It was a relief to get in to the studio this week with some of The Casement Project dancers and to begin to explore in such articulate and creative bodies some of the ideas that I’ve been storing over the past two years. Fortunately an Arts Council Bursary two years ago and a residency at Dancehouse in Dublin meant that I’d been able to test some of the Casement ideas with Aoife McAtamney before I started writing the Ireland 2016 National Project application. That physical testing meant that I could trust that the ideas could make sense in bodies. However, it feels like a lot of words and intellectual brain processing were required to make the application a success. Now, it’s important to bring that processing back to bodies and to the particular knowledge and wisdom they possess.

It turns out Roger Casement was born on the September 1st, so it was an appropriate day to start rehearsals at The Place as part of this year’s Choreodrome. For the first week I was joined four of the six dancers who will be in the piece: Bernadette Iglich, Matthew Morris and Mikel Aristegui have danced in a number of my projects as well as choreographing Cure. I’ve danced with Philip Connaughton in work by Adrienne Browne and by Ríonach Ní Néill, as well as seeing him in the work of other Irish choreographers and more recently, his own magnificent Tardigrade. Having such a talented and experienced group of performers in the room is a privilege. However, it’s not just their creativity and skill that I rely on to create the work, but also their generosity of spirit.

That generosity and openness was particularly evident on Thursday when a group of LGBT refugees from Micro-Rainbow International joined us in the studio for a movement workshop. I’ve been singing in the Micro-Rainbow choir over the summer and getting to know the group. I wanted to invite them to experience something of my work and see what kind of community we could build from the exchange. On the day when the heart-breaking photograph of the drowned Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, appeared in newspapers around the world, it felt good to share joy, care and creativity with these refugees. Opening the rehearsal studio is a gift for us, helping us see the studio and our work from the perspective of people who are not jaded by over-familiarity with the art form. And their visit reminded us of the importance of joy. We’re looking back to the next workshop on Tuesday.

On Thursday, we went out of the studio, on a research visit to the British Library. With the help of Ellie Beedham, Senior Producer at The Place, I’ve been working with Dr Eva Del Rey (Curator, Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance) to find ways of connecting The Casement Project to The British Library’s holdings and archives. Her colleagues Joanna Norledge (Curator, Contemporary Performance and Creative Archives,) and Helen Melody, sourced original material for us about Casement and about David Rudkin, whose play Cries from Casement as his Bones are brought to Dublin, I’m using in the work. They showed us Cabinet Papers from July 1916, prepared to discuss whether Casement’s death sentence might be commuted. Also correspondence and papers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Clement K. Shorter, concerning their petition to the government to reprieve Casement, with responses from people like Yeats and HG Wells (whose answer to the request for help was ‘Absolutely not!’). We also saw David Rudkin’s notebooks containing his notes on reading The Black Diaries, as well as the script used in the original studio recording of his radio play at the BBC. Seeing Casement being interpreted in these official and artistic documents is very useful in my own project of engagement with his life and after-life.

As the year goes on, we’ll find ways to distill all of this rich material, but for now we will keep on gathering and dancing with the material we gather.

It’s the start of a big adventure. Today, at the RHA in Dublin, Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys announced that The Casement Project is one the successful nine proposals in the Arts Council’s 2016 Open Call for National Projects. Some of you will have heard me talk about the role of the artist as citizen (alongside doctor citizens, hurler citizens, parent citizens, scientist citizens, drag queen citizens, etc.), so I’m delighted that The Casement Project will be one of the major art events of the 2016 Centenary Year and be part of a process of national and international reflection on our past, our present and our future. You can read about the other amazing projects on the Arts Council’s website, but I’m particularly pleased that there’s another dance project involving Coiscéim and Anú Productions, as well as a work on women and the nation by Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne

It’s a huge honour and a huge opportunity to be one of these successful projects and the proposal would not have been successful without the support of many people: the dance artists, the creative team, the producers, presenters, venues, experts from beyond the arts and a myriad of others. (It’s a big project.) I’ve known that the proposal was successful for just over a week, but had to keep it under wraps until the official announcement. That was very difficult, since I wanted to get started on the work straight away, but also because I wanted to celebrate with everyone: it’s going to be a big team effort to make The Casement Project the success we want it to be.

