Application for PACT residency-Mus Ro

Mus Ro Faclan Ann is Gaelic for Before Words. This project came about by living on the Outer Hebridean island of Uist. Uist is one of the most Westerly points in Europe along with the string of islands that create this incredible place. At the time I was reading David Abram, an ecologist and philospher whose approach to Animism fed into my physical dance practice. Animism encompasses the beliefs that there is no separation between the spiritual and physical world and that souls or spirits exist, not only in humans, but in animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains, rivers or other entities of the natural environment including thunder, wind and shadows. In essence what I was reading about I was experiencing by being in this place and by being in this place my physical understanding of movement and therefore my choreography was changing. What’s more the Gaelic language was foreign to me and yet seemed like feature of this landscape. In the conception of my experience into live performance, the elements I include are dance, song, sound, image and lighting. Each of these elements has as much importance for me as the next and should be interwoven so that there is no visible differentiation between elements. I try to as much as I can, within my choreographic choices, use the inherent qualities of the materials to work with. This means not only the output: which movements arise in which order, but to think about how the movement was generated in the first place and the knock on effect that has. Coming back to the concept for the work, I want to shift the audience’s perception between their experience of sound, song, movement and image so that they don’t experience the representation of ideas, which is what language offers. Rather something transmitting directly without being able to be named.