Category Archives: Blog
← Older posts Newer posts →Cure: Davin O’Dwyer on Austerity, Homeopathy and Bad Medicine
March 18, 2013When seen as a rejection of austerity, the Italian vote actually makes some sense. As a supposed cure-all for everything that ails us, austerity is sorely lacking in evidence to support its efficacy.
Our doctors don’t prescribe homeopathy or placebos, and our departments of health tend not to rely on complementary medicine as a cornerstone of public-health policy. Unfortunately, in capitals and central banks all over Europe and North America, the promotion of fiscal policies that run contrary to the evidence are the only policies that are being entertained right now. read more…
Cure: Illness, individuality and the group
March 11, 2013Psychologist Oliver James points out that mental health is not just an individual problem nor can it be addressed by individuals alone. Through Cure, I have been able to experience and build on the support of a particular network that has sustained me (artistically at the very least) in the past and continues to do so in this work.
However, in accepting that good mental health depends on a sense of belonging, I don’t accept that groups are sui generis beneficent since it is precisely the intolerance of some collectives that excludes individuals and puts them in psychologically, emotionally and socially vulnerable situations. read more…
Employment-based Postgraduate Programme: I’m doing a PhD
February 24, 2013Minister for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock, announced the recipients of a new Employment-based Postgraduate Fellowship that supports MA and PhD researchers to work with Irish businesses and organisations. I applied to the programme before Christmas but couldn’t announce the … read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentE-motional Bodies and Cities: Art and Geography Conference in Lyon
February 20, 2013Irish artists had a strong presence at the Art and Geography Conference I attended last week in Lyon. Ríonach Ní Néill and Joe Lee, Christine Mackey, Michelle Browne, Olwen Fouéré and Andrew Duggan all made strong presentations of work and reflection on practice in a way that encouraged me about bringing my own work into this academic arena. The conference was an opportunity for me to recognise connections between many strands of my own practice and that of my peers in artistic and academic disciplines. Ríonach presented a new film, Area, that she’s made with Joe Lee. It’s a beautiful film filled with stories, arresting images, eloquent dancing from many different kinds of bodies and no small amount of love. I recognised in it many of the Macushla dancers with whom, through Ríonach, I have had an opportunity of working but I also recognised the Docklands’ streets where much of the film is set and where my own bodies and buildings research started when I was Artist in Residence for Dublin City Council. read more…
Posted in Blog | 1 CommentCure: Rehearsals with Sarah in Limerick
February 9, 2013What was most exciting for me was to realise that in finding the right material, that Sarah had found how to choreograph for me. The material released in me associations from which we could build images as well as providing information (touch, stretch, resistance) that informed the movement material I generated. We talked a great deal but once the material arrived in the studio, the choreography seemed to arrive with it with relative ease. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentCure: Rehearsals with Stéphane in Melbourne
January 25, 2013When I think about Cure, it’s important to recognise the place of strong energy, of roughness, of effort in a process of recovery. It’s not all about breathing deeply and fading away into meditation. Something about that turbulent Dionysian energy makes me feel alive even if I am not one to live too long in chaos. Perhaps what I enjoy is surviving the chaos, making it through to calmness and for that reason I need the disturbance so that I can experience the pleasure of rediscovering equilibrium. If I were always in equilibrium, I’d get bored – and worse: I’d wonder if I were alive. So recovery for me is about recognising my appetite for and investment in the challenge. Without challenge, I don’t know that I’ve survived. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentCure: herd or heard
December 22, 2012According to Seamus Heaney, in an interview that I came across on Youtube, in times of crisis, political crisis, the writer is there to be heard singularly not herd – part of the tribe: ‘though at moments of crisis, this … read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentCure: In Berlin with Mikel
December 9, 2012It wasn’t until I arrived in Berlin that it occurred to me that it occurred to me that the representatives of Europe’s financially beleaguered economies have travelled to Germany for some kind of salvation….I have a great capacity for self-regarding questions and not just macro-analysis of our political and social conditions. However I think Cure might require some kind of connection between the personal and the wider context, an understanding of how the macro context is experienced personally as well as how the individual experiences (psychological, physical and emotional) of weakness, loss, survival and recovery might teach us about what’s going on at a political and social level. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentE-motional Bodies and Cities:
November 10, 2012Against the Google commercialisation of map-making, I think of the research practice that Olga, Luke, Madalina, Arianna and I have undertaken since Dublin is an emotional cartography that resists commodification. This resistance to commodification feels important in this time when we reach to understand values that are not simply commercial. What this means in practice is that our research in E.motional Bodies and Cities is not aiming at achieving commodifiable outcome. None of us are driven to putting on a show that we can sell. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t concerned with others and how our work will be communicated. Our aim is to involve people in relationships, to offer our map as material for them to become implicated in rather than a product to consume. Maybe I write only of my own desire, but at the moment I feel that I have found a context and a peer group of mature artists that helps me to investigate how that different value system for art-making can be achieved. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentE-motional Bodies and Cities: Christine Madden on international mobility
November 8, 2012It’s appropriate as I am in this residency in Limassol and soon to head to Berlin to start work on Cure with Mikel that this article on the international mobility of Irish dance artists should appear in the Irish Theatre Magazine. read more…
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