Aoife McGrath:

Professor Aoife McGrath is a dance practitioner–scholar and Professor of Dance at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast. Following a professional dance career in Germany and Ireland, Aoife has worked as a choreographer, community dance and theatre facilitator, and Dance Advisor for the Irish Arts Council. She is interested in finding out how embodied knowledge can be valued and included within engaged, policy-informing, collaborative research processes. She has published widely about dance on the island of Ireland, and her work has been funded by Horizon Europe, AHRC, Future Screens NI/AHRC, Creative Ireland, and Higher Education Authority, amongst others.

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Victoria Durrer:

Dr Victoria Durrer is a sociologist and Assistant Professor in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin. Engagement with the arts and cultural sector is integral to her work, which has received funding from the Higher Education Authority, the Irish Research Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK), the AHRC (UK), Creative Ireland and others. She is committed to publicly-engaged research and is contributor and co-editor of three international volumes: Cultural Policy is Local (2023), Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times (2020), and The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy (2018). 

This paper discusses interrelations between places for dance in a contested border region on the island of Ireland and the dance artists who work within and across its territorial border. Focussing on the interdisciplinary, engaged, collaborative process developed for the Sites of Significance project (Co-PIs: McGrath and Durrer)– which includes a screendance film documenting a cross-border gathering and danced exchange between dance artists and facilitators in Cavan (Ireland) and Fermanagh-Omagh (Northern Ireland) - it examines how the generation and sharing of personal, embodied cartographies of dance practices and sites/places for dance in rural border regions destabilises colonial approaches to the mapping of landscapes enmeshed in complex, sometimes clashing, socio-cultural and political narratives, and a post-conflict and post-Brexit “territorial architecture” (Murphy and Evershed, 2021).  

Funded by an award from Cavan County Council/Creative Ireland and in collaboration with Fermanagh and Omagh District Council and the UNESCO Global Geopark, Marble Arch Caves, the Sites of Significance project explored and mapped the often untold lived experiences of dance artists/facilitators working in rural border regions, and the “sites” in these regional landscapes that are of significance for their dancing lives. Territorial mapping projects are ‘always associated with colonisation and power’ (Gladwin and Cusick, 2016, p.191), and as Roisín O’Gorman suggests, ‘maps [can] seem like natural or neutral tools of mobility, allowing us to render invisible the lives and bodies missing in the landscape’, which leads to a ‘subtle normalisation of who matters and what is valued in a culture’ (O’Gorman in Gilson and Moffat, 2019, p.107). Challenging the devaluation of embodied ways of understanding relations between land, place and people, the Sites project created alternative cartographies that evidenced the uncharted “sensory landscape” (Serematakis, 1994) of dancing lives, allowing the sharing of movement memories of embodied experiences in a border-landscape that are sensed, spatial, and interrelational. 

Sites of Significance Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipQ3OXrVCaQ 

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References :

Durrer, Victoria, McGrath, Aoife, and Tsampazi, Argyro (2024), Sites of Significance Report, Cavan: Cavan County Council. 

Huggan, Graham (1994), Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Australian and Canadian Fiction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.   

Gladwin, Derek, and Cusick, Christine (eds.) (2016), Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 

McGrath, Aoife, Mills, Simon, and McGrath, Sorca (2024), Sites of Significance Film, Cavan: Cavan County Council. 

Murphy, M. C., & Evershed, J. (2021), ‘Contesting sovereignty and borders: Northern Ireland, devolution and the Union’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 10(5), 661–677.   

O’Gorman, Roisin, (2019), ‘Textures of Performance: rethinking The Knitting Map’, in Gilson, Jools and Moffat, Nicola (eds.), Textiles, Community and Controversy: The Knitting Map, London: Bloomsbury. 

Serematakis, N. (1994). (ed.), The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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