Michael Seaver wrote an article in the Irish Times about nudity/nakedness in dance and asked me to contribute to it alongside Aoife McAtamney and Nina Vallon, and Fitzgerald and Stapleton. The variety of perspectives is instructive: gender plays a part in how nakedness is received, though the different approaches of Aoife and Nina and of Áine and Emma suggests its not just about gender. Reflecting on the article and the work of the artists involved, I think female nudity is more readily commodified (‘lads’ mag’, artistic muse)and can therefore be less remarkable than male nakedness. However, female nakedness is even more challenging than male nudity when it refuses to conform to the conventions of commodification in the way that Fitzgerald and Stapleton definitely enact in their work.

Though he understandably didn’t include all of my responses in the article, Michael asked me some thought-provoking questions. Below are the questions and my responses

1. What has been the impulse to present a nude body onstage in your work? Where did that decision come from?

I wouldn’t say I have an impulse to present nudity on stage. I don’t give much thought to nudity. I don’t give much thought to tendu or
turn either but they’re often in the choreography as a means to an end. Nudity is a tricky notion anyway. You’ll already know Kenneth Clark’s distinction between the (aesthetically acceptable and supposedly not titillating) nude and the rawness of the naked. I think that nakedness emerges in some of my work because I’m not afraid of it. If it seems necessary or useful in the pursuit of a choreographic idea then I’ll follow it. So for example in Tabernacle, Matthew was naked near the beginning of the piece. That material came about because I’d asked the dancers in rehearsal to think about what they wanted to leave behind and Matthew had an idea of shedding skin and he undressed laying out his clothes like shed skin on the ground. I never ask the performers in my work to be naked. They offer it as part of an idea if it makes sense to them. Equally, if I’m performing, as I am in Cure, I’ll offer nakedness if it makes sense to me. So in one section where the intimate relationship between a piece of fabric and my skin is important, it made sense to me to take away all the other barriers – clothes – between me and that fabric. The result is nakedness but it’s not the aim.

2. In what way(s) can nudity be artistically meaningful?

When we were making Mo Mhórchoir Féin for the RTÉ Dance on the Box series, there was some question about how my near nakedness in a church would be received. It was suggested that I wear something else, maybe even a flesh-coloured body suit. Those options made no sense to me since the vulnerability of the naked body was important to the impact of the work, as was its implied sexuality. More importantly, the near-naked body of the male dancer in the church has a central and overwhelmingly authoritative precedent in the space already – the figure on the cross. So in that case, the unclothed body was a necessity. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise.

3. Can you relate nudity to your overall artist vision for Cure?

The physical nakedness in parts of Cure might be related to a willingness to be bare, to be open, to show things as they are rather than hide. I think the choreographers who’ve contributed to the making of Cure all have that impulse to honesty and openness that makes them great performers and artists and they’ve each found ways to reveal and lay bare what they think matters about cure. And in some instances, that laying bare is literal, not because they required it of me, but that their idea was best expressed by being naked.

4. How does it feel different performing nude than clothed?

If the choice is right – the right clothes, the right nakedness – then it’s not where my attention is in the performance. If the clothes or nakedness make me self-conscious then they’re the wrong choice. I performed the solo from Cosán Dearg in the middle of a busy art gallery in Beijing with lots of people taking photos on their mobile phones but the nakedness for the solo was right and so I didn’t feel exposed or vulnerable in that was potentially a weird situation.

5. How soon in your creative process to you think about costume?

The sooner the clothes are integrated the better. (Though I’m not as organised as Raimund Hoghe whom I heard has the dancers costumed before starting rehearsals and I can see how that makes sense) How we move is altered by the textures on our body, the tightness or freedom of a cut, or by the sensitivity of exposed skin. It doesn’t make sense to practise and practise movement material and not practise as sensitively the way that clothing or nakedness impacts on that movement. It’s not that it’s always about selecting clothes that are free: maybe one wants a particular restriction. In Cure, I wear shoes for some parts and that changes my relationship with the floor. It makes some movements easier because the shoe protects my feet but it changes others, like turns. But if executing a perfect turn was the objective then we’d make a different costume choice. For Cure, that’s not the objective! So no last minute trips to Penney’s – the clothes will be as familiar and worn in as the movement.

‘The lighting design is subtle and effective, and the soundtrack, which is occasionally unsettling, provides the perfect accompaniment to this performance. Fearghus Ó Conchúir is exceptional, a very talented performer….The piece was choreographed by a team of six, and there is a sense of the collaborative effort here. It is profoundly emotional, hopeful and thought-provoking, and is highly recommended.’ Una McMahon, entertainment.ie

‘A sequence of abstract meditations on the theme of recovery, bound together through the still centre that is Ó’Conchúir’s presence on stage, ‘Cure’ is not about the sum of its parts; rather, it’s about bringing attention to how necessary each of those individual, underlying parts are in the construction of a whole.’ Rachel Donnelly, DDF Blog

‘Fearghus Ó Conchúir puts his own eloquent body firmly on the line in this exposing, sometimes moving journey from fall to recovery. We are absorbed by his hugely focused presence and arresting movement, each small gesture carefully controlled, each flexing muscle intimating a small step forwards or even sideways on the road to healing.’ The Irish Times

‘It’s about how you share power? How do I give [the performers] power to be able to make something great? How do I give people who are interested to do some movement, in dance, who want to move so that they understand my idea and take it and go in their own direction? It doesn’t have to all come back to me. And it’s the same with an audience, how do I give them some potential so that they see and respect what I offer but also they feel like they can go somewhere with that?’

