There is still much to process from the Bodies Politic Symposium. As soon as the Owen Boss, Emma O’Kane and Karen Till made the first presentation about These Rooms (a collaboration between Anu and CoisCeim Dance Theatre based on the testimony of female witnesses to the little known and unusually cruel execution of 15 innocent civilians during the Easter Rising), I knew that it was going to be a rich, stimulating day.

What was fascinating, as the day progressed, was to see a common energy and sense of shared cause in what might have been disorientatingly diverse material. By the end of the day, we could sense the potential of what Jesse Jones called, a radical solidarity between queers, feminists, people with disabilities, travellers, and other bodies long marginalised for their deviance (this true even of that ‘deviant’ majority – women – whose embodiment has long been stigmatised and consequently policed and disciplined.)

Rosaleen McDonagh, in conversation with Lian Bell, spoke of a similar alliance, since Stonewall, between the queer and the disabled. However, she cautioned against complacency in the wake of the Marriage Equality Referendum that made people feel that Ireland had declared its progressive potential (and capital has been quick to trumpet Ireland as a destination for gay weddings, making sure that there’s money to be made from this progress). The deaths of Travellers in the Carrickmines fires and subsequent threat of mass evictions of Traveller families as a result of fire safety audits on halting sites in the wake of the tragedy, illustrates to her the racism and discrimination that still exists in Ireland, a racism she experienced as a child when a yellow line divided the playground between where the traveller and the settled kids could play. Her conversation with Lian, despite this topic, was joyful and mischievously humorous, as these photos suggest.

When I think of that apartheid dividing line, I’m aware of the power that can institute such a line. It’s a power that discriminates against traveller bodies, assigning them a particular place (travellers being a disturbingly mobile population for a settled authority), it is a power that also limits the settled children, who are corralled, albeit with significantly more privileges on their side of the line.

This thought struck me as we celebrated the energy of radical solidarity that seemed to be generated by the symposium’s participants. I wondered if our solidarity could be inclusive. Patriarchy has traditionally disembodied the standard male. His is a body that doesn’t need to account for itself. It is neutral and part of its power over non-standard bodies is that his is invisible, not available to scrutiny. The result has been huge privilege and inequity, but it comes at a cost for actual men, who ignore their own embodiment and find it difficult to communicate about it, particularly its vulnerability. As Caitlin Moran explains to men in recent article in Esquire, ’12 Things About Being A Woman That Women Won’t Tell You’:

Because remember that patriarchy’s bumming you as hard as it’s bumming us. We’re bulimic, objectified and under-promoted. You, meanwhile, are unable to talk about your feelings lest you get punched in the nuts by “a lad” telling you not to be “a bender”. You are unlikely to get custody of your kids, and are three times more likely to commit suicide. Feminism’s about sorting all this stuff out. Because it’s about equality. Not burning the penises. I can’t emphasise enough how much it’s not about burning penises. No burnt penises here.

The queer, the disabled, women are acutely aware of their corporeal vulnerability, but that vulnerability, that susceptibility to injury and mortality, is also what opens us up to our connections to others and to their ethical claim on us (Judith Butler and Paul Harrison among others helps me formulate this thinking, in case you’re interested).

Some of the things that I’m particularly pleased about is that we could have the conference in Maynooth, particularly in the South Campus and in the corridors of the old seminary under the exclusively male gaze of the imposing clerical portraits on the walls. This is an environment where a wooden screen separates seminarians from other students in the refectory. I detected a glee in some of the speakers at realising how speaking about their work, their rights, their bodies was particularly radical act in this context.

Seeing photos of Liv dancing the small piece of movement we prepared from The Casement Project, I realise just how prominent the crucifix and religious photos were in that room.

I’m pleased that there was dancing in the symposium.

Not just Jesse’s calmly powerful material, not just the short solo that Liv danced in the middle of the room, whipping up an energy and power that embodied much of what other speakers had alluded to, but also the whole audience in movement: not wanting to go over too much of The Casement Project‘s promotional blurb in my presentation of it (there are many other situations when I have to make sure I’m communicating the aspirations and the components of the project), I spoke about the motif of the interlinked arms in the work.

I showed the poster image, the images from Choreodrome when I first introduced interlinking to the dancers, Casement’s photo of the three men dancing in Puatamayo that prompted the interlinking and some footage of Aoife and me working through that image. More importantly I asked people to try out the interlinking with each other, creating simple connections and bodily contact, a collective body made from the impulses of its constituent individual bodies.

