I’m delighted to say that these past few months have been very busy with lots of exciting performances coming up before Christmas.
Myself and Kristyn Fontanella have been awarded Dance Ireland’s Mentored Residency in Traditional Dance under world-renowned dance artist and performer Colin Dunne.
Kristyn and I met on the MA Contemporary Dance program at UL this year and having had Colin as a tutor at different times throughout the year, we felt we would benefit from his experience in performance-making.
The aim of this residency is to explore the connections between the established styles in traditional dance (step dance and sean-nós dance) as well as finding a new language of material to traditional music. We are looking at sean-nós and step dancing from different perspectives and finding ways in which we can create new choreography which is unique to us as traditional/contemporary dancers. We are working closely with traditional music and using different choreographic methods such as text and improvisation. We aim to show our finding at the end of our residency at DancHouse on Friday 5 December. Stay tuned for details but in the meantime here’s a short clip of the exploration so far:
http://instagram.com/p/vHF77xtaju/?modal=true
I received a second residency from Dance Ireland to develop new contemporary choreographic work with Olwyn Lyons. We have made a short work in progress which incorporates live dance and digital projection. Our initial stimulus for the project was ‘restriction’ and we have moved through several creative stages using props and choreographic tools such as Laban’s intrinsic strands. We performed the piece for the first time at Echo Echo Festival of Dance and Movement in Derry as part of an open call for short works. We were delighted with the response and we are continuing to create and develop with a short dance residency at The Axis Theatre in Ballymun during the month of November.
We will perform the piece next at Dance Theatre of Ireland’s ‘Creating Space‘ on Sunday 7 December at 3.30. Here are a few images from our stay in Derry:
Sibéal Davitt 