Moving Conversations, Sandra Noeth, Dublin Dance Festival

Moving Conversations
Sandra Noeth De-Normalising Bodies, Rehearsing Citizenship

Create and Dublin Dance Festival

Sandra Noeth will lead a public panel discussion sharing models and examples that connect and expand on the following questions: How might physical and choreographic strategies represent, implement, legitimise and rehearse social and political action? In this time of conflict and suspicion, how do empathy, presence, improvisation or compositions inform the experience of borders? Noeth will be joined by John Scott and choreographers Ríonach Ní Néill and Mithkal Alzghair.

CAPP Research Residency, Sandra Noeth

Create, the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP), Dublin Dance Festival and Dance Limerick are delighted to team up to support a research residency by the distinguished German dramaturge, curator, writer and researcher Sandra Noeth, focusing on socially engaged dance.

During a week-long residency with Dance Limerick and Dublin Dance Festival, Noeth aims to open up new ideas and prompt critical debate around collective and co-creative relationships between dance and its social and political environments. Her explorations and collaborations will be grounded in her practice as a dramaturge and her ongoing research on bodies in bordering situations and bodies subjected to structural or systematic violence.

Additional support for the research residency comes from Goethe-Institut.

Biography

Sandra Noeth lives in Berlin and works as a dramaturge, curator and cultural scholar in Berlin. Since 2015 she has been a member of the research group “Loose Couplings: Collectivity at the Intersection of Digital and Urban Space” at the University of Hamburg. From 2009-2014 she was Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien, where she developed a series of theoretical-artistic research, presentation and publication projects on concepts and practices of responsibility, religion, integrity and protest in relation to the human body.

Her work focuses on the intersections of aesthetics, politics and ethics and more concretely on bodies and borders. Her current research investigates bodies and orders and bodies under structural violence, which she is exploring with an international group of artists, thinkers, lawyers, journalists and students in Europe and in several Arab countries.

Panel

Mithkal Alzghair

Mithkal Alzghair is a Syrian-born choreographer and dancer. He has studied between the’ East ‘(Higher Institute of Dramatic Art in Damascus, Syria) and the West (Master of Choreographic Studies at the National Choreographic Centre of Montpellier, France. He has performed for several choreographers and he has recently collaborated with the Italian company In-Occula, for the European project CRACK.He created Displacement in March 2016, a solo and a trio in which he questions his identity and legacy in a context of exile. The show won the 1st price of the International Competition ‘Danse élargie’, organized by the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and the Museum of Dance / CCN Rennes et de Bretagne.

Ríonach Ní Néill

Ríonach Ní Néill is artistic director of Ciotóg. A choreographer and dancer, her work is inspired by an engagement with human and social issues, viewing dance as a form of civic dialogue.

She was a member of Tanztheater Bremen under the artistic direction of Urs Dietrich, 2002-06, and performed with many Irish dance companies, including Fearghus Ó Conchúir, Finola Cronin, and Rex Levitates (now Liz Roche Dance). Ríonach founded Galway based Ciotóg in 2006 for which she has choreographed 11 works, which have been performed in the US, UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Turkey and throughout Ireland.

Ríonach was Galway Dancer in Residence (2010-14), affiliated with the Centre for Irish Studies NUI Galway, She has curated the Galway Dance Days festivals 2012 – 14, and co-convened the 2012/14 Corp_Real International Symposiums and Art & Geography 2013 symposium. Ríonach develops dance programmes for older people, including the Macushla Dance Club in Dublin, Ar Mo Sheanléim in the Conamara Gaeltacht, and a new dance project for people living with dementia.

John Scott

Dublin born, a graduate of English Literature and Classics at University College Dublin and dance at Irish National College of Dance. He studied with Meredith Monk, Julian Beck and Judith Malina (Living Theatre). He performed in Meredith Monk’s Quarry (Spoleto Festival) and for Yoshiko Chuma, Sarah Rudner, Anna Sokolow and Thomas Lehmen. Founder of John Scott Dance, his work tours regularly in New York, Edinburgh and in France, Eastern Europe, Palestine and in Ireland to Galway International Arts Festival, Kilkenny Arts Festival, Tiger Dublin Fringe and Dublin Dance Festival. Since 2003, John has worked with Survivors of Torture and Asylum seekers, integrating them in his choreography, which received the Irish African Refugee Network’s Culture Award. John is also one of the subjects of Sadlers’ Wells’ 52 Portraits by Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargin and Hugo Glendinning.