I’d like to think that these small moments of focusing on the physical, as we did also with a body-scanning and body-centring activity at the beginning and end of the day, helped participants to tune in to themselves and others in a way that isn’t typical of the usual, cerebrally-focused symposium. A whoosh of Mexican wave helped too.

One final thing that pleased me was the transformation of the straight lines of chairs which we’d set up in the hall at the beginning of the day, into circles and other groupings by the end. That’s important to me because I’d like all structures to be flexible and adaptive to the necessities of the moment. I was happy to start the day in traditional theatre/lecture layout, since that format works for the kind of communication we needed at that point. But when we needed to see Liv more clearly, or create more opportunities for participants to talk to each other, it was important that people could alter the arrangement to facilitate those needs.

The structures can change. The choreography can be different, but we need to be aware of how it’s working now and what tools we have to alter it.

The quarry where we’re filming has provided, in the words of one of the four brothers whose family has run it for generations, the skeleton of Dublin. Granite from this quarry near Blessington has been used in state buildings and statues throughout the city. Its the connection to statues that has brought me there, invited by artists Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan to perform in a short film they’re making for TG4’s Splanc commissions. Called Allagóirí Chumhachta (Allegories of Power), it will explore the significance of stone statues found throughout Ireland and their relationship to political history and collective memory.

Ostensibly, I’m on a break from The Casement Project. Though I researched The Casement Project through my own dancing (on my own and with Aoife McAtamney, thanks to an Arts Council Bursary), I’m not expecting to dance in the work as it develops. However, as I encourage other people to experience and extend the potential of their bodies, it would be ironic if I lost touch with my own body, so I’ve been saying yes to opportunities that come up for me to dance and to perform. I don’t want to lose touch with the challenge and with the pleasure of those connections that happen in the special circumstances of performing. For that reason, I was quick to accept the invitation from Megs and Tom to be in their film.

And of course, it’s not really a break from The Casement Project: the focus on commemoration in Allagóirí Chumhachta and the place of the body in it is absolutely my concern, particularly as we prepare for the Bodies Politic Symposium at Maynooth this month. Tom and Megs are linking stone as a raw material, the carving process, the commemorative statues around Ireland and, in me, the living body. I feel I’m processing a legacy of statuary – male and female, heroic and abject, triumphant and serene – a seeing what those figurative images become when re-experienced in a contemporary body.

Because it’s about the materiality of stone and the materiality of flesh, I’m naked when we shoot. The rain and cold make me aware of my limits, what I can tolerate only to a certain point in conditions that statues are made to endure. I’ve been frozen, my teeth chattering, my consciousness contracting in a knot of neck and upper-back tension that the cold provokes. Fortunately there’s a camper-van in I can get warm again, release the tension, relax and open my narrowed, hunched physicality beyond its primary survival state.

And, I must stress, I don’t hate this experience. It’s not something I’m forced to do but something I choose. Like so often when I’ve worked in challenging environments, I feel a particular aliveness, a sensitivity heightened by my exposed body, by open skies and by the demanding textures of the varied surfaces on which I’m moving.

I’ve agreed to this shoot because I want to stay alive to my own dancing body and that energises me to encourage others to find their own dancing this year of The Casement Project. I’m happy to create more hospitable environments for others in the first steps of that dance but don’t mind celebrating the resilience of bodies in challenging circumstances too.

Below is the text I wrote to prepare for my presentation for the stimulating Theatre of Change Symposium organised by The Abbey Theatre and curated by Fiach MacConghail and Dominic Campbell. I didn’t read it so the video documentation will probably show how I deviated from the plan. However I didn’t want to spend my first opportunity to be on the Abbey stage reading and risked riffing on this prepared text instead:

The Casement Project
If you were to create a new State today what would your concerns be?

Tá an áthas orm bheith anseo inniu. Ní ró-mhinic a bhíonn córagrafadóir comhaimseartha ar an árdán anseo agus táim an bhuíoch le Amharclann na Mainistreach, le Fiach agus le Dominic as ucht an gcuireadh labhairt libh.

I’m very happy to be here today. Choreographers of contemporary dance are not visible on this stage particularly often, and so I’m grateful to the Abbey, to Fiach and particularly to Dominic for the invitation to speak to you.