The Casement Project is ambitious – ambitious for me, for dance, but also for how people could understand their individual and collective potential. What would be the point in proposing it, if it weren’t ambitious? It’s also achievable, since it’s built on a creative team and network of partners that I’ve worked with in the past. But for the first time it’s gathering all of them to focus their skill and talents on this one big idea.

The project has five interconnected elements that people will be able to see and join in during 2016: a stage performance presented in Dublin, London, Belfast and Kerry; a celebratory festival of dance on an Irish beach; a dance-film for television and online streaming; an academic symposium in Dublin and in London; and a series of creative engagement opportunities to get all kinds of people involved in the making of the work.

The Casement Project is inspired by the queer body of Roger Casement, British peer, Irish rebel and international humanitarian, whose experience reminds us that Ireland’s flourishing has always been linked to the flourishing of disadvantaged people around the world. Casement’s body offers the model for a national body whose identity is dynamic and open to otherness. We want The Casement Project to be a moment when we explore the potential of a new national body, the kind that Casement might have wished for when he came ashore on Banna Strand at Easter in 1916. And we want to celebrate what the diverse bodies of the people of Ireland are capable of one hundred years on.

Now that the announcement is public, we have lots of work to do: I’ll be starting in the studio with some of the performers for two weeks of research at The Place, London as part of Choreodrome 2015. There will also be a lot of planning and logistics. We’ll be letting you know the details on our dedicated website which goes live soon
thecasementproject.ie

Let us know what you think.

I’d thought I’d given up dancing on concrete floors. A commitment to presenting dance beyond the theatre, where different people might meet it and where it could resonate differently, had led me to performing on hard floors. But after tearing the meniscus in my knee during performances at the Shanghai Expo in 2010 when we danced on concrete floors, I thought I wouldn’t be doing that again. My recently, I watched the committed dancers of Boris Charmatz’s Musée de la Danse, pound their bodies on the concrete of Tate Modern and feel disquieted and bemused since the Tate Modern website featured an interview with Yvonne Rainer that specified that dancers in galleries should benefit from sprung wooden floors for their performances (Cunningham’s work in galleries was usually presented on raised stages).

And yet, last night I danced on the polished concrete of the Agnès B gallery in Hong Kong and had a wonderful evening, even if my body does now feel compacted and a little bruised. The evening was curated by Alice Rensy, formerly Raimund Hoghe’s manager and now based in Hong Kong. She took advantage of the fact that I was in Hong Kong to include me in a series of dance events that she’s programming at the gallery to mark the exhibition there of Eugenia Grandchamp des Raux’s photographs. I shared the evening with Yang Hao, a Hong Kong-based dance artist from Chongquing whose accomplished dancing I saw when he was in CCDC, and who was a fellow participant in the i-dance festival improvisation workshops last December.

I decided I would revisit the solo from Cosán Dearg for the performance. It’s the piece I performed on my first visit to Hong Kong in 2007, as part of the Dadao Live Art Festival on tour.

I presented it in the Osage gallery and so it seemed appropriate to be doing it again in another gallery. Also, it’s the solo that I shared with Aoife McAtamney this year when we first started to work together in the studio. I wanted her to have some sense of my movement so asking her to take it in to her body was a way of passing that sense on. But I also wanted to see how the work transformed in her. Performing it again, I wanted to test how it has transformed in me.

It’s a work that’s built on repetition, the red path or cosán dearg indicating the earth worn brown/red from repeated traffic. It was a martial choreography with a strong and defended body when first I made it. Now as I’ve start to investigate what porous and permeable bodies might bring to my choreography, I was ready to repeat the work with a different sensibility.

