The outcomes of the investment of the Arts Council and of Dublin City Council have been very positive.
I have brought dance artists from China to Dublin to create artistic links between our different cultures. The visiting artists returned to China with a high opinion of Irish work and of the infrastructure of support for the arts in Ireland. Such supports do not exist for independent artists in China and creativity is not as readily expressed as a result.
Bringing Chinese artists to Dublin resulted in a new dance piece, the first collaboration ever between an Irish and a Chinese choreographer (with a Chinese composer). That work, Dialogue, will be performed again in Europe and in China in 2009.
I have created a 20 minute dance film with James Kelly of Feenish Productions, The film, Three + 1, was projected on to the side of the DCC building in Barnardo Square for Culture Night. The purpose of the screening was to make the publicly funded work available to the public for free.
The film will also be shown in film festivals across the world making sure the profile of Irish art is raised internationally.
The funding also allowed for the research and development for a new work called Niche, that premiered to critical acclaim in Project Arts Centre last month.
The funding allowed for the creation of a blog (www.bodiesandbuildings.blogspot.com) that shared the research and development process with the public, locally, nationally and internationally.
The funding helped create a project that attracted media attention and feature articles (Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Tribune, Herald, RTÉ) thereby raising the profile of dance in the public imagination.
I was able to pay six dancers through this process who in turn spent their money in Dublin. I was able to pay other artists (director, a film-maker) , other Irish companies such as Feenish Productions, Dance Ireland, and Project Arts Centre.
I was able to draw public attention to the impact of the changing urban infrastructure on the way people live their lives in the city.
I was able to create high quality dance work and share it freely with a public who might not usually experience the arts in their proximity.
In addition to all this tangible, measurable benefit, my development as a choreographer was furthered immeasurably by the support of both the Arts Council and of Dublin City Council. Their investment allowed me time to research and refine work of high quality. It allowed me to work with other artists and performers of high calibre. It also helped me communicate my ideas at a local, national and international level. The benefits of this investment in me is ongoing as the work I developed during the residency continues to be performed across Ireland and internationally.
As the Irish economy faces difficulty, I think there is something of immense value to be learned from the investment of the Arts Council and of Dublin City Council in the arts in general and in my work in particular. The number of outcomes, the range of employment, the raising of the profile of Irish creativity and innovation abroad are examples for how much can be achieved with limited resources.
These achievements were possible because of the way that partners in the arts work together creatively and generously. They were possible because artists are resourceful and innovative. It is right to invest in these skills. I am proud of these achievements and hope that I can take what I have learned to future projects. The arts are an important resource in Ireland, for Ireland and for all Irish people and I intend to keep finding ways to encourage investment in them.
Thank you again for the chance to clarify my position. I hope it helps your article.
Niche = A place of retreat or retirement
What did you see?
I did not see a place of retreat or retirement. Rather, I felt that in that dark space there was a sense of cosmic loneliness.
What did you feel?
I felt the young men were living “kidult” lives, relying on games to communicate with one another. They seemed confused, wary of human contact while, simultaneously, longing for it. They appeared not to know their place in the scheme of things and consequently were unable to find their niche. Maybe their niche was pretence. The woman, on the other hand, though she was a remote and solitary figure, was methodically carving out her space, attending to the practical things – as women do – preparing food and sorting clothing but passively, almost mechanically. Her world and that of the
young men never met.
Technically, the piece was superb. I liked the fact that there was no background music. Instead, the dancers provided their own living sounds thus adding hugely to the physicality of the work.
What do you think now?
Is “Niche” a comment on the changing landscape of Dublin’s Docklands? Are these young men reflecting the sense of loss and dislocation caused by the destruction of the old neighbourhoods? Or are they just confused by the changing role of men in our society and by their inability to find their place in that society.
