‘We are still, even many years later, in the places to which we are subject because (and to the exact extent that) they are in us. They are in us – indeed, are us.’
Edward S. Casey, Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 91, no. 4 (2001), pp. 683-693, p. 688.

Performing at the Dublin Dance Festival(20/21 May 2022) was an emotional experience fuelled primarily by the strong sense of gratitude for how my dancing body has been enriched by a history of relationships that go to make that place. It’s been two pandemic years since I’ve been in Dublin so there are many people there, friends and colleagues, that I haven’t seen in person for at least that long. And as I stepped into the large, airy space of Studio 4 in Dancehouse and began to warm up, I found myself smiling at the many memories of working there. The last time I danced in the studio was with The Casement Project rehearsals and I could still visualise the line of photos on the back wall. The fact that Matthew Morris is also in Dublin, for the first since 2016, rehearsing with Philip Connaughton (also in the TCP) made that connection particularly live, even if I haven’t seen either of them yet. Imagination of past and future meetings made them palpable. But I felt also around me, in me other resonances: Studio 4 looks out on to a park at the level of mature trees whose foliage swaying in the wind has often been a companion to my dancing there. So too the dogs that run there and who inspired a section in Niche and the seagulls that enhanced a performance of Dialogue with Xiao Ke when we used the skyline as a backdrop for our performance.

And when we came to performing, with familiar faces in an audience visible in the day-lit studio, I could feel myself in a place, as a place made through these energies of influence, experience and support. All of this has a particular relevance for the kind of work I’ve been evolving with Isabella Oberländer. Though we met first when performing Open Niche in Limerick and Isabella performed inside the Niche structure, it wasn’t until 2018 when I was Artist in Residence at the Walthamstow Wetlands that I worked with her directly. The Wetlands residency focused on structures of sanctuary for human and non-human life. Maybe because the NDCWales focus drew me elsewhere in 2018, it wasn’t until 2020, when the pandemic threw me back on my basic resources and impulses that I returned to the Wetlands research and rebound its relevance. I asked Isabella if she would work with me. Fortunately, she had access to a studio in Dance Limerick, within her permitted travel area, and that, plus a shared reference point in the Wetlands, made it possible for us to work together via Zoom. We presented that work (“For Isabella”) in Uilinn, West Cork Arts Centre last year alongside solos I’d made for myself. But we sensed in ourselves and from our audience there an appetite for our two bodies to be together in dancing. We share certain physical traits, even if our pathways through dance have been quite different. To my knowledge, Isabella is relatively unusual in being a queer dance artist in Ireland and our related but different sexual identities give us some shared understanding also. And as our work together has evolved, it is this focus on the structures of queer sanctuary that has invited our attention. I think of queer as a verb in this context, as a movement rather than as a fixed identity. It
“embraces fluidity, resists definitional and conceptual fixity, looks to self and structures as relational accomplishments and takes seriously the need to create more livable, equitable and just ways of living ‘a form that intervenes in social reality through deploying an action that re-creates the agent even as the agent is creating the action’. “ Stacy Holman Jones and Tony E. Adams, ‘Autoethnography as a Queer Method’, in Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash (eds.), Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, (London: Routledge, 2016), pp.195-214
p. 213.

In creating a space for queerness and queering, we are not so much trying to establish fixed borders that have to be protected and defended, so much as spaces of concentrated specific care and attention, spaces that are porous and who gain their quality from the care and attention applied to their creation rather than from their dimensions, locations or history. They are spaces of sanctuary made from relations and therefore open to change but in the moment, no less precise for their potential for change.

Because the work still carries the vestiges of its inspiration in the Walthamstow Wetlands, we remain open not only to the interdependence of humans, but to an interdependence between human and non-human animals and indeed the material structures that support us. Because we worked with fashion designer Gregor Pituch who made silk tunic like garments for us and gave us long strings of pearls for us to dance with, we were confronted by the restricting and enabling materiality of these prosthetics. These were not costumes to decorate our dancing but contributors to the unfolding of the performance, changing in ways we couldn’t control the appearance of our bodies and possibilities for our movement. 


I come away from these performances grateful not only to have been able to perform again in Dublin, with Isabella and for people, including some old friends. I am also grateful that we’ve managed to evolve this work at its own pace, unhurried by and frankly wary of external obligations or demands. Part of the work’s joy comes in the ease of its unfolding – this is not to imply that there hasn’t been work to craft its physicality and sensations. We’ve sustained this development over a long period, mostly unfunded but equally free to attend to what we felt we could sustain and, when the invitations came, viably deliver. Not everyone has that luxury to slip the demands of the market. For this period of time (who knows how long?), we’ve made a sanctuary that is temporal and spatial, social, psychic and affective. It may be a temporary state but it is one I find energising, pleasurable and possibly an inkling of what wiser dancing could be. I know others have found these paths already and I look eagerly for their guidance and the allyship of people like Isabella who already make this quest possible.

