RUINS

Choreographed by artistic director, Deirdre Grant, ‘Ruins’, is a special site-specific contemporary dance piece designed as an aural, visual and sensual experience; drawing on movement, voice and video installation work compiled over a two-year period and delivered by a unique set of highly skilled performers. The piece will premiere on Sunday, 3rd June at Selskar Abbey, Wexford as part of the Wexford Opera Fringe Festival and is Deirdre’s first full-length work for Myriad Dance.

Draped in moving images, taken from the textural and spatial qualities of this unique 12th century site now in ruin, Selskar Abbey provides a backdrop of solemnity, solidity and monastic reverence; an interplay between confinement and safe haven for it’s host population for over a thousand years.

Through her adept choreography Deirdre Grant explores how this meditative space has a resonance and a permanent meaning and permutations for both today and the past. ‘Ruins’ draws the audience into the internal and external exploration of landscape woven in and around the vicinity of Selskar Abbey, incorporating St. Mary’s Abbey and the chapel spaces.

The work has undertones of the historical and religious politics of the space, as well as crafting an exciting blend of the modern and the old, raising questions such as why spaces become empty and unused? Why do populations disperse? What is left in the space when it is empty…memory…resonance…what are we left with?

This latest production by Myriad Dance is the concluding stage of a two-year collaborative trans-national project between the company and Canyon Movement Company, Arizona. The concept behind this unique project was to investigate, through experimental choreographic research, medieval ruins from both countries dating from the 12th century. The two sites chosen were Selskar in Wexford and the stunning Wukoki National Monument in Arizona USA.

The performance includes dance work from both the US and Wexford visits interspersed with sound installations by Pat Jackman and a digital imagery installation by Pádraig Grant projected onto the walls of Selskar Abbey .