“Change is not made without inconvenience even from worse to better”
Eithne Doyle
Finding his own niche dancing on the streets
Saturday October 25 2008
One afternoon during the summer of last year, Fearghus Ó Conchúir put on his black overcoat, put the hood up, and walked out into the rain. He was looking for something.
He wandered through Dublin's northside till he found himself on a corner in the docklands, on Guild Street, where the pavement was wider. He took out his mobile phone, turned on the video function, and propped it up so it was watching him. And then he started dancing.
He danced for 10 minutes, took a break, and danced again. Some people walked by, giving him a wide berth. A woman sitting outside her house called him over.
"You want to be careful of that," she said, pointing at the phone. "It'll get robbed." And she asked him what he was doing. A passing car stalled, and the driver asked him what he was up to.
He was up to a few things. He was dancing. He was researching. He was rehearsing. He was recording. He had been given money by Dublin City Council and the Arts Council to develop choreography on the theme of 'bodies and buildings'. The body of Dublin was changing, he believed -- not just the physical city, of buildings and infrastructure, but also the typical, individual, human body.
Ó Conchúir wanted to explore this in dance, and so he would spend his morning developing dances in the studio, working with his ideas about different bodies, and then, in the afternoons, he would try these dances in different places in the docklands, to see how they felt, and how the environment changed them.
That work has ultimately become the show Niche, which plays tonight in Dublin's Project Arts Centre, and next Saturday in the Mermaid in Bray.
But at that early stage, Ó Conchúir wasn't thinking of getting it into a theatre.
"The thing about performing in a theatre is that it's people who are comfortable coming to a theatre who will come to see it," he says. "To do it on the streets is a way to let people stop and watch as long as they want to."
Many of those who passed him dancing simply ignored him. "It's interesting what level of strangeness people will accept," he observes, wryly.
Others would watch from afar: office workers smoking outside their building; or builders on construction sites. "It pleases me that there can be a place for art alongside the everyday. I like that it was okay for me to do my thing alongside people smoking, or building, or pushing the pram, or whatever."
Having worked on his own, he decided to bring in some other dancers, and produce a show. But as he was due to put the finishing touches to an Arts Council application, he fell ill, and missed the deadline.
He was devastated. He knew the time was right for this show, and didn't want to wait until the next funding round. So he decided to try fundraising himself.
He sent out an email: "You can help me make a new dance piece. I am looking for 500 people to donate €100 each," it said. Once he had 10 positive replies, he knew the piece would happen -- though he ultimately received just 50 donations. (The rest is being made up by in-kind donations of theatre services, and his own money.)
Paradoxically, he found it empowering to say to people, "I need help, can you help me?"
It provided a way of bringing other people into the project, and forced him to think more about communicating and sharing what he was doing. (All of this early work, including the Guild St video, is documented on his blog, bodiesandbuildings.blogspot.com.) He calls his funders 'the Optimists'.
Despite the bleak economic prospects, he says he too is optimistic for the arts: "We made this piece on a shoestring. We found a way to use the limited resources at hand to make something that I hope is beautiful and engaging. There is something that is optimistic for me about being able to do that."
Niche features four dancers, a motley collection of artefacts cluttered on a bare stage, and no music.
"Music often tells an audience what to feel and think and I'd prefer to let you make your own mind up," he writes in a programme note. "And besides, there's lots to listen to: the sound of plastic bags, of jumps, of effort, of traffic in the distance... "
He describes how the docklands environment inspired the dances: sites there can be strewn with rubbish; looking at abandoned objects, he would wonder where they had come from.
"What's the story behind that child's buggy in the middle of that wasteground?" he might think.
Niche, he says, is "a dance about finding your place". It may sound eccentric, but that fits. Ó Conchúir's method is a celebration of the eccentricity that flourishes in the city, of the ways people forge an identity amidst the turbulent cross currents of economic and social change. Ultimately, everybody needs to find their niche.
cmurphy@independent.ie
Today the situation is more open and the opportunity exists for the artist to redefine the space itself rather than simply produce work to be sited by others. The role of the artist in determining our external experience is essential. Without
the artist, the role falls to the landscape architects and/or the urban designers. Current art practice goes way beyond the idea
of the object placed in space. Appropriately, the content of our “public realm” must reflect the people who use it by going way
beyond a town councillor’s view on what ART is.
