Category Archives: Blog
← Older posts Newer posts →Glenstal Abbey
July 16, 2011I hadn’t been at Glenstal Abbey since I was 14 and I cracked my cheekbone playing rugby for my school against the Glenstal school team. I’ve just spent two days this week participating in a workshop at the abbey that foregrounded my body again? The workshop had been advertised as focusing on Music, Mysticism, Religious Imagination and Ritual but by the time I got there, it had, with a generosity and openness that I admire in the Abbot Patrick Hederman, transformed into an exploration of the body and religion. Though there was a lot of thoughtful discussion, the workshop placed art – music, visual and choreographic – at the heart of expression.
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Dance/Body at the Crossroads of Culture
June 20, 2011I had feared, following my knee injury, that I might not perform again myself and that this process of passing my material over to these dancers was a way of dispersing my dancing self forever. However, this enforced pause has revealed how much I want to perform and fortunately my knee is recovering so it should be possible. It is likely to be a different kind of performing in the future so this Irish body is still a work in progress, still being made by experiences such as this conference where meeting at the crossroads of cultures teaches me new things that I hope I can continue to process in my work. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentTabernacle: a tangent
June 8, 2011“So much of the best contemporary work is described as “difficult” or “experimental”, as if you needed superendurance or specialized knowledge to make your way through it. Really, all you need is an open mind — this doesn’t mean you’ll end up liking it, or that you should — and, more important, you need the willingness to spend some time truly looking at what’s in front of you, just as artists take the time to make it” Claudia Rocco NYT read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentTabernacle: Production photos
June 6, 2011Some beautiful shots of Tabernacle by Jonathan Mitchell
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentTabernacle: working with Sarah Browne
June 3, 2011There are many ways in which Sarah Browne influenced the making of Tabernacle. read more…
Posted in Blog | 1 CommentTabernacle: what people are saying
May 31, 2011It’s too soon for me to write about the last weeks of Tabernacle rehearsals and the performances. But since the project has always been about openness and eliciting feedback it seems right to record and acknowledge what people have been saying in reviews, blogs, emails and facebook posts. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentTabernacle: Rehearsals through other people’s eyes
May 25, 2011Other people’s perspective help me see the work afresh. That’s been the value of having open rehearsals and sharing Tabernacle’s working process with a wider group of people than would usually come to the studio. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentTabernacle: Half way through our Dublin rehearsals
May 14, 2011Since getting to Dublin we’ve been busy. There have been interviews for Imeall, for TG4, for the Irish Times. There was a visit to evensong.
Members of the Macushla Dance Club have been in the studio with us giving the dancers insight into their experiences of religion and responding to what they perceived in our work. I was struck in particular by Eithne’s reminding us that as a women she was instructed to think of her body was ‘an occasion of sin’.
I’ve finished rehearsals this week tired but also reassured that we’ve made material that is physically and emotionally arresting. Thanks to the dancers the work has an integrity that moves me and that I hope others will find equally engaging. But there is still work to do. To see into the potential of the material we have, to understand it better, to add, to subtract, to attend even more carefully to what it could articulate. read more…
Posted in Blog | Leave a commentTabernacle: seeing religion on my way to rehearsals
May 5, 2011It makes sense to me to be rehearsing Tabernacle in Dublin now. I’ve been trying to communicate to the performers the pervasiveness of religious influence in Ireland, even as many people distance themselves from the church and my walk from Broadstone to Dancehouse each morning confirms that continuing influence.
Tabernacle asks how we carry these images and attitudes in our bodies and whether that legacy can adapt to the next individual and collective movements we need to make read more…
Tabernacle: dancing the revolution: The Place Residency Week 2
April 25, 2011Of course the tradition from which Iarla and I come is a rural Gaeltacht one where community is held together by many ties and customs of which religion is an integral but not exclusive element. When I imagine the crash from which Ireland is still trying to fashion a recovery, I am aware that we have a long history of traumatic and devastating events from which we have had to navigate futures. We have already lost worlds, lives and people. And here we are again. read more…
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