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OR THE INAUGURAL Creative Brain Week at Trinity College Dublin, curator Dominic Campbell intro- duced me to choreographer, activist and scholar Paul Modjadji. Typical of Dominic’s sensitive and inspired relationship building, he used the structures of Creative Brain Week and its focus on creativity and brain science as a way to introduce two dance artists that he suspected might have something in common. This article provides a brief account of the encounter between Paul and me, Fearghus Ó Conchúir. The relation- ship is still fresh but its impact, as we hope this article conveys, is none- theless significant enough to want to communicate. Prompted by Dominic’s creative matchmaking, Paul and I had a con- versation via Zoom that allowed us to speak about our dance-making as a way of engaging with and trans- forming difficult legacies that are invariably written on and encoded in our bodies. This is not to think of our bodies as material without agency, merely molded by external “forces” (as misconceptions of Foucault might suggest). 1 A combination of Foucault, Butler and Barad helps us to recog- nise embodiment as material and dis- cursive. 2 Dance is a form of knowl- edge that understands and practices the making of individual and collec- tive bodies. To the extent that it chal- lenges or re-choreographs the path- ways of a status quo or proposes alternatives to hegemonic formations 1 See for example Nigel Thrift, ‘Entanglements of Power: Shadows?’ in Joanne P. Sharp, Paul Routledge, Chris Philo and Ronan Paddison (eds.), Entangle- ments of Power: Geographies of Domination/ Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 269-278, p. 269. 2 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Soci- ety, vol. 28, no. 3 (2003), pp. 801-831 Materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily produc- tion: matter emerges out of and includes as part of its being the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of the world). p. 822
of individual and collective bodies, dance is a political activity. Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. 3 Within that context I shared with Paul how I have worked with dancers to take on and shift particular cor- poreal legacies in Ireland, a culture shaped by colonialism, Catholicism and nationalism as well as political and economic neo-liberalism and glo- balisation. When Dominic invited us to present a session in Creative Brain Week based on these initial conver- sations, I suggested that we exchange choreography from our archives and see how it might resonate and be rearticulated in our differently accul- turated, trained and racialised bod- ies – bodies that nonetheless could acknowledge in one another a queer kinship. We called our session Moving the Body-Brain, Moving the Brain-Body – a danced lecture . This approach of asking someone else to take on, or embody a trou- bling legacy was a strategy I have recognised in operation in my own work. I’ve used it as a way of exter- nalising, examining and ultimately altering through transmission some- thing that I would have struggled to gain perspective on exclusively from an individual subject posi- tion. Paul agreed to the offer, per- haps with questions, as his reflec- tions below detail, that he withheld in a spirit of generosity. Our inten- tion was to exchange choreogra- phies, however my testing positive for Covid the week before the event meant I couldn’t attend in person. Consequently we focused on Paul’s embodying of my work: that’s not to say that there wasn’t an exchange in the process. To witness Paul take on and transform a solo that was made through me was already to learn about the structures in my body that produced the work, and it
revealed potential in the movement that wasn’t evident to me before. Exchange doesn’t necessarily require the same or even similar input to be mutually rewarding. The work I offered him was a solo from a dance film commissioned for national television in Ireland in 2010. The work is called Mo Mhórchoir Féin: A Prayer . The Irish language title (I grew up in an Irish-speak- ing area ) refers to the Confiteor, a prayer in the Catholic mass which has the words: ‘Trí mo choir féin, trí mo choir féin, trí mo mhórchoir féin’, ‘Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.’ The lines in the prayer are tradition- ally accompanied by the gesture of beating one’s chest in confession of sin, though the choreography queers the gesture with ripples through the spine that connects the ground to a free pelvis and the weight of my elbow as it beats against my ribcage, mixing mortification and pleasure. As someone who started my dance-training at the age of 23 – relatively late – I am aware that my body was nonetheless trained. One of the most powerful agents of that training was the Catholic Church where as a member of the congrega- tion and as an altar boy, I learnt an aesthetics of worship and a chore- ography of when to sit, stand, and how to move with decorous ele- gance from place to place with just the right bowing of the head – an arrangement no less precise, if less articulated, than the conventions of épaulement in classical ballet. The film was shot in a Catholic church in Dublin chosen because it resembled the kind of country churches familiar from my child- hood. I knew that activating my personal stake in this work would contribute to its authenticity and to its actual rather than repre- sented transformation of legacy. And so I dance between the sanc- tuary and the pews, while an altar
boy prepares to leave after Mass. The altar boy and I are watched by an older woman. The context of creation was also the aftermath of the publica- tion of the Ryan and Murphy Reports into abuse perpetrated, concealed and consequently facilitated in Catholic institutions. I was aware that much had been written and spoken about in relation to this abuse and that words were important after genera- tions of disabling silence. But I was also aware that much of this abuse was perpetrated and suffered bodily and that the full expression of embod- iment had not been included in the responses to that abuse. Though I had not experienced abuse myself, I knew that my body had been shaped by the religious culture that allowed abuse to happen. As a gay man, I might have readily iden- tified myself as a victim of religious
insist on the incarnation – making flesh – of God in the human form of Jesus: no birth, no bodily suffering on the cross to expiate the sins of human- ity, no death, then no redemption and no Catholicism. On a practical level, often forgotten is that the figure of an unclothed man, the crucified Jesus, dominates the church space. So when the commissioners queried my choice to wear only underwear in the film as potentially provocative, I could draw attention to the sanctioned precedent on the cross. While that presiding body is still, mine moved vigorously and joy- fully, as I recognised how I’d managed to make it possible for my queer body to express itself in a space it might not be expected to occupy. It is not a body raging outside the church but one stak- ing a claim inside the church, asserting its always already valid place there. It is important for me to acknowledge this
POWER IS EXERCISED THROUGH NETWORKS, AND INDIVIDUALS DO NOT SIMPLY CIRCULATE IN THOSE NETWORKS; THEY ARE IN A POSITION TO BOTH SUBMIT TO AND EXERCISE THIS POWER …
corporeal agency and the responsibility that goes with it rather than only think of myself as a victim of institutional power. As Foucault reminds us, we are all implicated in networks of power: Power is exercised through net- works, and individuals do not sim- ply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power [...]. We can also say, ‘We all have some element of power in our bodies.’ And power does—at least to some extent—pass or migrate through our bodies. 4 This was the complex solo I wanted to share with Paul. 4 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (eds.), David Macey (trans.) (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 29-30.
exclusion in a state where the legacies of Catholicism and colonialism con- spired to keep homosexuality crim- inalised until 1993. Yet, I felt it was also important to acknowledge my complicity in carrying and thereby car- rying on the influences of a Catholic upbringing that I inevitably perpetuate. In making Mo Mhórchoir Féin , I also wanted to challenge the easy concep- tion of Catholicism as anti-corporeal. The very fact of the church’s perennial anxiety about controlling bodies sig- nals the persistence of bodies in spill- ing beyond the strictures that nonethe- less help constitute them. For the more theologically-minded, the church’s his- torical emphasis on the mortification of the flesh is also in tension with the religion’s central articles of faith that
3 Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Phi- losophy, p.162.
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