For French philosopher, Jacques Rancière

What appeals to me in this formulation is the choreography it implies. It’s about moving bodies from one place to another, making visible what hasn’t been seen and giving expression and form to what was previously unintelligible. It reminds me that of the choreography in political, social, economic, ideological structures, what Ranciere would calls the police, assigning particular movements, particular places, refusing to acknowledge some bodies at all. And it bolsters my commitment to dance as a form of knowledge to help question, analyse, imagine and embody other possibilities than the ones we’ve been given.

When I think about creating a new State today, I think about what new choreography could a national body perform and how hospitable to a diversity of individual bodies, movements and expressions that collective choreography could be. And I want to propose the importance of dance in this new state to help us question, analyse, imagine and embody what that new choreography could be and how that choreography will continue to evolve.

Despite our reputation as an articulate nation, capable of creative, subversive and resistant dexterity in the way we use language, I don’t think we’ve recognised, explored or embraced a similar articulacy in our bodies. And that lack of physical fluency, historically and today, has a negative impact on individual bodies but also prevents us from imagining new possibilities for our collective choreography.

I speak of the importance of dance with the zeal of a late convert. I didn’t start training professionally until the of 23 having read English at Oxford and done an MPhil there in European Literature. I am someone who has a huge respect for our literary heritage but t was studying Yeats Noh plays, Beckett’s austere choreographies and eventually Friel in Dancing at Lughnasa that I recognised in them that there were moments in their dramatic work when language had to give way to bodies and to movement. ‘Dancing as language had surrendered to movement, as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony were now the only way to communicate.’ As if…

There are historical explanations for our blindspots around the body: the colonial characterisation of the Irish as untamed, wild, violent and ape-like provided a justification for civilising colonial rule. Little wonder then that cultural and eventually political nationalists wanted to present the Irish body as one that could be self-controlled, making an alliance with Catholicism as a way of inculcating respectable, moral physical behaviour. However that conception of the acceptable bodies results at the foundation of the state in a Constitution that fixes women to the domestic environment, cherished as mothers, but denied autonomy of their own bodies. It results in a system which interns or expels those bodies which do not conform, whether they are bodies that procreate outside of wedlock (Magdalen Laundries), bodies that are poor (industrial schools), bodies whose desire for other bodies is not sanctioned (LGBT) , or bodies whose nomadism doesn’t fit the official state choreography (travellers).

Of course things have changed. After the Marriage Equality referendum, the state congratulates itself on its inclusiveness but I think it’s worth remembering that for the referendum to be carried, we needed to focus the campaign on love and avoid discussions of sex. What bodies want, how they interact is still a tricky subject to consider. There’s still work to be done….

And it’s not only about getting bodies moving. Ireland’s embrace of the global market means that what we need now is a skilled, resilient but above all mobile Irish body that can travel the world in search of employment. It’s no surprise that Riverdance’s disciplined army of sexy Irish dancers was the most prominent export of the Celtic Tiger exuberance. And it’s no surprise that Heartbeat of Home emerged during our more recent economic difficulties, with its cast of Irish dancers drawn from the Irish diaspora to remind the world what a strong, capable, globally connected body the Irish body can be. I don’t mention Riverdance or Heartbeat of home as a criticism but as a reminder to myself how easily choreography can be co-opted by the market and by a state desperately trying to be viable in that global economy.

What’s needed isn’t one more choreographer, but a choreographic creativity that checks what rhythms have become stuck, what movements deadened by habit, what bodies that are not being seen

Over the years, I’ve been using my choreographic practice to make my own small shifts, who knows how successfully. In Match, a duet that takes place on Croke Park, I wanted to communicate to the wide audience that its broadcast on RTÉ allowed, that they already knew how to read emotionally and psychologically charged physicality. They watch it in sport all the time. However, as a dancer, I take the GAA DNA I’ve inherited (from my mother, uncles, shared with my brothers, sisters and GAA-star cousins like Cork Ladies footballer, Annie Walsh!) and shift its purpose, expand its possibilities to include me it. Of honouring an inheritance but shifting it to other ends.

In Mo Mhórchoir Féin, another film for RTÉ made in 2010 after the Ferns report and Irish Child Abuse Commission Ryan report, I put a male body dancing in a church alongside an altar boy and an older woman watching. Many people asked me about whether I intended to be iconoclastic by placing an almost naked body in the church but I reminded them that there has always been a semi-naked male body at the centre of Christian churches. It’s just we’ve forgotten how to see that physicality. So in my work, finding new choreographic possibilities for bodies isn’t only about invention. It’s about examining and releasing suppressed, ignored or forgotten potential in the existing body politic.

