limerick IRELAND 2016

Mary Nunan is a contemporary dance artist – choreographer and performer. Her professional career began when she joined Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre (1981-86). She was founder Artistic Director of Daghdha Dance Company (1988-1999). Throughout her career Mary has created a substantial body of solo and ensemble choreographies that have been performed in national and international venues including: London (South Bank), Berlin (Podweil Theatre), Munich (Dance ’95), Paris (Pompidou Centre) and Guanajuato (Festival Cervantino), Mexico. The screen adaptation of her dance theatre work ‘Territorial Claims’ was screened at the Lincoln Centre’s Dance for Camera Festival in New York City (1998). Since 2002 Mary has been involved as a collaborative artist and performer in Maya Lila Collective, under the direction of Joan Davis. She performed in ‘The Bell’s Shadow’ (2014) a full-length dance film, inspired by Davis’ work, directed by Mary Wycherley. In 2014 she directed a short dance film ‘Starting with T’ (2014) working   in collaboration with Mary Wycherley, Jurgen Simpson and Monica Spencer. Other artists with whom she has collaborated include Yoshiko Chuma, Karen Power, Nigel Rolfe, Katherine O’Malley, Oscar Mascarenas and Kenneth Edge. Most recently she collaborated with Lin Snelling and Guy Cools: Rewriting Distance, Limerick (2016). Mary is currently Course Director an MA Contemporary Dance Performance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. She is also a visiting guest tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Mary was awarded a PhD from Middlesex University, UK, in 2013.

 

Mary Wycherley is a dance artist whose work embraces live performance, choreography and film. She has a longstanding interest in innovative modes of presentation for dance and movement and collaborative processes underpin her practice and research. Mary is Limerick Dance Artist in Residence 2015-2017, appointed by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2015 she premiered In The Bell’s Shadow, a feature length screendance film made in collaboration with choreographer Joan Davis and scored for the Irish Chamber Orchestra by Jürgen Simpson. Her installation work includes a diptych Starting With T, a community project made in collaboration with Mary Nunan and Monica Spencer, funded by Limerick City of Culture 2014, and a triptych The Dance of Making (2012) funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2013 Mary premiered Frames & Fragments and Contour, two Dance Ireland commissions. Her work has been shown at festivals and galleries including the National Museum of Contemporary Arts Bucharest, The American Dance Festival, The Solas Nua Arts Centre Washington, VideoDanza Festival Buenos Aires and at home, including the Galway Film Fleadh, the Kilkenny Arts Festival, West Cork Art Centre, RUA RED Gallery, Fab Lab (Limerick City Gallery off-site exhibition), Fastnet Film Festival, the Firkin Crane, and the Light House Cinema Dublin. She is a director and curator of Light Moves festival of screendance and lecturer in dance and film at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick.

 

Thin skin peeled back and crimpled

Revealing

The layer before bone

Amphibianly gleaming

And pitted with gravel.

The ship sailed

The shadows danced

Birds soared

The scrolls from the sea not dead

Unfurled

Tables tilted

Hair swirled in spirals

Jaws dropped

Ripples rolled off tongues

The belles in their beauty

Fell to the ground

The door opened, light streamed in

Pafff

Gone in a flash.

Sea waves, suspension full

Hang then drop,

Momentum without resistance.

Ebbing and more ebbing,

The pull of angel wings around the moon

Sounds

As raucous as gulls, as joyous as a soul released from a granite plinth

The slippery golden eel reels in circles

The dog chases his tail in search of a happy ending.

After the calling,

                        the flying trapeze artist flew over the alter to fool the world of

                        its splendour.

The grandeur of it all as it spills children out its doors waving like spiders befriending toads.

When the drop – shed tears of arrows

                        when the lines became squares

                                          when the squares became circles… the walls moved.

Through rivers and wounds, deep gashes splurge blood, patched up by a kiss on the wall and a fixing bandage.

Stripping hairs from canvas, weaving wires which hold you –

frames, journeys, avenues to the collections of us all.

Amphibians once.

Billowing past –

the sailing ships found place amongst the corridors of open vastness.

Spiralling towards lifting, holding together.

It all drops, into the quiet weightless song of her mother plaiting her hair.

Fit for the queen and proclaiming notions of other times, other people; someone else’s glasses.

                        Alive and slipping through the cracks of each other.

Finding the headlines unfolding as the sea swept us out.

                        Woven in cloth,

                        threadbare

                        and mouth open.

The materials speak, not I.

I hold the object.

It speaks through my holding.

It is underneath the surface, inside our intestines this time.

The story is told with such a vivid colour that I see it here in the arches and arc

of time.

Fossils wait.

