Journal

Despite seeing good dance pieces at Kilkenny Arts Festival over the past few years and having presented Tabernacle in the festival myself, I’ve never been completely happy with the relationship between performance and audience that Kilkenny’s Watergate stage sets up. One of the things I love about Kilkenny Arts Festival in general is the set […]

Ste Murray has been documenting The Casement Project from the outset.  His photos of Féile Fáilte give a flavour of the atmosphere, activity and beauty of the day.

Having rehearsed until after 11pm the previous night and knowing that we would be active again until midnight that day, I was a little reluctant to get myself and the dancers to Banna for a press call at midday on the day of Féile Fáilte.  I knew the day would demand sustained energy and I didn’t want […]

Theo wrote a beautiful and thoughtful blog post for SoutheastDance about his response to the Orlando shootings and how it affected his dancing in Butterflies and Bones: ‘Dance continues to have a new found relevance for me these last few weeks. It is inherently empathetic, uniting, celebratory and hopeful.

Its ephemerality a distillation of this moment in time. To dance is to humanise and this is needed now more than ever before.’

We don’t get to know everything about a work from its premiere. It evolves with each performance and reveals more about its potential. It surprises me, even as I begin to understand it more deeply. That, at least, is my aspiration when I’m making work and it is that hope to be surprised by the work and by the performers in it that gives Butterflies and Bones its openness, malleability and resistance to determinacy.

Roger Casement was denied his full identity. In Glasnevin he is still in exile from his beloved Antrim, which he wanted to be his last resting place. These successive internments, the posthumous exiling’s from his own place and from his own self, are addressed beautifully in Butterflies and Bones.

HOSPITABLE BODIES: THE CASEMENT SYMPOSIUM Roger Casement in 1916 Friday 3 June 2016 British Library Jeffrey Dudgeon   I am opening today’s session and have therefore to give you a crash course in the Casement diary controversy, and indicate where the ‘Hospitable Bodies’ are buried. If I offend I apologise. The clue is in our […]

Butterflies and Bones is the deposition of Casement’s natural body, from the body politic, first one state and then another created for him. Through dance, in sweat and sinew, a sense of the true man will be recomposed. There is a limit to words and dance as an art form powerfully surpasses it

The enactment of art, the nurture of artists, the years of trial and experiment by a man from the Ring Gaeltacht like Ó Conchúir and the talented dancers who perform his work, is a synthesis of many talents and arts forms besides their own. It is a cultural ecosystem which in Ireland is parched to the point of exhaustion. The recent diminution of the arts portfolio in government, is further demoralisation, yet again.

We have a new trailer. Butterflies and Bones: The Casement Project has its world premiere this weekend at The Place, London.  I’ve invited lots of people to see the work as it develops but I also want to save some gorgeous surprises for the performance itself.  So it was a hard task we set José […]

I’ve been thinking about people who might be interested in the biography of Roger Casement.  As I’ve tried to make clear, Butterflies and Bones is an imaginative response to the life and after-life of Roger Casement.   It draws on his complex and queer history for contemporary and future ends. We’re not presenting a Casement biographical-dance. […]