine gleeful and sassy Facebook selfies looked back at us from screens and newsprint. We learned about their jobs, their loves, their culture, their activism, their families and most painfully of all, their dreams, the ‘who’ of the thing appeared to reveal the true horror of these losses. The hashtag was right, we were and are them; our child who just graduated (Akyra), the brother we look up to (Juan), our uncle (Franky), our barista (Luis), our pharmacy technician (Stanley), our bouncer (KJ), our accountant (Eddie), our bartender (Dee Dee) and our mum to eleven children who survived breast and bone cancer and who regularly went dancing at Pulse with her gay son (Brenda).

The one detail that I can barely comprehend is the fact that they were killed dancing. Since it was Latin Night at Pulse, I imagine them dancing in couples, in each other’s arms; such an ultimate expression of love, sexuality, community, diversity, care, freedom and of trust.

How are we all implied and impacted by these events? How do we relate compassionately, without lessening the experience of the families who reel from the loss of those they loved? How do we respond as queers, as artists and simply as empathising humans? How do we continue to honour these people through the ongoing noise of 2016 and beyond? How do we dance now when dance’s nature is one of trust, freedom and ultimately, hope?

For me, the volatile world events of this last month have reframed the act of dancing. Dancing was exposed as an act devoid of shouty activism when it seemed so desperately needed. Its muteness was suddenly so apparent. I struggle to explain it, but simply launching into an improvisation at work seemed like the most idle thing to do. The freedom of my body in space almost insulting to those that died in the very act.

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Theo Clinkard performing with Liv O’Donoghue in Fearghus O’Conchuir’s The Casement Project. Photo by Stephen Wright.

 

I was performing in London the day before and the day after the shooting. I was dancing the most glam queer voguing dance that has ever been asked of me as a performer; the kind that normally happens in a kitchen to a glittery pop song. Whilst I feel comfortable in my rainbow bright skin, it was a challenge to let myself flaunt it. It took trust to reveal that part of myself in a public place but it was liberating since, just like them, I was in a safe place. The fact that the term ‘safe place’ suddenly seems to ask me for quotation marks is a glaring reminder of how hate crime implies us all. To dance our dance we have to imagine we are safe. An arms flung in the air kind of safe.

As I prepared for the second performance, the opportunity gifted to me by being on stage became alarmingly clear, for I was visible. I could dance their dance in all its gay glory. A proud and defiant dance, needed today as much as ever before. Not just for Orlando, but for every marginalised community, LGBT or other. We are all of them. Dance continues to have a new found relevance for me these last few weeks. It is inherently empathetic, uniting, celebratory and hopeful.

Its ephemerality a distillation of this moment in time. To dance is to humanise and this is needed now more than ever before.

Kitchen dances, club dances, wedding dances, dad dances, private dances, queer dances, local dances, campfire dances, worldwide dances, miniature dances, sexy dances, video dances, watched dances, expansive dances, playground dances, beach dances, forest dances, pensioner dances, romantic dances, flashy dances, stage dances, shy dances, lyrical dances, spoken dances, imagined dances, free dances and non-violent dances. It is our responsibility to keep them all going.

Happy Brighton Pride to everyone. Be more fabulous than you ever dared and keep dancing their dance – I think it was probably a very sassy one!

 

www.theoclinkard.com

July 04, 2016

After the premiere of Butterflies and Bones

Mikel, Bernadette, Philip in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

Mikel, Bernadette, Philip in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

People have compared creating a new artistic work to giving birth. Since I’ve never experienced child birth, it’s hard for me to know how useful the analogy is, but there is one aspect that I can imagine being particularly relevant: while the moment of birth is an exciting introduction to a new life, it’s not like you get to know everything about your child in that single moment. You live with her/him get to know her/him by interaction.

Mikel, Bernadette, Matthew, Liv, Theo in Butterflies and Bones Photo Stephen Wright

It feels similar with Butterflies and Bones. Being with an audience seeing it for the first time was an opportunity for me to meet the work afresh, having come to some sense of it in various studios in London and Dublin. But we don’t get to know everything about a work from that premiere. It evolves with each performance and reveals more about its potential. It surprises me, even as I begin to understand it more deeply. That, at least, is my aspiration when I’m making work and it is that hope to be surprised by the work and by the performers in it that gives Butterflies and Bones its openness, malleability and resistance to determinacy.

