Screen Dance
Uillinn Dance Season 2026

Turnstile I Tipperary Dance

Running time: 36 minutes

Friday 6 & Saturday 7 November 2026

Free event, film screening at 1:15pm and 7:00pm

Turnstile is a performance and visual arts installation, combining dance, video and original music. Commissioned by Tipperary Museum of Hidden History, in memory of the 1920 events known as Bloody Sunday.

Two dancers are enclosed inside a glass cabinet. Video projections show oversized bodies falling into an empty space. The factual numbers of a bloody forensic report become the backbone of the music composition.

In Turnstile, Tipperary Dance reflects on our ability to find resilience after violence. This work considers the decay of memory and pays a poetic tribute to the illusory nature of narratives that spin inside the collective unconscious, invading its heart.

Music, film, recorded voices and the flesh of the body weave threads of history, to form a new present-day image. This work enters through a door of memory and spins out through a turnstile of reinterpretation, imagination and possibility.

Turnstile is an invitation to revisit violent facts and reconstruct a new state of play through the lens of dance. Unravelling the story, taking rudimentary constituents that define the traumatic events. Letting each one of them carry its own significance. Decontextualizing each component from the original narratives. Weaving them into a new scene, a new plot that does not carry the trauma in its heart.

Note: Turnstile was filmed in January 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first live performance of the piece was in 2024 at Clonmel Junction Arts Festival.

CREDITS

Artistic Direction: Jazmín Chiodi & Alexandre Iseli
Created in collaboration with the dancers: Robyn Byrne and Róisín Whelan
Dancers in the videos: Robyn Byrne, Jazmín Chiodi, Alexandre Iseli, Amberlee Toumanguelov
Music composition: Oscar Mascareñas
Video design, mapping, editing: Lucy Dawson & Shane Vaughan
Set: Martin Cahill
Light and video operator: Anthony Hanley
Photography: Alexandre Iseli

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Commissioned and funded by Tipperary Museum of Hidden History, funded by Creative Ireland, co-funded by The Arts Council under the Dance Artist in Residency Scheme.

Tipperary Dance is proudly funded by The Arts Council and Tipperary County Council. The development of the work was supported by Tigh Roy and The Source Arts Centre. Many thanks to Marie MacMahon, Amberlee Toumanguelov, Roy Galvin.

MIND[e]SCAPE (2021) and Orla & Sam (2022) I Orla McCarthy

Friday 6 & Saturday 7 November 2026

Free event, film screening at 12:00pm and 2:00pm

MIND[e]SCAPE (2021)

Running is a meditative form. It brings the subconscious lens into focus. This unconscious economy of (e)motion can focus the mind to find resolve in the agony of reflection, mediate obsessions, or find an ephemeral peace in a kind of vacancy of the immediate. Contemporary notions of mindfulness and mindlessness emphasise how we need weigh these fundamental aspects of the mind against one another. But is there value in the pursuit of compartmentalising these coalescing states, or is it an exercise in futility to view both mindfulness and mindlessness through anything other than the window of the present? What presence or transience of mind dictates to the body? Tension and release in the ligaments of our past behaviors and future selves constrict our ability to live absolutely in just one state of mind, surely?

Choreography, Direction & Performance: Orla Mc Carthy
Music: SISTIR
Cinematography: Sam van der Schot
Text: Luke Butt
Made with thanks to Dancer of the Dance Festival of Irish Choreography 2021
Screened at Uillinn Dance Film Season 2021
Shot in Heidelberg, Germany

Orla & Sam (2022)

Orla & Sam is a tribute to the everyday warmth that we feel when we fall in love. Alongside her real-life boyfriend Sam van der Schot, professional dancer/choreographer Orla Mc Carthy composes and re-enacts the tender routines and spontaneous gestures that underline the couple’s days together. Much like an old home video, the film creates a rich sense of nostalgia, exploring human intimacy in all its everyday flickers of affection, vulnerability and joy.

Director Anna Bogomolova accentuates Mc Carthy’s choreography with a playful point-of-view approach to cinematography, seeking to celebrate love as a reciprocal, responsive process.

The film affirms the idea that choosing lightness can be an act of love. As the perspective jumps from Orla to Sam, we see them respond to each other’s movement, thriving in each other’s gaze. They are shown witnessing and appreciating each other. It is this love and attention in the eyes of the beholder that allows the other to shine. Accompanied by the contemplative, slow-burning track ‘The Hustle’ by Lambchop, the film takes the viewer not only on Orla and Sam’s journey of discovery, but on their own self-discovery.

Written & Choreographed by Orla Mc Carthy
Performance: Orla Mc Carthy & Sam van der Schot
Directed by Anna Bogomolova
Cinematography: Nicky Pajic
Music: Lambchop – the Hustle
Sound Design by Kenny Kneefel
Colour Grading by Giovanni de Deugd
Gaphic Design by Bas Dobbelaer
Special thanks to Gabin Corredor, Majon van der Schot, Nick Duinmaijer & Cinesupply
Shot in Heidelberg & Ursenbach, Germany
Presented in CINEDANS film festival at the Eye Film museum in Amsterdam in 2023