It’s for that reason that as part of the Arts Council’s National Commissions for 2016, and as part of the 1418now WW1 Centenary Commissions, I’m choreographing a work called The Casement Project that dances with the queer body of British peer, Irish rebel and international humanitarian Roger Casement. For those that might not know, Casement was born in Sandicove and came to prominence when, as part of the British consular service he published a report detailing human rights abuses and exploitation of the local population in the rubber trade in the Congo Free State. He was active with others in setting up the Congo Reform Association and was sent by the British government to report on similar abuses in the rubber trade in the Amazon, a report for which he was reluctantly knighted. Casement’s recognised in Ireland, particularly in the poverty of the West of Ireland which he also tried to alleviate, a colonialism related to what he’d witnessed in Africa and South America. He became increasingly involved in cultural and then political nationalism, raising money to arm the Irish Volunteers and eventually going to Germany in the First World War to secure arms and support for Irish independence. The British Secret Service knew of his activities so that when he returned to Ireland on Good Friday 1916 on a German U-boat for the Easter Rising, he was captured on Banna Strand outside Tralee and brought to London where he was hanged for treason. Given his international reputation, a campaign for reprieve was organised, however the British Government stymied serious support for the reprieve by sharing extracts from Casement’s private diaries in which he detailed his enthusiastic sex with men. How Casement uses his body and places in relation to others was not something endorsed by the colonial choreography of the time. The treatment of Casement’s body is a clear reminder that the personal is political (which means that the state is there in the apparent privacy of our bodily intimacy but it also means that when we make changes on the level of our bodies that it can have political ramifications) as his sexuality becomes a matter of state, discussed at the British Cabinet, where civil service papers presented to counter arguments for a reprieve of the death sentence describe Casement as having:

‘completed the full circle of sexual degeneracy from a pervert to become an invert, a woman or pathic who derives his satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use them. (Cabinet memo July 15 circulated July 18)’

You can hear the attitude to women implied in this characterisation and the proper relations of male and female bodies it entails…

The state’s concern with Casement’s body continues after his death: At the National Archives in London, a letter from the Doctor (Percy r Mander) at Pentonville Prison where Casement was hanged describes how he examined the body immediately post-mortem to determine if Casement could have had the sex he describes:

‘ I found unmistakeable evidence of the practices to which it was alleged the prisoner in question had been addicted. The anus was at a glance seen to be dilated and on making a digital examination (rubber gloves), I found that the lower part of the bowel was dilated as far as the finger could reach. The execution went off without a hitch and the prisoner was dead in 40 seconds from leaving the cell. The vertebrae were completely severed and spinal cord also, so that death was absolutely instantaneous.’

And beyond this post-mortem investigation, Casement’s bones were a subject of discussion between the British and Irish governments, with the Irish supporting Casement’s family’s request to have him reinterred in Ireland. Just ahead of the 50th anniversary Easter Rising, Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister and perhaps mindful of the votes of the Irish working class in Britain, agreed to return the remains, though of course Casement’s wish was to be buried in Antrim but such a burial wouldn’t constitute a repatriation. So he is buried in Glasnevin instead. Where bodies go, what they do is political.

A number of things have drawn me to Casement as a resource for imagining a hospitable national body. Of course, his is a scandalously hospitable, permeable body. It is also constantly mobile. He never had a permanent home but was always in transit, a choreography that was necessary, perhaps, for someone who wouldn’t settle in the patterns of the nuclear family. When he was tried, he was described as being of no fixed abode. His diaries detail how he even managed a day-trip from London to Dublin and back again, the kind of trip that cheap air travel has made possible for some of us, but which was much more of a feat a hundred years ago.

He is also important to me because of how he connects nationalism to international justice. So he reminds me that we cannot think of a flourishing national body without taking in to account our responsibilities to those who are beyond our national borders. But then he also reminds us that borders are fluid. Born a Protestant, dying a Catholic, British peer Irish revolutionary, part of the establishment and simultaneous criminal. Incidentally the same law that criminalised his homosexuality was in force in Ireland until 1993, the year I started training as a dancer. Casement was also sensitive to bodies, to the length and heft and beauty of men he desires, but also to the suffering of abused bodies in Africa and the Amazon or under-nourished bodies in the West of Ireland. This part of the 1916 legacy is not something I was taught growing up in Ireland, and in our moment of centenary commemoration, I want to communicate the value of a deeper understanding of bodies, of their potential, of their diversity. It’s not only dance that can communicate this understanding but I do think that dance has insights that are valuable in helping us to expand our physical potential and movement possibilities.

