irish modern dance theatre

PERFORMANCE

BLEED by Tere O'Connor, Artistic Director of Tere O'Connor Dance, New York
18h IST / 19h CET / 13h EST (65 min)
This work was filmed and produced by On the Boards for OTB TV in Seattle, Washington

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"Bountiful, beautiful, labyrinthine dance... Bleed suspends the watcher in its own webs of watching and being watched" -  Siobhan Burke for The New York Times, 2014

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LIVESTREAMED TALKBACK moderated by Laurie Uprichard, Independent Performing Arts Consultant, Curator and Producer, following the film at approximately 19h IST / 20h CET / 14h EST

 

Dancers: Tess Dworman, devynn emory, Natalie Green, Michael Ingle, Ryan Kelly, Oisín Monaghan, Cynthia Oliver, Heather Olson, Mary Read, Silas Riener, David Thomson

Lighting: Michael O’Connor

Composition/Sound Design: James Baker

Cello: Chris Gross | Voice: Julia Read

All other instruments and vocals: James Baker

Costume Design: Walter Dundervill

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Watch video of Tere O’Connor's “Bleed” Research

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BLEED is the culminating work of a two-year project encompassing O’Connor’s affinity for complexity and layering in dance, in which he collapses three previous works Secret Mary, poem and Sister, all from very different source material and each with an entirely different cast, into this larger work.

This work was filmed and produced by On the Boards for OTB TV in Seattle, Washington.

 

Tere O’Connor is the Artistic Director of Tere O’Connor Dance in NYC and a Center for Advanced Studies Professor at the University of Illinois. He has created over 40 works for his company and many commissions, including Lyon Opera Ballet and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He received a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, among numerous other grants and awards and has won three BESSIES. He is currently researching his new work Rivulets.

 

CHOREOGRAPHER'S NOTE
BLEED is the culminating work of a two-year project during which I constructed three other pieces—Secret Mary, poem, and Sister—all from very different source materials and each with an entirely different cast. I then collapsed these into this fourth work, simultaneously remembering and forgetting the previous dances. All 11 of the magical performers from the other works are here, yet the movement material is gone. ghosts of the other dances resonate through the new work and shape its form, but they are subterranean and exert their pressure on this new construction from the caves of memory.
 

The ephemeral—overly romanticized in dance history in my opinion—is an actual tool for me and is integral to my process. In this expanded version of a concept that has always been central for me, erasure is a form of construction. Each image or section of a dance is absent in the next, but its essence remains to color the forthcoming events. I craft these wafts of memory into my choreography, privileging them over the recapitulation of dance movements. Because inference, essence, quality, reference, and affect seem to be some of the purveyors of meaning in dance, I long ago ceded any desire for the expression of specific ideas to the ambiguous contours and endless associative pathways of the choreographic mind.
 

This work is sparked by my immersion in the poetics of dance and the information I have gleaned from 30 years of wrestling with its indeterminate qualities. My experience with crafting dances has been a journey away from the exigencies of definition or resolution that might be useful in
the construction of “cogency.” I have moved decidedly towards abstraction and its potential to mirror consciousness. Contradictory impulses coexist in my works. A search for singularity of meaning gives way to a complex weave of disparate elements. I work with a willfully convoluted palette where recognizable imagery and the anomalous enjoy equal value. I am not looking to shape hidden stories into dance but rather to understand how the sequencing of events accrues meaning in choreography. The viewer joins me in the definitions of the parts, but I must provide a structural frame that allows for this and perhaps promotes the dislodging of memories in the viewer in order that they might co-mingle with the images of the dance. People’s projections are braided with my construction to finalize the work.
 

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