Fearghus Ó Conchúir Choreographer and Dance Artist

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Cure: In Berlin with Mikel

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It 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…

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E-motional Bodies and Cities:

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Against 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…

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E-motional Bodies and Cities: Christine Madden on international mobility

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It’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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Cure: Chris Morris on shame

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I think shame is at the root of our current financial crisis and all the problems in our country. Shame affects everyone who holds back the whole truth of who they are because they are afraid of rejection, and that … read more…

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In June this year, Liam Carson, director of IMRAM asked me to present something in the Irish Language Literature Festival that he organises. His imaginative approach to generating more interest in new writing in Irish leads him to commission collaborations … read more…

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Modul Dance: Structures of Power and Intimacy

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I find it difficult not to pay attention to the meta-choreography in these situations. I feel strongly the presence of the determining structures that we’d like to think are ‘outside’ but which in reality are with us shaping what’s happening.
Economic and political changes in Europe have affected the dancehouses with some losing their funding, thereby changing the network and having an impact on how dance artists operate with in. Danshuis Station Zuid, unfortunately is one of the casualties of cutbacks in support for the arts in Holland. read more…

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Cure: Lunch for Café Valise

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In thinking about nourishment, I wanted to use today as a chance to start talking about recovery and to listen to other people’s response to the topic. I wanted to hear what recovery meant to people on a personal level but also on a social, economic and political level. The lunch guests were a mixture of artists and visitors to Biennial who shared very personal experiences of recovery but who also spoke with passion about what recovery means for Liverpool in the week following the report from the Hillsborough Independent Panel exposing “institutional denial followed by institutional deceitread more…

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Cure: Re-thinking ‘Brand Ireland’

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“One could well imagine Ireland succeeding in ‘positioning’ itself as the society and the economy that first finds light at the end of the post-Washington Consensus tunnel, the first country to pilot and prove a new form of capitalism – more moral, more fair, more balanced, more human.” Simon Anholt on Ireland’s national brand
read more…

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Cure: John Waters on rage in Irish culture

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As I think about Cure for next year, John Waters has suggested ‘that what we were calling the “economic crisis” was something far worse: an anthropological calamity arising from a misunderstanding of desire.
Having invested all hopes in the balloon-basket of materialism, (which had recently fallen out of the sky) we had being brought face-to-face with a confusion centred on an inability to define what we want.’ read more…

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Olympic Delivery Authority Residency – Neville Gabie, how did it go?

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An article in the Guardian explains some of the challenges that Gabie encountered retaining his artistic autonomy in the ODA residency. It’s inspiring to see what he has achieved, just as it’s important to recognise the challenges that artists face and hopefully offer when they place themselves in contexts such as the Olympic Park development and the political and commercial forces that the Park represents.

Now, how can we make sure dance is recognised as an art form that is an effective medium in such contexts? read more…

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