romham’s piece romham pàdraig gallacher When Rianne Švelnis and i began this residency, i wanted to explore my current embodiment which has recently come to include costochondritis - or what i call “fire-ribs”. i feel dance viscerally, and have struggled with this additional thoracic pain and immobility; so, i wanted to see the ribcage exposed, manipulated, transformed by and into other body parts (eg, Rianne brilliantly proposed ribs as gills), and see what remained, what could only be realized through fire-ribs’ existence. We experimented with that for a while, and with the ribcage now outside the body, we were able to dig down, and suddenly i was watching my past, present and future body dancing right in front of me, despite our very different embodiments. Rianne is an incredible, curious, intuitive dancer, and joy was everpresent in this challenging work. That opened space to explore joy and possibility in what i'd been experiencing as intensely limiting. i thought we were creating a piece loosely about fire-ribs, but that shifted and - like the chest-cracking-open movements we began with - things necessarily peeled away, and a new exploration opened up. i experience my wheelchair and crutches as integral parts of my body (flesh, chair, crutches, all forming one body), which sometimes feels like I'm in more than one place at a time when 10
D a n c e C e n t r a l Fa l l 2 0 2 1
romham gallacher © K.Ho
any of these elements are apart. Each has a body memory that influences the whole: how i use crutches informs how i use chair, informs how i use flesh. Threeness. Triality. In the studio, a poly-rhythmic, multidimensional, multi-limbed, and multilocational organism emerged, and these are the central questions we asked: What’s the language this creature is speaking? Can we break that language down to its constituent parts? And ultimately, how do we dance this? We recognized that the fantastical is a kind of knowledge, that a lack of language is part of language, and that of course language is evolving, with gaps, uncertainties and glitches. So, we put all of that into the dance: Each