In the context of post-Brexit turmoil in the UK (and Ireland and Europe as a whole!) Jacqueline Rose’s analysis of the damage caused by a masculinist ‘certainty’ in politics confirms why I try to make choreography that asks its audiences to engage with complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty. It might not always be easy but it’s my way to protect against the oppression caused by certainty. She writes:

‘And it is a curse of male-dominated politics… that it tends to be the kiss of death for a politician to suggest things are uncertain. It is rarely wise to say that what we most need to do in political life, indeed not only political life, is hesitate, slow down and pause for thought; to allow space for the complexity of who we are. As Edward Said pointed out, there is only a short distance between believing you can subdue the mind and believing you can subdue the world.

The idea of control always presents itself as an island of self-sufficiency or a law unto itself. In fact, the idea of control is meaningless on its own. In a world of rampant inequality and injustice, I can only seize control at the expense of someone else. We succeed in controlling our borders; migrants drown at sea.’

Liv O'Donoghue Photo Stephen Wright

Liv in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

Phelim McDermott’s perspective on live theatre inspires me in this respect also. He says that what is magical in live performance is like a wild animal, something timid and cautious and untameable. If you’re building a performance you have two choices: you can either kill the animal, stuff it and put it on the stage each night or you can build the conditions which might encourage the wild animal to show up. The former choice guarantees you a facsimile of the animal that appears where and when you planned. But it also guarantees that the animal is dead. The latter is a risk, since you can’t predict if the animal will come or how it will perform. But how much more magical is the work when animal in its unpredictable liveness comes?

Obviously the latter choice is what I aspire to. And there is a considerable amount of choreography of different kinds that goes in to building the conditions that would welcome and encourage the appearance of the wild animal. But it’s not a choreography that can guarantee outcomes. And that requires me and everyone involved the work to be comfortable with the vulnerability of no guarantees.

Philip in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

Philip in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

On Sunday, when we performed Butterflies and Bones, news had broken of the shootings in Orlando where a gunman targeted people in an LGBTQ club. Seeing Philip dance his collapsing bones solo to the sound of gunshots, suddenly amplified and underlined a continuity between Casement, the precariousness of certain lives and the revolutionary defiance of dancing those lives in vigour, pleasure and fun. I wish the tragedy hadn’t made that continuity so painfully visible, but I’m grateful that we could continue to dance our insistence that all kinds of queer lives are viable and deserve respect.

 

Even more powerfully, at a vigil for the Orlando victims on Old Compton Street, London next evening, a trio of dancers brought their vogueing to the event:

JAY JAY: Vogue is a dance outlet that comes from the ballroom scene, and within the ballroom scene there’s many categories, but it was for the queer people of color, black, Latino, et cetera, to come together in this world — it was for queer people of color to create this feel of a ball. A place where everyone feels comfortable, a place where there’s no judgement. [Yesterday], I called everyone and was like, “let’s vogue down!” — because there’s so much upset and sadness and that is happening, and voguing is uplifting. It’s an outlet for pain.

D’RELLE: I think why it was so important to me was because I was in Florida only a week ago, and left my friends out there. We needed to do something to show our support and solidarity because although it was in Orlando, it could happen anywhere. I called Jay Jay and we both agreed we need to go down there and vogue. Why vogue? Vogue — like Pulse — was for the black and Latino gay community, and is an expression of strength, freedom, and unity.

JAY JAY: Vogue always brings people together, no matter if you can vogue or you can’t vogue, you always love it, you always find some kind of love for it. People come together as one community, and they forget about all the negatives. That’s what voguing does, and that’s why we brought it to Soho — it was such a sad day in the beginning, and we wanted it to not just be sadness and pain. It is sad, it is painful to see this, it’s painful to understand it. But we need to come together and empower.

Matthew, Bernadette, Theo, Mikel, Liv and Philip in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

Matthew, Bernadette, Theo, Mikel, Liv and Philip in Butterflies and Bones. Photo Stephen Wright

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