Artist/Citizen: Choreographing the Nation Brand

This research examines the corporeal experience of dance artists in Ireland implicated in the production and promotion of the nation and in possibilities of citizenship at multiple scales. Dance, as an art-form practised in the formation of individual and collective bodies, is proposed as a valuable resource for imagining, embodying and reflecting on alternative corporealities that make spaces for diverse and contested experiences within and beyond Ireland’s borders. As an art form concerned with the organisation of movement in space, dance provides a framework for analysing the spatialities of substantive citizenship, recognising that the nation state is not the only scale at which citizenship operates. Who is permitted to appear where and when is a question that guides the geographical, ethical, political and choreographic perspectives deployed throughout. Also of concern has been how the corporeal knowledge and experience of choreography appears in the written form of a PhD thesis. In a challenge to totalising and deadening accounts of live performance, the thesis draws on the distinctive insights of the choreographer-scholar that nonetheless acknowledges the partial, mobile and emergent quality of its situated knowledge. Using a queer bricolage as methodology, the research focuses on my choreography as an example of contemporary dance practice, operating independently of formal structures of incorporation, but nonetheless dependent of multiple networks of support, to ask what agency is available to the individual dance artist in shaping the nation brand and in proposing structures hospitable to the kinds of embodiment disadvantaged by hegemonic conceptions of the national body. The research situates my choreographic practice in the context of cultural policy and practice in the Irish State, as evidenced through The Arts Council, Culture Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Creative Ireland. My recent work, The Casement Project, the largest of the Arts Council’s projects for the Ireland 2016 commemoration programme, offers valuable material for addressing the relationship between the dance artist and the nation.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Ó Conchúir, Fearghus

Language dc:language

en