In practice The Casement Project has five main elements:

A stage performance that will premiere in June in London, less than two miles from where Casement was hanged. It will be also be presented in Dublin and Belfast later in the year.
Having the premiere outside of Ireland felt like a useful way to make sure the national commemoration didn’t become inward focused, and besides, as part of the 1418now Centenary Commission programme, it also queers that World War One narrative in a way that seems important to me.

On 23rd July, we will have a day of dance on Banna Strand, called Féile Fáilte to welcome the stranger ashore but also to celebrate the stranger who is already part of each of us.

I’m making a dance film with Dearbhla Walsh to be broadcast on RTÉ

I’m organising two academic symposia. The first, happens on 25th February at Maynooth University and is called Bodies Politic and will look at how some of the artistic projects commissioned for 2016 are addressing the body and commemoration. On 3 June, The Hospitable Bodies Symposium will take place at the British Library, connecting Casement’s legacy to the work of contemporary artists

And finally there is a series of engagement opportunities for people to join in the project, which includes workshops with LGBT refugees in London and participatory work in Tralee that will be shown at An Fhéile Fáilte.

A sixth element in the project is the talking about it in a way that starts people to think and invites them to become involved. It’s what I’m doing here today. It’s a privilege to be with you, to have this voice on this platform, but I’m suspicious of myself talking. And so the finish today I want to show you the briefest of glimpses of the dancers in The Casement Project in a trailer by DRAFF magazine, a beautiful and free magazine about theatre and performance that I’d urge you to pick up around town. It’s got more information on The Casement Project in rehearsal if you’re interested. I want to finish with it because it’s the dancing that matters. But I hope placing my body for the first time on this important national stage in front of and alongside you, that it also prompts a physical response.

When the dance film, Match was shown on RTÉ, it was discussed next day on a radio chat show where one man phoned in to say, ‘I have no idea what that was but I couldn’t stop watching it’ . That matters to me because it suggests a connection, one that doesn’t yet or may never have words to describe it. We deserve a new state where such valuable knowledge can be acknowledged and built on.

[The short DRAFF trailer I showed is here]

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAb68VrBEys/?taken-by=draff_magazine

Despite now having a very supportive and highly skilled team to help with production, communication and administration ( Project Arts Centre, Lian Bell, Annette Nugent), for the past two years of its creative and practical development I’ve held The Casement Project and its intricate networks of relationships, partners, and negotiations. We’ve been passing on as much of the operational responsibility that I’ve been holding to the people on the team who have a much greater expertise than I do, leaving me the work of choreography and artistic direction on which I’d like to be concentrating and by which the success of the The Casement Project will ultimately be judged.

For the two weeks of development rehearsals in Dancehouse in December, it felt very important to me to switch from the list-ticking project management mode that I’d been in throughout the necessary planning phase and to allow myself a more expansive, exploratory state in which we could find the depth and breadth of the work. This felt particularly important as this was the first time the whole cast would be together.

I could see from the outset that this was and is an exciting assembly of people. They have distinctive personalities but nonetheless create a rich, textured but cohesive group entity that I am privileged to work with. Much of these two weeks of development has been about allowing them and me the time and space to figure out how this group entity works, what its capacities and limits are, what it allows in to its world, how it affords space for difference within it. This group building is an essential part of the choreography and probably the most important part given that I focus less of my energy on what the dancers are doing than on how they are doing it. I have this luxury, of course, because as co-creators, the dancers take such care of the movement material that they generate in response to what I’ve proposed them. And it’s not only the dancers: it’s also Alma Kelliher and Ciaran O’Melia, the composer and designer respectively, the production and administrative team and an expanding circle of guests, friends and visitors who become part of The Casement Project, however temporary their interaction with it. I’m thinking of people like Polly Mosely, my fellow Clore 2, who came from Liverpool especially to see part of the process and left traces of thoughts, words and images that inform how I see the material we’re developing. I’m also thinking of photographer Ste Murray whose light documenting presence in the studio has gifted me images of the work in progress that confirm the compelling qualities of the performers and frame moments of poetry that I might not have noticed. Given how much photographs by and of Casement have influenced the movement material so far, it’s not that this contemporary photography should be similarly informative and generative, reminding us how the shifting protean qualities of the dancing are fixed in particular moments by the photographer’s work.