Céilí as Real-Time Transmission Environment
This video documents a participatory céilí developed through my work at the University of Notre Dame, in which live musicians perform dance tunes while dancers learn and execute figures in real time. During the event, dancers began speaking the calls aloud in time with the music without prompting, creating an additional rhythmic layer shared across the group.
This spontaneous calling functioned as both a support mechanism and an embodied expression of structure, reinforcing timing, coordination, and collective awareness. Rather than a staged performance, the event operates as a site of active transmission, where dancers internalize form through listening, speaking, and movement simultaneously.
This work reflects my interest in how traditional dance knowledge is acquired and stabilised in communal settings, and how musicality and structure are negotiated collectively rather than imposed.
Popcorn
This choreographic work examined eight-bar step sequences from the repertoire of Donncha Ó hOibicín, treating them as modular units that can be separated, rearranged, and recombined. By disrupting conventional ordering, the piece explores how individual phrases relate across shifting structures, and where points of overlap and continuity emerge.
The work is informed by questions of form and musicality within sean-nós dance: how rhythm and phrasing are maintained when expected structures are altered, and how concepts such as theme, variation, and repetition function in the absence of a fixed sequence. In this context, the choreography investigates whether coherence can be sustained through internal rhythmic logic rather than predetermined form.
If/Then
Selected for the Velocity Dance Festival (Washington, DC). This choreographic work examines the movement vocabulary and rhythmic structures of Páraic Ó hOibicín, Róisín Ní Mhainín, and the Devane family tradition, with particular attention to shared and divergent patterns across practitioners. The work is framed by the research question of whether sean-nós dance transmission can be understood as a conditional (“if/then”) system, in which movement choices emerge through responsive, context-dependent decision-making.
The Political Pickie
This work examines how audience perception of traditional dance is shaped by narrative and relational context. Using the step vocabulary of the “Maggie Pickie” set dance, the choreography is structured as a trio in which roles are implicitly associated with public political figures during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle.
Presented in Washington, DC, in March 2017, the piece explores how attribution of identity—whether explicit or suggested—alters the reception of movement. By assigning recognizable personalities to performers, the work investigates how audience expectation, bias, and familiarity influence interpretation of shared choreographic material. Although the steps remain constant, meaning shifts depending on perceived character and relationship.
This work is informed by the question of how knowledge of a person, or projection of identity onto a performer, reshapes the viewing of traditional dance, and whether movement can be read differently through social or political framing.