They wait to find the space inside the body: the grotto, the host.

Spiralling up into the ripples; those women are seen, not seen, seen.

They go out at night

to fold the fossils into the earth when all sleeps.

They leave everything: words, blind spots, chariots, freckles, folds, ripples, intestines.

They leave it and crawl underneath the surface of where it all began.

1.

Pieces dropping open, folder spilling.

rising up, opening out, playful fall.

The view from here is extensive, through the graves, over the flowers.

Lift up and over

Guided, guided reach, I feel the warmth of my hands over-lap over-lap over-lap.

A knot.

Unwind, unwind.

If I listen too much I’ll crack.

Glide near you, slither around you.

Up up up and away. Far off lands.

2.

Thread lightly with weight

crawling underneath the surface of the rocks, inside out.

Thread lightly with weight

there must be buttercups.

With the window calling you,

you go.

You are here.

I am here.

I see the air across your face.

Fresh warm joints,

ripples

pleated cloth trailing behind you as you arrive.

(Mary’s dance as part of the warm up)

As you start moving, I am emptying myself to stay with you.

There is a moment where you clench your fists, only briefly.

You like to curl, to swirl, to arabesque around.

(My dance)

I need to sound my dance first: growl it, breath it, swallow it.

Slowly I sense my left ear opening wider.

It all ends with a little jump of celebration.

(After the first practice)

A gentle way in, to discover more details:

the scars of the building,

the spiders hiding in the floor,

the graffiti of a girl crying,

red candle wax and clapping hands left behind.

There is a strong pull upwards:

flying kites,

skipping, double dutch,

a zip line,

wanting to be a fulcrum hero.

A lot of gymnastics, too!

Tomorrow we have to open more windows!

Mary’s warm up practice today gave the weight a lightness.

We were holding on to let things go.

We practicing dropping upwards.

There was a lot of Punch and Judesque conversation going on between the sounds a pen would make or the facial expressions of a beard, cut off by a table edge.

I feel a need to draw the shadows of my ears and Lin got her hair braided-plaited again.

To hold the space for each other.

To stay open and present.

To fold in whatever crevices the others leave behind.

To let things drop in their own time.

To create just enough balance.

To do the bell trick again.

Here I am sailing in a church which is a kite.

You are holding the other end of the paper folding.

The third practice had a beautiful wildness to it, with a lot of spinning, making the words to dizzy to write them down, afterwards.

Lin: The story is sailing.

In which everything made absolutely sense to me.

Lin being a blind spot of a freckle.

Mary racing to grace.

I being inside the grotto of my body.

Mary synchronizing with fossilized folds and stones.

There were a lot of echoes of other places:

the Angels at the Art Gallery in Antwerp driving their chariots,

but also a lot of new perspectives:

high up and bottom down.

It felt we were digging in deeper, geological strata to rise up to the surface of our words,

creating many different happy endings, each leaving a hole to crawl through,

again and again and again.

Ring my bell!

(Final practice and public presentation)

We came full circle.

Mary, Lin and Mary recreating the flow of the river, whose spring we unleashed from the very first day.

I, embodying you, gazing down on them. My saliva getting dry of having to chew the paper. My voice being tempered.

Afterwards someone complimented me on my sense of timing and I did ring the bells in time or walked through the door, just before the rain poured down.

I felt washed, my liver regenerated to take it to the next cycle of revisiting Rewriting Distance.

We begin our week together with bodywork into dancing. After each session of bodywork we write.

I worked with Mary Wycherly and these are the first writings of the week.

the spine

the breath

billowing through

a sail …

there is rigging

and the

length of a day

as it changes,

and my my my

how full and fine

is each single

vertebrae as it moves

into the ocean

of space around …

this is a gig ….

the rigging

bone, muscle, tissue

how broad

and full the hull

as it sails out

and takes the day

with all its weather

into the sailing,

the shaking

and all the working

forth.

behind me

yes, sunlight on water

the trail, a boat makes;

moving through,

each clavicle

intelligent as it opens

into the length of an

arm, and the feel and

swirl of waters,

leaving a trail,

the pooling behind

giving

a place,

to be swimming, with

the back of me

filling with adventure

trailing

a summer cottage,

a clear lake,

an early morning in June,

the heat,

the potential

the surprise of

weather and length

and breadth of

this spine

as it yawns into a

day of who knows what …

the wonderful embrace

of laying down on a hill

a gentle slope,

feeling all the tissues

breathing back

into the smile of this

sphenoid …

resting

like a tree house,

supporting

the

on-going

echo

seems to be going on without us,

there is resilience here

the floor is sprung

the stones soften

and the building takes flight

on a sunny day,

this kite flies,

weighs less than

a spider

and more than a

toad

and floats into the sky

a small miniature

of a long time ago …

when I skinned my

knee

and saw myself bleeding

for the first time

scared and exhilarated,

buttercups,

daisies,

adorn and energize

a sleepy holiday Monday …

skipping,

sailing,

surprises

from the smallest

memory,

the smallest shell,

a sound gentle,

a sea huge,

… a flight path

found.

