The brief is very brief! Dance with natural sound in your natural setting, percussively. I’ve been raised in a house always full of music and dance and so, dancing is second nature to me. But dancing without music is not.
As a percussive, traditional artist, I always seek to respond to the music as if in conversation with the player. Different musicians and their music move me in different ways. How should I move when there is no music to move me?
I have never watched the swallows as much as I have in 2020. I was anxious at the thought of them leaving us for Africa as I watched them line up on the wires at the front of the house in late September. They were late leaving this year. I think I was as lonesome for the great memories they had shared with me of summer past, as their fine company itself. My little boy and I spent many blue sky days lying in the field watching them chase one another overhead. Or my father standing at the red meadow gate watching them swoop through the long grass, shaking his head; “They’re flying low, the rain is on the way.”
The chatter between them was like a tune. I tried to replicate their rhythms and accentuations. It reminded me of all the other movements my home place stirs in me from one season to the next. The bubbling call of the curlew on the hill, the sway of the hawthorn on the ringfort, the skygoat diving at dusk, the skylarks song, the return of the whooper swans to the lake, the roar of the river after a storm, the looing cow in the scrub, the shriek of the fox in John’s meadow, the munching of the cows the other side of the quick, the echo of our neighbours talk from across the lake, the South West wind whistling through the towering conifers, the stillness the snow brings, the rain on the red rusting roof of the outhouse. These are the same sounds my ancestors heard before me on these lands. These sounds all make me move in different ways, all stirring different emotions and memories.
“Beech gives wind speech
Each branch reaches to other
branches as the gale rises;
Each leaf dances with other
leaves as the storm crashes.
Can you hear that inland sea,
its slow explosion?
High in the hill - woods, huge
surf breaks far from any ocean.
Robert Macfarlane”
My life has been greatly shaped by the people and place I have grown up around in Leitrim. One side of the road is the townland of Headford, my homeplace, the other, Correish, home of my grandparents.
Headford - Lios na gCeann - Head of the Forts.
Correish - Cor Éis - Éis’s Hill.
There is a strong connection between the land, music, language and history here. They fuse and influence a style that is unique to us. I would even say there are some people who match the character of their townlands very well. The same can be said for many parts of Ireland and their people. I think of Breanndán Ó Beaglaoich; the wild landscape out west beyond Dingle and all it carries from the past, their soothing language, how this all emanates through him and his music. This is something I have thought a great deal about of late. As a dancer I am almost continuously earthed; I dance by making contact with the land beneath me. My home land has instilled a huge sense of belonging and fight in me; a wildness and a burning sense to protect this place and all it holds. Has it also influenced how I move?
I am unsure yet of where this project will take me, but the thoughts and questions it has provoked has greatly reminded me that I am firmly rooted in this place.
Edwina
I made this reflection of my surroundings and time in lockdown. Leitrim.
