Gibbons & Divilly

Bernadette Divilly

I am involved with dance improvisation, the politics of bodies, architect, heritage and ways of being in rural and urban landscapes. My practice as a socially engaged choreographer includes contemplative dance practices. Alongside this I work with Dance Movement Psychotherapy. Both career paths have emerged out of the raw materials of body, memory, composition, culture, and creativity. My focus is on how relationships are made in connection with place. My research during 2018 investigates the language of home. This involves engaging with an international dance community and returns me to my first dance place the landscape of Leitrim.

Maria Gibbons has collaborated with me several dance and arts participation projects as videographer. We are now working with finding a new direction and common language across our different influences and disciplines based on mutual engagement with landscape, heritage movement and witnessing.

Maria Gibbons

I have had a very varied career – as research zoologist and fish farm manager, as a community media animator, as a freelance social researcher, as an advisor on walking trails, as a shepherd and as a creative collaborator. The common thread driving all these activities is a desire to investigate, to research and to communicate, to work intimately with animals and the outdoors, to address invisibility in the media context and to create media artefacts that voice some of these interests and concerns. Over recent years I have worked closely with the dancer/choreographer Bernadette Divilly on a number of screendance projects and this has stimulated me to consider video/film/still photography in a more artistic context. I have recently completed a series of video programmes on community gardens and am currently in the process of developing a script for a short series on the farmer-farm animal bond. The present proposal is the hoped-for start of a parallel project, whereby a more personal and experimental approach will be explored in a collaborative manner with Bernadette Divilly.