For the evening we decided that each of us would bring a solo and that we would finish with an improvisation that built on the dialogue between the solos.

Because my solo was shorter that Yang Hao’s I performed Cosán Dearg, Yang Hao presented his Pied a terre, and I did Cosán Dearg again, inviting the audience to notice what had changed in me and in them since the first time they say it. We finished with an improvisation in which we reflected on the evening and on our response to one another’s work while dancing material that echoed that work.

I was so happy to perform and found the audience, which included ACLP and dancing friends in HK, generous and engaged. I think the gallery staff were surprised by the turn-out though given Yang Hao’s profile in the city (a former star dancer in CCDC and growing choreographic talent), they shouldn’t have been. Mostly I was very happy with the warm and open atmosphere we created together, making for an environment where the audience could be involved in and close to the work.

I was also tickled by my costume. The solo was always performed naked: I’d had a sense of it being an animal energy and the unclothed body best expressed that. However in Hong Kong in 2007 I wasn’t allowed to be naked and though things have changed in the city’s cultural scene (I presented Cure last December with no issue about nudity), the Agnès B gallery weren’t comfortable with me being naked for this version either. I didn’t need to push but did wonder what I would wear instead. The solution presented itself when I discovered that the Agnès B shop had loaned clothes for a previous performance. I chose an outfit of vibrant red clashing prints of a kind I’ve never worn before. But I loved the transformation and strangely animal quality of the print. It also has a hint of the clown and of the rock star but I was happy not to take myself seriously. This lightness is something I’ve learned from dancing with Olga Zitluhina. Thank you Olga, it’s makes for joyous dancing that is no less serious for its fun.

Postscript (1 Jan 2020): I just found this video edit of our dancing!

I am proud of our performances of Niche this weekend because the piece proved to be robust enough in its construction to be open to and welcoming of the unexpected possibilities of an uncontrolled public environment. Some of the feedback we received focused as much on the passers-by who entered into the environment of our performance as on the choreography we planned. ( The giggling teenage girls who stayed to the end to watch the dance, the shouting man who passed right through but left behind a residue of heightened energy). I am confident, however, that the choreography enabled the audience to notice those unexpected interventions without feeling that the performance was compromised.

This robust permeability depends to a great extent on the qualities of the gifted, creative performers and also to the history of our working together and clarifying the intention and ethics of our way of performing. These performers have been with me not only in Niche, but in Tabernacle and in Cure also and this history makes a difference to the assurance with which we can take risks together. There has been an investment: of physical energy, of emotion, of care and yes, of money. Such an investment doesn’t guarantee a return but it helps.

The robustness of Niche is also the result of a year as Artist in Residence for Dublin City Council, researching the relationship of bodies to buildings in the context of urban regeneration. That research led to a film made in the Docklands, to a stage performance and to a touring project, Open Niche, which saw choreographic material from local participants in each place we performed woven into the structure Niche provided. Our performance of Niche this weekend (an excerpt from the whole) carries all of this research and experience in it. Work gets better as you work on it, test it, re-live in different contexts.

Openness brings surprise: our rehearsals for this iteration of Niche had been mostly light and joyful. Even Bernadette, often segregated into loneliness by the process of Niche, was part of the fun of re-rehearsing as we discovered that the piece existed not only in the individual roles assigned to particular bodies. We were all familiar with each other’s material, so I could observe Bernadette take on the signature physicality of Matthew’s solo or Matthew the distinctive high kick of Mikel’s Basque dance. Meanwhile I had visions of Stéphane dancing particular moment’s of the piece as I took on his role. We retained some of that lightness in performance but a combination of the site on New Wapping Street, the world of marginalised people we still witness in Dublin today and our physical separation as performers across the large site we inhabited brought a toughness and sadness to the performances that I remembered from previous iterations of the work. Maybe dancing on asphalt and concrete, with broken glass and dog shit close by brings a different physicality to the dancing that changes the emotional temperature.

It makes gives me satisfaction and happiness to be able to dance, to be a person who dances in this way.