Dance House, 13 August 2020

This is a recording of dancers Marion Cronin, Lucia Kickham, and Sarah Ryan performing the second part of a dance phrase taught to them by Jessie Keenan. Jessie took the phrase from a filmed rehearsal of her own live dance improvisation to audio she recorded in response to the question ‘So what is surfacing?’, adapted from a phrase written by Brian Friel during the composition process for Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). The footage from which the phrase originates was taken at the UCD Humanities institute on 25 February 2020; this video was taken at Dance House during a week of workshops and rehearsals on 13 August 2020. This phrase, danced in unison with moments of deliberate hesitation and repetition from two of the three performers, forms a significant portion of Keenan’s film ‘So what is surfacing’. 

The phrase is accompanied by an ultimately unused work in progress by Robbie Blake, performed by Bláthnaid Conroy Murphy and Michelle O’Rourke. Robbie had used redacted text from an online privacy policy to generate a piece in response to some of the ideas that were emerging from interactions with Zosia Kuczyńska’s research.