The idea of public space as something other than a surface to connect two front doors is radical. The work of PUBLIC ART
through its rich and diverse activities sets out to question the nature of this space --- that every town & city has in abundance ---- and programme it as opposed to designing it. The distinction between these two activities is vital. One is about
beautification, which often degenerates into style or heritage. The other is about reclaiming the space for genuine public use.
If the street could be the city art gallery, then why not a school? No shops but markets? No theatre but a continuous
performance? The public realm has the ability to liberate many of our treasured institutions in such a way that they could be
redefined. This is the work of the artist and architect, alongside the rest of the community.
Choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir is using the changing face of Dublin as the backdrop to his innovative dance performances, writes Michael Seaver
LOADED WITH political resonance, Tiananmen Square was a popular and high-profile choice for western participants at last year's Dadao Live Art festival in Beijing. Irish choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir instead chose to perform at the building site of the Olympic Stadium, for him an equally, if not more resonant political setting for his dance.
"Some of the other artists were really surprised that I had got permission to perform there," says Ó Conchúir. He didn't. "I did it on the sly. For me, it felt more appropriate. It was about asserting the right of an individual to express himself, perhaps on behalf others, in the shadow of this national governmental symbol."
The western world seems infatuated by China's new cityscapes. In this month's Vanity Fair magazine, Kurt Anderson pays a gushing tribute to Beijing's new architecture. It's a typical full-colour glossy reflection of the new architecture (rather predictably titled From Mao to Wow!), with impressive photographs and a convenient narrative. Anderson finds parallels with New York City's heyday in the early 20th century when the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station and Rockefeller Center marked the city's cultural significance, which still exists today.
But there is an inconvenient narrative behind Beijing's new architecture that Ó Conchúir wanted to articulate. "A lot of people had to leave their homes and make way for the new construction. In this context, I felt it was important to make a statement for the individual." The individual is constantly forgotten in Beijing preparations and even human horse-power is cheap. In the past month, 10,000 soldiers and civilians have cleared algae from the coastal city of Qingdao, which will host the yacht races at the Olympics.
Ó Conchúir agrees with Anderson's assessment that Beijing's cultural significance is being defined at present through its architecture. It is also something he sees back in Dublin, where areas of the city are making way for new buildings and a new cityscape is being created that will define Dublin for years to come. As dance-artist-in-residence with Dublin City Council, he has interacted with this changing architecture in rather the same way as he did in Beijing: rather than put dancers in sites of historical interest, he has placed them in building sites and wastelands that precede the bulldozers and cranes.
"The whole rush to create new buildings is, of course, tied to our financial wealth," he says. "But the change of the physical landscape is also a change of our mental landscape, our history and how we imagine we are at this moment." Responding to these changes as a dance artist means going into these spaces and finding new ways of moving there, in other words, relating the human scale back to the new building.
"I'm not a luddite," he is clear to point out. "I'm not against the development. I just want to connect with what was there before, as a way of understanding and humanising the new when it comes along." New architecture is almost always constructed on top of previous settlements or buildings. "Even the process of building foundations is like opening a grave," he says. "We have to do something with the memories of the old buildings and find ways to make these new buildings more adapted to exuberant human interaction, even though many are more security conscious and corporatised."
This doesn't mean redesigning the buildings, but finding ways to adapt the spaces. There is a wall near where he has been filming off Sheriff Street, which always has people sitting on it, talking. It was built as a barrier, but it is now used as a space for socialising. It is only by the interaction of the human body with the built environment that social spaces are created in unexpected spaces. He sees a similar thing happening because of the smoking ban. Banished outdoors, smokers in the Dockland's new offices have had to seek out or create social spaces that weren't in the architect's plans.
