Chloé Pisco 2026
Dances with Whales

Dances with Whales  – a year long Associate Residency with Chloé Pisco at Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre

Dances with Whales is an evolving performance project inspired by extraordinary real life encounters between humans and marine life. Central to the work is a real life experience of the artists, meeting whales eye to eye, underwater, and discovering a form of movement‑based communication where dance becomes a shared language. These encounters took place alongside wildlife such as blue and basking sharks, octopus, vast bait balls of fish, dolphins, seals, and Ireland’s coastal habitats with deep Atlantic blue to forests of kelp and cold‑water coral.

Chloé describes her motivation as ‘to shed the silly and dangerous ideas of human supremacy over animals, and nature. As it is literally killing us.

We can learn from whales and our ancient Irish connection to them. Learning from them about how to live in Harmonious mutualism. As we are deeply interdependent on each other for our very survival.”

During her residency at Uillinn, choreographer and performer Chloé Pisco will develop the live performance language of Dances with Whales. The work will blend projected underwater footage (by the artist) with bungee‑harness choreography, contact improvisation, and explorations of interspecies movement. Future stages of the project which will unfold throughout the two-year Associate Residency at Uillinn, envision large‑scale aerial dance, community‑built puppetry, and outdoor spectacle performances that celebrate ocean life and our deep interdependence with it.

Dances with Whales is underpinned by a community‑centred process that invites audiences to consider the ocean’s perspective and challenges ideas of human supremacy over nature. Chloe is currently collaborating with local artists including Helen Morgan, Danae Wollen, Lucia Smyth, and Tara Brandel, continuing a long history of creative work rooted in West Cork and informed by her twenty five year international dance and circus career.

With the public and peers Chloé will be researching group improvisation, innovative bungee‑harness techniques, and bioluminescent visual effects inspired by the glowing plankton of the Irish coast. Chloé will also deliver a workshop with Uillinn Young Dancers.

While in residence, Chloé will be researching off site engaging with West Cork’s marine landscapes, creating movement responses to significant coastal sites, and exploring local connections to whales and wider marine ecologies. Underwater dance sequences filmed during the residency will contribute to the projected environments central to a performance work being developed for Uillinn Dance Season – autumn 2026.

‘All of it mixing together in an explosive celebration of ocean life.’ Chloe Pisco

The Oxytocin Project continues to be supported by Uillinn in 2026 following Chloé’s first residency Dances with Whales, between Water and Air that took place from 3 June to 5 July in 2025. Last year Chloé collaborated with local artist Tomasz Madajczak who mentored her in videography, alongside dancer artists Safire Hiraki and Ash Ashton, with additional contributions from emerging young artists Hetty Gazzaniga, Nori Madajczak, and Lucia Smith.

Research took place across varied environments – studio, sea, air, and land – exploring how gravity, time, and space shift our physical experience. These embodied inquiries were visually documented and looped into immersive installations using projections of underwater footage, dancers in flight, and real-time video mapped onto performers’ bodies and projected onto the external surface of Uillinn as part of the autumn Dance Season 2025.

Chloé Pisco Biography

Chloé Pisco is a Basque, Sicilian woman raised in West Cork from a young age. For the last 24 years, Chloé has been creating, performing, teaching and most of all directing: dance, circus, spectacle and immersive theatre hybrid works – as a full time career, around the globe. 

Chloé Pisco is an internationally renowned director, performer, researcher and educator with over 25 years’ experience across dance, circus and theatre. Training from 3 years old in Brussels, then studying at Alvin Ailey School at Fordham University NYC, and later completing her Masters in Fine Arts Research in Circus, in Stockholm. In 2024 studying Creativity and Change making, (at MTU Cork); featuring transformational learning through art, impact campaigns, activism and ARTivism and in 2025 studying Entertainment Law at NUIG, Galway. She has taught in universities, including in Sweden, Australia and France.

Pisco has worked in 26 countries, working with leading companies in the USA, Asia and across much of Europe and Australia. She was the founder of multiple professional live work production companies. Some inclusive and community-focused, including Rebus, No Frontiers Dance Co. and the Flying Dance Company. She has worked in spectacle and Street in Ireland extensively. Directing performers for outdoor spectacles for decades with such pioneers as Macnas, Spraoi, Luxe street theatre, Fidget Feet Aerial Dance, Craic na Coilte, Arcana, Cork Community art link, (including on the Dragon of Shandon.)

Her practice centres on translating science and impactful social and environmental change making knowledge – through the use of powerful story telling for diverse audiences. Even so far as to optimise the efficacy of these stories, by researching, understanding and proving that oxytocin, (our empathy hormone), is correlated to and in fact increased by engagement in live arts with her most recent academic research thesis.

Since 2013, her research-led Oxytocin Projects explore empathy and mammal behaviour through research, including the creation of a corporeal communication database for whales, as well as through performance making, producing, teaching and academic work, alongside ongoing collaborations, lecturing and leadership in global circus networks and research groups. She also dances with whales regularly and they dance right back.

Uillinn is where she first flew in her bespoke bungee harness again after her spine injury.  She is enamoured with the rural context of West Cork, the natural spaces nearby and the breathtakingly inspiring Studio that she has made countless creative research babies in, many with Tomasz Madajczak. 

And this time is no exception, whether it is to work on more sunset dances, window bird flocking collective pieces with the local birds and or responding to the spaces in the building. 

She can’t wait to get back into the creation flow that feels so safe and open at Uillinn.