The Casement Project addresses the queer body of Roger Casement. Through him, we have an opportunity to explore otherness and diversity, with a view to welcoming the stranger in our midst. Alongside Fearghus’ work with the LGBT refugee group Micro-rainbow International in London last year, I was asked to facilitate movement workshops as part of Due Process, an event at Axis Ballymun organised by the brilliant folks at Change of Address. Due Process was a two day programme of workshops, performance and food, bringing together local community groups, asylum seekers and refugees, as well as members of the arts community. The group ranged from very young children to adults, and everyone in between. I taught two movement workshops across the two days, both with an emphasis on sharing, creating, and most importantly having fun. The age diversity of the groups meant really having to throw out the normal dance class rule book, but it was a pleasure to get everybody moving, working and creating together. The fact that more or less everyone was a beginner united the group, with each of these individuals from different backgrounds and histories suddenly on a level playing field. There was a sense of simple joy and a basic equality that was unprovoked and unquestioned.  A community was formed, if even momentarily.

Change of Address is a brilliant project. I was really touched by meeting, sharing and eating with the unique group that had been brought together. This is a project that feels like it has potential to make a real difference to both local communities and those who are only just arriving here in Ireland, and I look forward to seeing how The Casement Project can be part of it.

A piece on Change of Address by Maeve Stone:

Change of Address is myself (Maeve Stone), Moira Brady Averill and Oonagh Murphy. We formed the collective last year after several conversations about our work revealed we all felt the need to respond to the refugee crisis. Since then we have been working together to run creative workshops, facilitate public events and engaging people in conversation about the asylum system in Ireland.

We believe the creative process is transnational. It is neural. It is human. It does not depend exclusively on language and can be experienced by anyone, regardless of cultural context or personal history. Art is most potent when new culture meets old, where ideas become adopted, connected and expanded. The global migration happening right now will continue. It is a humanitarian crisis and a moment for personal and artistic response. We see an opportunity in the refugee crisis to begin the conversation between cultures. We want to use art, the process of creative thinking, to bond Irish artists to refugees.

changeofaddressireland@gmail.com

I hadn’t planned initially to have this phase of rehearsals in London but after the sense of connection to people who were supporting the project that I felt when we rehearsed there in September during Choreodrome, it was clear to me that we couldn’t disappear for half a year and then come back with a premiere. Maintaining and building on connections and networks of support felt like a necessity. And so, thanks to the help of The Place, we were able to rehearse for a week.

A week is a short time, but I was knew that I wanted to reactivate movement material we’d developed in early stages of the process and to introduce some of the objects that would help us to make further design decisions. Relearning material from a video is not the most creative process for this wonderful collection of dancers, however, there are always alterations, amendments, some losses and usually more gains in the task. I am also aware that how ever many times I review video material (and in the months since our last rehearsals in December, I promise I have been reviewing the material!), I know I need the liveness of the performers in a shared space to inspire me. It’s the same when it comes to design and for that reason it’s crucial that we have as many of the design elements in the room with us so that they can be a reality in the creation. Paying attention to what people, material and objects are really doing, and not what I imagined they might do, is one my main choreographic tools.

I also knew that I wanted to start amalgamating the smaller passages of material into longer arcs, to get a sense of what it was beginning to communicate. These arcs are always provisional, subject to reordering, and it’s a pleasure to see how the dancers rise to the creative challenge of navigating different journeys through the arrangements of material.

I was very happy that we were able to host another workshop for participants from MicroRainbow International. I’ve continued to work with this group of LGBT refugees and asylum-seekers and think they’re a very special community of support. It’s not easy for me to articulate why I think of these workshops as part of the creative work of The Casement Project and not some ancillary activity. In other models of engagement, these workshops might be with a view to mining the participants for content, or to generate a performance with them, or to disseminate the content of the show. For me our workshops are more a practise of solidarity, a exchange of movement, of care, of attention. And they are a reminder of the value of dance as a mode of human interaction.

We had a showing of our work in progress on Friday afternoon, an opportunity to invite a number of friends and supporters (from The Place, from 1418now, from the British Library and a big team from Dublin who are working hard to create the conditions for the work to be visible and appreciated). The rehearsal process is daunting for me: this feels like an important opportunity and I don’t want to waste it. I don’t want to squander the talents of the performers and the creative team who are contributing to the work, nor do I want to do a disservice to the investment of many partners. However, despite that pressure, I wasn’t daunted about presenting what is still rough sketches of what the work might be. I am confident that we are in the right territory.

But there are still lots of questions, still lots I don’t know (I never know!). One of the responses to the sharing that felt important to address was the appetite of some people to know more about Casement. It’s clear to me that this work is not a dance biography or a dance history lesson. I was relieved that Easter had seen a number of commemorative re-enactments of historical moments from 1916, because I feel that is done and that I can move forward. And it’s moving forward, conscious of a historical legacy but not burdened by it, that I want to do. For those that want to immerse themselves in the history of Casement, elements of The Casement Project like the symposia provide rich material; however I don’t think the dance is going to tell the that history, although I hope it will convey something of its complicated spirit.

In practice this question of how much context to provide comes down to how much text we offer – in programme notes, in the use of the Rudkin radio play, in what the dancers say. I was struck seeing the historic Embodied performances by six female choreographers in the GPO this week how significant the use of text was for many of them. It seemed necessary to make place for female voices. However, I am trying to slip the authority of language that has curtailed possibilities and limited definitions. If I use words, it is to seduce them into an environment where they cannot claim certainty. So I have work to do to figure out how that works for me and for audiences who may have an appetite for something more stable. I’m listening….

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.