We’ve put the church

into the air,

suspending

our breathing,

capturing shapes

dancing into

an under toe,

something underneath

this architecture

keeps it flying,

carries it off,

puts it down.

The skin is canvas,

we are all in need

of a bandage from

time to time,

close your eyes

tell me what

you see and feel,

sing a song of spiders,

everything falling, the

supports seem to have

a mind of their

own.

So what’s in a mind?

But away away away,

following Mary’s shadow

I feel like a cat,

this game so amusing,

could play it all day,

like a song,

from a long time ago

“ we are sailing, we are sailing we are sailing”

filling the

stones of this structure,

billowing,

until

the sound of my fingertips

coming together

is carried

yes

carried by the

way you caught it,

and began

polishing the paper,

until a story came

through into

words ….

Drop,

stay,

hold,

fold,

and

switch .

The delight of

the bell

at just the right time,

and she makes a braid,

cradles and holds

a memory.

“until it is gone.”

Such a brilliant edge in a shadow,

always moving and multiplying

“I knew you would be there,” he said …

she smiles and turns

the tables upside down

and everyone is falling in all directions

depending on where you are

looking from.

hold me

fold me

carrying up like a

kite on a string,

hold me

fold me

read into a dance

that drops and

read into a dance

that drops and …

“are you there?”

ahh

ahh

ahhh

the door opens

he is singing

about sailing

after the sermon

and we all fall down

yes,

we all fall down …

We begin the day with a warm up from Mary Nunan. A practice she is calling

“zeroing.” It influences everything. The way we imagine backward in forward, up in

down, and the pre-moving in moving … the way the torso moves to support the

suspending, yet reaching arm … the underneath of something, and how it gives flight

to other things … pre-verbal, pre-movement … preparation for all the intelligence of

the body to receive sensation and navigate with multiple potentials.

Yes, the stone spoke

and Mary told me the

secret of “the tin man”

and you

and I

were almost

symmetrical.

Then the angels appeared.

How can I go slowly

when the angels

alway remind me

of the on-goingness of grace

and the raucous party

it actually is

as they drive towards the sea.

And once a gain,

again,

the two women

back up together

halting the fury of the horses

and finding

the fossil

the finger

the hand

the print of time on skin, on stone.

Everything alive

if we take the

time to

touch

and hold.

(Listen

and embrace ….

The folds she was holding stood up;

… she, he, they …

                swam into them

                    and were held on a page

                        by the thunder of their moving

                            and the quiet of their staying.

(a grotto: a sanctuary: a house; a hand)

In a moment’s notice the

ending was happy

and the beginning was

again

unfolding,

overlapping,

waves and water

finally

coming ….

softening the stones,

revealing a shard of glass

becoming

a pair,

seeing through

a song

of ringing bells.

Timing caught,

statues

sailing.

Last night I dreamt of Simone Forti … this morning I find this quote from her.

“ the improvisation is the kite. The chosen subject the thread that holds the kite as it

rises on the wind of impulses, works, memories, movements and associations.”

the kite takes off …

it begins by the window,

softly …

the stones

have ears

and hear

the silence

of many souls,

like music

this place

singing

solitudes …

then the river appears

from the ruins of the week:

unfolding right

down the aisle,

the waters

begin

again

going through

babbling along

the stairs

folding into

holding

staying

until the man appears

with the screaming canvas face …

he is magic

the way he is always becoming,

depending on climate …

part of the room,

his body a beam

fitting into

centuries of rain

and his face

modern

and

art.

all at once

(the bells ring)

he places

the canvas

where two women

have squeezed the voices

through,

framed for time,

quiet and screaming,

into his mouth.

She tips into the

river, her body

holding

staying

discovering

the nooks and crannies

and the

edges of the story;

she leds us to the jumping,

her body so able to

carry the shape of a thing

and then

architecture man

lifts scroll woman

up off the ground

and the room spins,

the kite flys …

her feet leave

the ground

and all of us

turn the

room around …

the river running through

because she finds

the source

the opening

right through

the audience

the music of the river

the song of the other side

but

Mary:

she holds her ground

so we three

join her for one last round …

“we are the river,

stand on the liver,

sing and deliver”

Then we are quiet,

they clap

and smile, and we all

get some lunch.