NEW PERFORMANCE ART
AN aerial dance performance and art installation finished its debut run at Courthouse Arts Centre last weekend.
‘ Threshold Ritual Haunting’ is an immersive aerial dance installation and performance created by Katie Joyce Holmes who is Artist in Residence at the Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely.
Katie Joyce Holmes, from Ballymanus, lives in Tinahely and has been Artist-in-Residence at the Courthouse since 2018. She created a multi-dimensional performance art piece that was inspired by her local ecology, local theologies, ideas of home, ritual and natural devotion.
The show involves a scheduled aerial dance performance and a permanent immersive art installation to create an experience that explores how we can untie our anchors to the past to be fully present in the multiplicities of now.
The installation and performances cycles over a three-week period for a show that has taken anything from 10 years to three years to four months to create.
Combining aerial dance and a large-scale projected animation in collaboration with Bray artist Liing Heaney, the installation also involves poetry, 2D and 3D art pieces and music. Liing Heaney was animator and co-designer on the project with Katie.
‘ Threshold Ritual Haunting’ invites the audience to immerse themselves in our new worlds, its new rituals and new goddesses for the duration of their visit. Using the tenets of prayer, repetition, rhythm, movement and feeling, they will be transported to a place in the right now.
Ambitious and experimental in its realisation and its production, this was the Courthouse’s first in-house production, a fruitful harvesting of a residency in partnership with Katie, since 2018. The show was produced by cultural producer Maeve-Ann Austen and was funded by The Arts Council of Ireland, Wicklow County Council Arts Office and Creation Aerial, which focuses on aerial training and movement research.
‘ Threshold Ritual Haunting’ was the Courthouse Arts Centre’s first show since cultural institutions were permitted to re-open. Audience members were brought by staff to socially distant spots where they remained for the duration of the 20-minute performances.
Katie Joyce Holmes is an artist whose work was originally in poetry and text, but in the past five years has embraced aerial dance, dance and visual art. Her current interests lie in ritual, devotion, environment, ecology, theology and the cycles, repetitions, rhythms and tensions inherent in all of these worlds, tangible and intangible. The local environment and landscape of the south Wicklow hills and uplands are an essential element in all of her work.
She has previously created work in the Dublin Fringe Festival and in various art projects, collaborations and residencies around Ireland. Katie is Associate Artist at Creation Aerial in Dublin.
Liing Heaney’s work has been shown at the Project Arts Centre, the Dublin Fringe Festival and Signal Arts Centre in Bray. A graduate of the National College of Art and Design, she has received many artist awards.
For more details, visit www.courthousearts.ie.