West Cork Arts Centre in partnership with Cork County Council have received an Arts Council Award to support dance artist Mairéad Vaughan, to further develop and share her dance and choreographic practice within professional, educational and community contexts.
Mairéad’s dance and choreographic practice is predicated on cultivating an awareness of the body-mind-environment as one intelligent living system. Her movement practice prepares for an inner inhabitation of our body-mind, which moves outwards through space from a more embodied perspective. Her movement enquiry reflects on how our inner sensed and felt experience extends out to directly influence our perception and our relationship with our environment. To this end, she will share her movement, choreographic and performance practice called ‘Attuning’. ‘Attuning’ is the result of her four-year Arts Practice PhD research into the symbiotic relationship between the body-mind and environment. It supports the three elements of her practice – dance, composition and performance. Her current choreographic interest is in constructing immersive performance installations that elicit a sensory, kinaesthetic and energetic response.
Biography: Mairead Vaughan is a dance artist, choreographer, researcher and dance facilitator. She graduated from Northern School of Contemporary Dance (UK) with a BA in Performing Arts (Dance), from The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance (IWAMD), UL, with an MA in Contemporary Dance Performance and more recently she completed an Arts Practice PhD in IWAMD. Mairéad is passionate about sharing ‘Attuning’ within multi-disciplinary arts fields, educational and healthcare environments.
As artistic director of Shakram Dance Company (www.shakramdance.com), Mairead received Arts Council funding to choreograph a body of fifteen original choreographic works, which toured nationally and internationally. Her earlier work was highly influenced by the energetic, rhythmic and gestural nature of Bharatanatyam (South Indian Classical dance form) and Iyengar Yoga, which she studied in India. Extended periods of travel to remote environments such as the Arctic Circle, Amazon rainforest, Mattu Picchu (Peru) and Borneo, inspired and evolved her approach to creating work.
Her work spans live theatre performance, music and dance collaboration, site-specific dance, screendance and more recently performance installation. She is passionate about creating immersive spaces that deepen sensory, kinaesthetic and energetic awareness, as a means to reclaim our body-mind-environment interconnectedness.
Funded by Arts Council Dance Residency and Cork County Council
