First Fortnight
Venue:Online: Via Zoom
Take some time out to explore this series of online events focused on dance and wellbeing offered by Dance Ireland in partnership with choreographer Áine Stapleton, First Fortnight, and Galway Dance Project.
Curated by Áine Stapleton, these events will be led by international artists who offer different perspectives on mental health and wellbeing through their dance practice.
The events are open to all and will be hosted online via Zoom. Dance Ireland is the national dance development organisation, enabling people, places, ideas, communities and genres of dance to come together – to ignite action, provoke thought and connect with each other.
(All fees go directly to paying the workshop leaders.)
Dance Talk: DANCING LIVES AND MENTAL HEALTH
Sat 16 Jan, 6.30 - 7.15pm, FREE
The mental health of an artist is important. Dancers can face many challenges and stressors, how do you look after your mental health while developing your career? In this panel discussion, the expert panel will talk in detail around this.
The panel includes international dance artists Adrienne Truscott, Tobi Omoteso, and Jamie Reid in conversation with Dr Aoife McGrath.
Dance Workshop: ALIGN TOWARDS LIFE
with Michelle Boulé
Thu 14 Jan, 3pm - 5pm, €5
This workshop will help you align your body to support what you are here to create in life…whether that’s being an awesome dancer, partner, friend, momma, poppa, artist, none or all of the above. There will be a theme for the day and the Moving with Innate Wisdom practice will offer simple directives and improvisations to help you transform your body into an active agent and receptacle for your truth.
Dance Workshop: ME. MY HOUSE. MY DANCE.
with Clint Lutes
Fri 15 Jan, 3pm - 5pm, €5
This will be a seriously playful workshop and meeting place. After a brief landing process and warmup, play with improvisation based movement games and get to know each other a bit better. We’ll investigate our homes through guided improvisation and get to know them a bit differently, and perhaps ourselves a bit differently in the process. In smaller groups we will create mini choreographic scores and share them with each other. My hope is to connect you to your body, in your space, and connect us all across virtual boundaries, with humour and sincerity.
Performance Lecture: EMBRACING PROBLEM WORK OR “FAILURE” AS A FEMINIST ACT and EDUCATION.
with Adrienne Truscott
Sat 16 Jan, 4 - 5.45pm
Adrienne Truscott will present excerpts from and talk about a show that has caused her nothing but trouble—from the humorously banal to the deeply consequential, both personally and professionally. At the time of its premiere, this show disrupted her confidence, professional standing, family relations and general well-being while also teaching her about her process, impulses and impulse control - perhaps more than any other show. This show has now garnered her both 4- star reviews and lost her a job and might be the best worst show she’s ever made.
Disclaimer/Advisory note:
This talk will contain references to content in a show about sexual assault, if you think this will be upsetting, please take care and consider this before joining.
Suitable for over 16s.
Audio: The Poetics of Dance and Place by K.J. Holmes
Take time to listen to the symphony of sounds of self and environment, to move within a somatic experience that offers resonance, reflection, atmosphere, gravitas and sublimity. To inhabit an interior of geography of body and world, and the symbiosis that exists as a shared field with other beings.
Playing scale and tone, a form of preservation and conservation, learning through the influence of light, space and the living natural world to gain understanding of where we are through lived experience.
Music by Jeremy Carlstedt