Cindy Cummings & Rhona Coughlan Residency

Cindy Cummings & Rhona Coughlan will continue work they began together in July 2023 during this two-week Ceist Residency.

There will be a Residency Showing on Friday 3 October, 6pm

Cindy and Rhona have been in the process of creating a new solo work for Rhona since July 2023. As inspiration for this process, they have been uncovering and simultaneously creating a new version for the telling of a tragicomic event in Rhona’s past. Through improvised movement, choreographic tasks, singing, and automatic writing, they have been time traveling between a remembered past and recreated present, each strategy of development being a conscious choice for channeling and crafting the act of remembering.

The journey leading up to this residency has been sponsored by Dance Ireland through a Launchpad Award (2023) and a week-long residency at Dance House (2024).

Cindy Cummings is a dance artist, choreographer, performer and tutor whose practice integrates dance, theatre and live art. Since 1986 she has created collaborative works with artists around the world for live performance, installation and film. Unifying her practice are several themes: the vulnerable and mutable place of the body within contemporary society; the centrality of play and humor as tools of creative interrogation; a passion for scientific ideas, rigor and innovation; and a curiosity with how the body in 4 dimensional space/time can be used as both medium and text of human communication.

Cindy is based in Co Kilkenny where she worked as movement director for KCat, an inclusive Arts Centre in Callan. She choreographed several productions with Kcat’s Equinox Theatre Company: The M House, The Water Boys, POWER: We All Come From Somewhere, and Out There. Other recent projects include The Local with Asylum Productions, What I (Don’t) Know About Autism (Jody O’Neill/Abbey Theatre) and facilitating inclusive workshops for Sibikwa Arts Centre (Johannesburg) and the Inclusive Dance Cork programme at Dance Cork Firkin Crane.

Rhona Coughlan has for the past several years focused her energies on personal coaching and disability advocacy, taking a break from performing to create opportunities for other artists. Since 2022 she has been the artistic director of Inclusive Dance Cork, bringing together Irish based and international artists in the first inclusive dance course in Ireland with accreditation through UCC.

In her extensive performance work (1994-2015) she co-founded the inclusive dance companies Wheels in Motion (1994), Croí Glan (2006-2010), Spoken Dance (2012) and later collaborated with Wobbily Dance, USA (2015).

Rhona is now looking to cultivate new circumstances for re-engaging with her performance practice to reawaken her creative juices as a solo dance artist.