Ultan O’Brien & Nic Gareiss

Fiddler, violist, and composer Ultan O’Brien (Slow Moving Clouds) and percussive dancer Nic Gareiss (This is How we Fly) perform a set of new collaborations exploring space, time, and texture in Irish traditional music and percussive dance.

Ultan and Nic create sound and movement at the nexus of sight, sound, and touch, puckishly exploring what fiddle music and Irish dance reveal about both predetermined and extemporaneous composition. By engaging mimetically: fiddle, fiddler, and fiddling, dance, dancer, and dancing, the duo reimagines the erotic symbiosis of traditional music and dance through historic repertoire and new encounters via the media of sound and gesture.

Ultan and Nic's residency and performance at Dance Cork Firkin Crane resumes the duo's decade-long commitment to discovering and deepening a lexicon of collaboration which, amongst other revelations, reconsiders movers as soundmakers and recasts fiddlers as dancers, not only as a means to highlight these respective practices and repertoires, but ultimately to centre rapport.

Ultan O'Brien and Nic Gareiss first met in 2012 at the Solas Arts Festival as collaborators of Gaelic singer and broadcaster Mary Ann Kennedy. Despite very different geographic backgrounds (Ultan from Ennis, Co. Clare and Nic from Michigan, USA), it became clear that they shared many ideas about the profundities and possibilities of fiddle and dance; as praxis, as pleasure, as performance, and as partnership. They collaborated as co-facilitators of the 2017 Leitrim Dance Project Residency at The Dock Arts Centre, and they spent a week in duo development of Nic's First Footing residency (2019) at the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, School of Scottish Studies, and Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh. The duo premiered a short set as part of Kaleidoscope Night chamber music series in Dublin (2019).

Watch Ultan O'Brien & Nic Gareiss in Rehearsals here

Creators and Performers:
Ultan O'Brien: fiddle, viola
Nic Gareiss: percussive dance, voice

The work of Ultan O'Brien and Nic Gareiss is supported, in part, by a Dance Cork Firkin Crane Production Residency