"His work is very significant and relevant to the way the city is developing," says Jack Gilligan, arts officer for Dublin City Council. "It is great to have someone responding so fluidly to his surroundings. Even since he began working in this area of the north inner city, things have changed."
Ó CONCHÚIR'S CV IS full of contradictions. A native Irish speaker, he completed degrees in English and European Literature at Magdalen College in Oxford. He then studied dance at London Contemporary Dance School and, now as a choreographer, the self-proclaimed country boy from An Rinn in Waterford is finding artistic resonance in building sites off inner city Dublin's Sheriff Street.
His first work to connect the performer with his environment was Match, a dance film for the 2006 International Dance Festival Ireland. This duet focussed on the contests in daily life and relationships and featured two tussling male dancers performing in an empty Croke Park.
The towering terraces amplified their battle with resonances that went further than GAA contests, but appeared almost gladiatorial. After that he teamed up with architect Dan Dubowitz and was commissioned by Fingal County Council for a public art project set in the area's Martello Towers. The public aspect of this is important.
"I am keen to make the work accessible to people," he says. "When I say accessible, it's not about changing the content of the work. The work is as strange and idiosyncratic and personal as always. But rather than hide it in a studio, or a theatre where it is marginally a self-selected audience, I want to show it where people can see it. They are not obliged to stay and watch it. But they will see it."
While in China he teamed up with choreographer Xiao Ke and composer Yin Yi and together they have created Dialogue, which will be performed at Dancehouse on July 30th. As the title suggests, the work is about talking together, but it is not a work about Ireland and China.
"Neither of us wanted that, however, when we come together we embody certain aspects of the places we come from. So we're going to see how that fits together, but without making a programmatic declaration about inter- cultural relations."
Another dance, Niche, is directly inspired by the derelict areas awaiting the bulldozers in the Docklands. Ó Conchúir teamed up with James Kelly of Feenish Films and made a dance film in the original location, a setting that is ideal. "My work isn't polished and glamorous. It's quite rough and muscular, and it's that grittiness that gets amplified when its put into an environment that isn't so pristine." Later in the year, Niche will transfer to the Project Arts Centre, thanks to a fundraising campaign that, it is hoped, will raise 500 individual donations of €100.
"Niche is about finding a place for ourselves, a niche, in an environment that's changing all the time. It's about living in cities with cranes on the skyline, about communities that aren't like we remember. It's about excitement and loss and it's something I think we can all connect to."
Dialogue will be performed on Wed and Thurs at 8pm at Dancehouse, Corner, Foley St, Dublin, 01- 8558800.
www.bodiesandbuildings.blogspot.com
© 2008 The Irish Times
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times
Transport chief's Dublin plan: confuse drivers to cut crashes
FRANK McDONALD, Environment Editor
TAKE A street in Dublin. Eliminate the footpaths. Get rid of all the "clutter" - traffic lights, direction signs, pedestrian crossings and guard rails, then see what happens.
That's the experiment John Henry, director of the Dublin Transportation Office, wants to try out in the centre of the city.
"Without any signs, traffic will automatically slow down and there will be fewer accidents because drivers will take more care," he said confidently.
"The environment is what controls speed, not signs or rules. It's psychological. Signs like 'slow', 'stop' and 'yield' are often not seen by drivers. If you take the signs and kerb lines away, and say 'go figure it out yourselves', you're creating uncertainty - and that's safer."
Evidence from abroad, rather surprisingly, supports Mr Henry's novel proposal. Five years ago, the Dutch town of Drachten removed signs and traffic lights as part of a "naked streets" experiment - and accident figures plummeted as drivers became more cautious.
Drivers undirected by signs, kerbs or road markings are faced with confusion and ambiguity. Since they do not want to cause accidents at junctions, or damage their cars, they reduce their speed and establish eye contact with other users."