Silvia Gonzalez interviewed me about Tabernacle last year for the Numeridanse channel. I thought I should listen to it and I was surprised to hear how much of what I said about it was a preparation for Cure
See the full interview here

From our experience of doing the final E-motional Mapping in Limassol with a big group of people following us, we knew that such a crowd of specific spectators had a big impact on how we experienced our process and on how we manifested that experience. Having a large gathering of people on the streets has the practical impact of changing the dynamic and energy of the environment. It occasionally obscures the geometry of the quintet and so challenges our ability to compose with the shape of our relationship in the city. Moreover, even though we are clear that this work is not a performance, the crowd of designated spectators which has gathered specifically to follow us (as distinct from the casual spectators who encounter us on the route) creates a frame that we are drawn to fill. And so with the spectators in Limassol we expanded our physicality and accepted being visible in a more performative way.

Aware that more than 40 people had booked to join us for our final walk in Bucharest, we considered carefully how we should organise their experience and ours. The sensitivity in the area about the destruction of Matache meant that it was necessary for the E-motional Bodies and Cities organisers, Cosmin and Stefania, to get a permit for our route. The problem wasn’t so much our exploration of the neighbourhood, which we conducted daily without official sanction, but the large group that followed us that might be construed as a demonstration. We initially asked for permission to follow a route through the Matache market and through some less sensitive local streets. Only the route through the streets away from Matache was permitted.

So that we wouldn’t have a group of 40 following us however and so that the powerful experience of visiting Matache wasn’t completely lost to our process sharing, we decided to split the group in two. One would find us on the sanctioned route, doing what for the purposed of official legibility was called a ‘dance parade’. The other group would be divided into smaller units of 5 (reflecting our geometry) and sent to the market with tasks that would help those participating experience for themselves the process we engage in and also bring back to the bigger group a sense of the market. Given that the ‘dance parade’ would take place in the permitted streets and that others were simply visiting a market, we didn’t anticipate any problems and printed instructions accordingly (thanks to Luke’s combination of artistic and practical design skills).

However on the morning of our presentation, Cosmin and Stefania received a call from the police requiring them to confirm that no one would be visiting the market and rather than put them into any legal jeopardy we had to abandon our plan to send 20 people to the market, knowing that the police’s alertness to our activity would make such a group too visible. We didn’t lose the market completely however but chose a smaller number of people to experience the market individually and therefore less conspicuously (although some who took photos were spotted and warned from doing so again). This solution wasn’t ideal but the whole situation did remind us that our work of placing the body in relation to the city has an unavoidably political dimension. Aptly, the theme for our research in Bucharest was the politics of the body and though we hadn’t chosen to deviate from the process we developed in Dublin and Limassol to specifically address that theme, the process found its way to foreground it nonetheless.

Having a large group follow us changed our walk in Bucharest as it had in Limassol: so did the presence of plain clothes and uniformed police officers who followed us throughout. The plain-clothes officer filmed everyone at the start of the walk probably to have a record of the participants in case of any trouble. The police officers were not unfriendly, although their guns were disconcerting. I had found a small plastic gun (with Made in China stamped on it) earlier in the week and secreted it under a bench in the dog park on our route, along with a broken mirror and a piece of honey-comb. I hadn’t really known why I was keeping the little gun that I would visit on our walks each day. I understood the broken mirror as a simple metaphor for our fractured reflections of the city in our walking practice and the empty honey-comb connected to our group activity and to the many holes that distinguished our route in the city. Having the policemen and their guns finally gave a post-facto purpose to my impulse. Early in the walk, the policemen found me covering Luke with crumbled plaster.

I had found him lying on the side of the street and, reminded of our interaction in the Carob Factory in Limassol where I buried him in carob seeds, I found what I could to ‘bury’ him again. The police asked if everything was ok and if this was part of our dance. I said yes. But Luke’s lying on the ground prompted anger in some local onlookers who berated the police for allowing this to happen. A local elderly lady however came to help Luke to his feet, not distressed, not angry but careful.
The police passed me a little later as I held a position waiting for our quintet to advance. I asked them if everything was ok. The one who spoke English said ‘yes’ but that he didn’t understand what we were doing. I explained that we had been experiencing this route for the past week, its details, atmospheres, architecture, history and that we were communicating what we perceived in our bodies. He said he understood. As we progressed, I felt these policemen become guardians as much as surveillance.

As aspect of my nascent studies in human geography that connects directly and helpfully to my work has been the understanding of space not just as a set of physical parameters but as a nexus of contested histories, and imagined futures experienced through the body as an emotional, psychological and social entity. Our mapping of these particular streets in Bucharest is not scientific. We change the experience of those streets for one another just as much as a crowd of spectators does. We bring our shared history, our memories of other cities as well as our impressions of other parts of Bucharest and ‘find’ those memories again in these particular streets.

As we walked on Saturday I noticed Arianna start to dance to the music that was being played from a car radio on the street. The memory of our group boogey outside the ice-cream shop/café in Limassol where the owner would wait for us to pass so he could turn up the music for us. Without saying it, we all recognised this moment and found our Limassol boogey on the streets of Bucharest.

It pleased me very much that Romanians recognised their city in our group walk, feeling its tensions, textures and possibilities through us. It pleased me that Madalina was proud that we had achieved this manifestation in her city. It pleased me also that others identified the challenge to a capitalist expediency and efficiency that our slow and careful noticing of the environment might represent. Our walk is not a ready commodity. It doesn’t come packaged in a performance-friendly arc of narrative or rhythmical development. It is not homogenous. Olga, Luke, Madalina, Arianna and I engage in the process in our distinct ways and and the group practice is an amalgam of that diversity rather than a uniformity imposed on each individual. A hurling, rugby or soccer team is not made only of backs or forwards.