WE Create Memories

The ‘WECreate Memories’ 2019 project explored perceptions of memories of Limerick using qualitative and oral memory as narrative through which to inform costume, dance, image and motion. Limerick was visited at the initial primary research stages to engage with the sensuality of the city, its history, collective memory, its textures and light, collecting images and sounds. In the manner of Benjamin’s flaneur The research took the form of Limerick’s ‘wanderer-voyeur’v or like Perec recorded the passings of the city and its streets watching the town as a stranger and experiencer (Perec 2008, pg. 62vi). Limerick became the site for collating visual and textual research which on return began to form the concepts for two new garment works to inform the project residency in August. The garments produced as costume for site specific screendance performance are informed by the silhouette of a Limerick lace garment found in the museum. The imagery on the garments, digitally printed on silk single georgette fabric, captures the gritty urban spaces of the city juxtaposed with the sense of the natural and the land, the green of the surrounding landscape and nature, that forms a quintessential juxtaposition within the city itself. The imagery of the garments and their form becomes metaphors for the city where hybrid objects are created in real objects possessing sensual qualities. In producing works that captured the emotive atmosphere of the city in visual and wearable metaphor they echo Tony Smith when he says “I’m interested in the inscrutability and mysteriousness of the thing” in a discourse between the real and the sensual, the present and the past, the quotidian and the oneiric. The screendance video resulting from the Dance Limerick Percolate Residency 2019 was premiered at the Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre, Texas State University between 27th and 29th February 2020.