‘Home’ is activated in relationship. Relationship within the constellations under my skin including all intelligent systems, supported by bone, nerve and blood. ‘Home’ is also my culturally conditioned response worth investigating in order to lubricate my perceptions. I find ‘Home’ through connection. ‘Home’ is experienced as a landscape inside and out.
Does ‘Home’ begin with deep implantation in the womb and growing our own tree of life? We also begin to understand welcome, navigation of mutuality and also hostility and unsafety, depending on the conditions of the pregnancy. This is the beginning of states of consciousness around ‘Home’.
2019
I propose to work with a small group of people who have knowledge about homelessness and home. The group will be gender balanced and will include the cultural diversities of the indigenous residents and more recent arrivals that now dwelling in Ireland.
Together we will devise creative ways for communities to share knowledge about how home and homelessness is lived and known through our physical bodies. We will investigate perceptions and habits connected to being at home or being homeless using mindful movement practices. This will be explored through body language and words. States of homelessness impact the nervous system. In this research participants responses will be respected and supported for safe regulation.
The intention is to find common themes and threads in connected to home and the homeless continuum while having a real understanding of the complex social issues that are creating conditions for increasing homelessness in Ireland currently.
The research and its development will be cognizant of international human rights, health and wellbeing of participants.
To get involved, please see https://bernadettedivilly.com/workshops
2018
‘Home’ was my direction for research in 2018, supported by a conversation with Barbara Dilley , primarily on the subject of influence in 2017, I begin. This research impulse was re-stimulated in 2017 at the Eco Art Incubator Cyprus: Sites Embodied, EDN and Atelier Akamas: Nature Embodied Cyprus (Supported by Dance Ireland and Dance Gate Lefkosia (EDN Members).
I studied the ‘Language of Home’ in dance studios in Dublin, Galway, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Lefkosia. My awareness expands and condenses as I explore location, who the studios and spaces are shared with, what’s missing, who’s missing, what’s present and who’s present. Exploring ‘Home’ as a shifting state of being.
Timeline of my artistic investigation into ‘Home’
2017: Dance Ireland residency and bursary.
January/February 2018: January Workshops and Long Dance residency with Nancy Stark Smith, Connecticut and Massachusetts, USA.
March 2018: International Contemplative Dance Day – A Celebration of Barbara Dilley’s 80th birthday.
April 2018: Emerging into ‘Homing’ – Professional Development Award in collaboration with Maria Gibbons at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre looking at relationships and landscape.
June 2018: Global Underscore
July 2018: The Create Cultural Diversity Summer School.
October 2018: Working as a dramaturge in Cyprus with Arianna Economou on ‘Home as a Journey’. Workshop exploring borders, boundaries and landscapes of ‘Home’ using contemplative dance.
November 2018: Dance Ireland residency with a New Movements event ‘B Home’, including workshopping Home with the dancers using both principles of Underscore and contemplative Dance.
December 2018: ‘Return Home’. Dance lecture performance and workshop at Galway City Museum.