Price
Free of Charge. Pre-Registration Required
When
Friday 4 April
Where
The Mick Lally Theatre
Tickets
Moving Meitheal – Galway Dance Symposium
ALL AGES WELCOME
Galway Dance’s one-day Symposium exploring the relationship between Intangible Cultural Heritage and contemporary (dance) performance, to be held at the Mick Lally Theatre, Galway City on Friday April 4th 2025.
The symposium is part of the International Residency Initiative Scheme supported by the Arts Council to build relationships with Scotland’s Glasgow Life and Theatre Gu Leòr.
Doors open 10am with an introduction by Galway Dance and IRIS Facilitator Rob Heaslip – with the 5 participating artists in the programme.
IRIS Dance Artists:
Bernadette Divilly
Jack Anderson
Fionnlagh Mac A’ Phiocair
Aneta Dortová
Osian Meilir
Rob Heaslip – Facilitator
Seona McClintock – Host
Alessandra Azeviche – Panel Member
Edwina Guckian – Guest Speaker
Zoe Munn – Guest Speaker
Rona Dhòmhnallach/MacDonald – Panel Member
Colin Dunne – Panel Member
Amir Sabra – Panel Member
Panels with invited artists include:
Future Folktales – Lived experience of making work connected to heritage for the contemporary audience palette.
Diasporic Dances – Lived Experience of creating culturally representative work while based abroad.
Event concludes with a sharing by participating IRIS artists.
This event is free of charge but you must register through Eventbrite in advance.
More about the dance artists…
Bernadette Divilly is an established contemporary dance artist and dance movement psychotherapist living in Galway City. The essence of her work is responsive to the present moment, nourished and informed by her West of Ireland cultural heritage. Her compositional dance aesthetic is also supported by dharma art.
She is Dance Artist in Residence with Áras Éanna Arts Centre since 2022, researching and developing work in the Gaeltacht community of Inis Oírr, based on ideas centred on landscape, language and the body. In 2024 her Dance exhibition Síreacht agus Sult with lens based Artist Cormac Coyne and Siobhán Ni Dhuinnin was based on an invitation to know one’s own longings and experiences of satisfaction, embodying one’s own ancestral influences in terms of landscape, language and relationship to place.
Jack Anderson began Irish dancing professionally in 2008, touring with Rhythm of the Dance and Celtic Legends before going on to work with Ériu Dance Company. Following this he trained at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, and has since worked for a variety of choreographers and organisations including Éowyn Emerald & Dancers, Shotput and Scottish Ballet. Currently his practice is focused on dismantling and reconciling the relationships between traditional and contemporary dance histories in his body and approach to work, and he is exploring this in the creation of dance-theatre gig not for glory in collaboration with Charlotte Mclean and Malin Lewis. Jack lives and works in Glasgow.
Fionnlagh Mac A’ Phiocair is a 24-year-old native Gàidhlig speaker from the Isle of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides and has been immersed in traditional music all his life. Known for experimenting with different tunings & harmonics, he treats a euphonic, hypnotising sound which washes over audiences. Fionnlagh is regarded as a pioneer in the evolution of Scottish Smallpipes.
Fionnlagh also regularly plays with Sarah Hanniffy, A violist from Galway. This innovate fusion inspires new life into the old traditions that each member has grown up with – music which has been handed down both orally in Irish and Hebridean Gàidhlig cultures. The duo will take to the studio this year to record “The Solace From There”. Fionnlagh has recently taken the Smallpipes into a different creative space with his new ensemble The Sòlás Collective, which was launched in August 2024. This trio takes aspects of traditional music into new, experimental ground.
Aneta Dortová is a dance artist, choreographer, and musician based in Galway. She graduated with an MA in Contemporary Dance Performance from the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick. Her artistic practice focuses on the relationship between live music and dance and traditional and contemporary dance. Her expertise is in solo step dance traditions of Ireland and percussive dance traditions of the North Atlantic region. Her contemporary dance practice is informed by release technique, improvisation, and contact improvisation.
She recently received the Arts Council Ireland Bursary Award, Galway City Council Bursary, Macnas Career Development Bursary, Arts Council Ireland Agility Award, Dance Ireland HATCH mentorship Award, and the Lightmoves Festival Student Merit Award. She co-founded and co-organizes a folk music and dance festival FolCon, in Brno, the Czech Republic.’
Osian Meilir Originally from Pentre’r Bryn on the west coast of Wales, Osian Meilir is a freelance choreographer and movement artist currently sharing their time between Wales and London. Since graduating from Trinity Laban in 2017, Meilir has been performing and creating work for a variety of performance spaces, having predominantly worked and created dance productions for the outdoors. Their work has toured extensively across Wales, the UK and internationally including Ten Days on the Island in Australia (2023), Biennale de la Danse in Lyon (2023) and at FIET; the Children’s and Youth Theatre Fair of the Balearic Islands (2024).
