Week #7 & 8 Artist in Residence
I always find a good tune helps me to write and inspires my thought process. Today it is ‘The Hours‘ by Philip Glass.I feel like I am reaching a new turn in the road on my journey. I really feel like I have grown throughout this process.The weeks have seen me developing my physical theatre work and I have undertaken work with a group in Dublin.This work has lent itself to this project as it has allowed me to understand my creative style and how I wish to develop my work.It has allowed me to re- connect with movement and revisit my own dance training and love of choreography. How I wish to express myself through my work using bodies in space, telling stories, creating events and using abstract ideas to present imaginative and bold work. I am excited to reveal the undercurrents that are rippling away under the surface and like a momentous tune that lifts and carries you I wish to be able to do that with my work.
Today I wish.
I have explored movement and choreography in the Courthouse space using gesture and using the architecture of the building. At one point in this journey I felt like ‘I am the building’. The building is the story, the architecture is the dialogue.The space informed me on an instinctual level and I allowed my movement to grow from an impulse driven by the external space but affecting my internal world.
The ceiling as oppressor. Very apt in a building that was once a functioning courthouse.
I am confined, in some ways by the architecture of the space in terms of free movement. The pillars surrounding the wood flooring centre of the building feel like an enclosure in some way. The wood floor extends only to the perimeters of the pillars and outside of that it is stone floor. This interests me in terms of choreographing work that reflects the historic past of the building. The sense of being caged, hemmed in, penned, fenced in, and confined. When will this bird fly free?
Week #8 began with my work listening to the sweet sounds of the Tinahelys Womens Choir and again a very appropriate song for my work ‘Fly me to the Moon’. I am so inspired my music and hope to create work that allows music to weave its magic and feed the mechanics of my work. This week took me back into the past again and my interest in ‘transportations‘ to Australia unveiled the stories of the ‘potato orphans’ and the poignantly titled ‘barefoot and pregnant’ girls sent away from home for a new life in Australia, some fortunate enough to find a better life and others subjected to brutal hardship and cruelty. These girls were forced into a rough masculine society and I can only imagine what it took to survive this way of life.
It is a great pleasure and cathartic to sit with your creative thoughts, 
allowing your instinct and artistic self to sail through the process and connect with what is relevant and what represents your individual expression. Now the next step will to be explore further with other bodies in space, any space, because we are all just bodies in space and I need to discover how I can guide others to tell an interesting story or create interesting pictures and use some of this wonderful information I have foraged for,
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
-William Hazlitt Journey, Soul, Liberty