Reading Mark Robinson’s report for Creative People and Places on Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities , I came across this quote from Peter Block

‘I’ve lost faith in reforming anything that calls itself an organisation: They inevitably dehumanise us… organisations value people less and less and yet… there’s enormous hope in humanising spaces in organisations….What dehumanises organisations is the system’s design based on predictability, consistency and control. There can be experiments and exceptions locally for a while, but most often they are killed off by the system’s requirement for consistency and predictability. My aim is to carve out spaces for human possibilities. I cannot change organisations – they have this inbuilt context, and the patriarchy is so deeply embedded in us – but I can decide every time how to occupy the room… ‘
Peter Block, in interview with Converse 8

Mise freisin.

I’ve always been drawn to dance artists who are performing when it’s beyond the expected, people whose persistent dancing may be surplus to conventional requirement, not normal (let’s say in the statistical sense). Part of this project of Dancing More Wisely is to reflect on what allows some to persist, to investigate what conditions, what personal, social, economic, physical conditions would allow more people to have sustainable dance lives (and careers) if they wished. And resourced with that wisdom, how we might resist the pressure to use it all up quickly because no one envisages you’ll be around for the long haul?

I was struck by Annie’s mention of a well-intentioned question from someone she met. They asked her: “How long do you plan on doing this for?” It’s a question with a lot of potential – a genuine enquiry, an expectation that it should finish, a judgement that it’s already gone on too long. I’m embracing it as a potential title – perhaps it’s the title of this little dance.

What looks like a duet is in fact a trio with Olga. I think it’s the coolest dancing I’ve done all year

When I was asked by Luke Murphy if I’d like to present something at a season of dance he was curating at Uilinn – West Cork Arts Centre, I was keen to accept but to also make clear that over the past two years I haven’t had the opportunity to produce any work, as in prepare it for stage with the usual support of lighting, design and costume that an audience might expect. The combination of pandemic restrictions plus the fact that as an Arts Council member, I’m not able to apply for funding in my own name, has meant that while I was able to dance, I couldn’t pay the teams of collaborators that I’d usually work with to shape and refine how a performance meets its audiences. What I did have to offer was the beginnings of a repertoire born out of the pleasure of dancing and a belief in dance as a way to connect to ourselves and to others, to ourselves through others and through attending to this apparently solo activity, to connect to others.

What I assembled was an evening of dance made from the different elements I’ve been working on this past couple of years: For Tove, the solo that has evolved through a number of screen and streamed versions for this first live performance; the Déambulations audio piece from the Walthamstow Wetlands; Unreeling, the solo I performed at Tipperary Dance Platform and finally For Isabella, a solo I’ve created with and for Isabella Oberlander via Zoom that draws on the Wetlands as sanctuary. I trusted that these pieces, still fresh, still with potential to develop further could work as companion pieces for the evening. I liked that they had aspects that drew from my own experience but that the evening ends up with Isabella who transforms my experience through her own.

We performed in the gallery space in Uilinn, a space with a concrete floor that I really shouldn’t dance on, and a generous height that is a pleasure to be in. The audience was limited due to pandemic restrictions but felt warm and supportive. It included family, dance colleagues and friends as well as other artists from the area. I tried to create a relaxed atmosphere by encouraging conversation between the audience members. And so when it came to a short exchange at the end of the evening, it was rewarding to hear what people had connected with. Some mentioned calmness after a difficult day, some memories of London through the audio piece, another a memory of their father in the middle-skin of my bare torso (she didn’t call it middle-aged but she did mention the particular quality of skin that my body now has and that I couldn’t have evoked when I was younger. There are connections this older body can make that younger ones can’t. And vice versa.)

As with TDP, I was energised by performing and by the realisation that sharing the work with others does do something more that the pleasure of dancing alone can offer me. It has an intensity that teaches differently and the work is clearer (and by work I mean the choreography and what I’m trying to achieve by dancing) when it’s undertaken in relation to audience.

I come away from the experience grateful to have been able to dance, to dance for an audience, to be in a team with Isabella and with Jared who looked after the sound. I wonder about how to develop this work: the same challenges exist in terms of resourcing the collaboration of others. But I trust the material and will wait to see where it can grow next.