Andrew Coombs 2026

Andrew Coombs
2 to 8 August 2026

Inviting three non-dancers to investigate solo performance. Using costume, textiles, props and clowning, the project explores how “dressing up” unlocks movement and identity. Challenging the virtuoso ideal, it centres everybody including the decrepit, grotesque and “imperfect” as expressive and worthy of being seen. Each solo is performed in both “dressed” and “undressed” states, revealing layers of self. This is dance as declaration: your body, your story, your presence, visible, political, and unapologetically alive. To research and devise short movement solo’s with non-dancers from within the community, using costume, textiles, and character play as tools to generate movement.

The residency aims to challenge traditional ideas of virtuosity, beauty and grace, making the solo form accessible to all bodies. It will support participants to create identity studies in “dressed” and “undressed” states. The project centres creative agency, foregrounding personal presence and individual experience.

This residency develops Andrew’s exploration of the non-traditional western performing dancer. His work resists dominant ideals of youth, grace, and technical perfection, instead valuing lived experience, vulnerability, and presence. In this residency Andres will extend this into the territory of the grotesque and the decrepit body — not as something to hide, but as expressive, complex, and politically charged. Working with non-dancers deepens this enquiry, opening space for bodies often unseen in performance to be visible, performative, and fully alive making responses that are not codified by dance.

This research contributes to a body of work including facilitating over 10 years of dance with older people, making dance performance with 8 collective, a group of non-professional old female dancers and working with LGBT collective Salt & Pepper. Andrew Coombs is a white African of Irish descent working internationally with movement and performance, creating playful, participatory artwork with non-professional people of all ages. I work with movement and textiles to open up spaces of joyful disruption—where play, “dressing up”, and dancing become acts of connection, self-love, and subversion. My practice often challenges norms around gender, vanity, and ageing. I have a background in clothing and costume making and as a community dance artist working within public settings. I have produced and directed children’s theatre and dance in London, UK. In the last 10 years I have been working extensively with older people, using accessible movement and playful interactions.

insta Andrew7coombs

Image above of Mark Holland by Andrew Coombs

WCAC acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council and Cork County Council in making these residencies possible.