Weekly Professional Class with Natasha Bourke

After taking some time to land into the space/ our bodies and open up awareness, via some exercises, Natasha will invite individual and group movement inquiries, through guided prompts. In these playful musings participants will embrace some new movement patterns that Natasha has been exploring - body isolation, sounding, balance, weight, tone, counterpoint, nuance and transition.

Natasha Bourke is a Cork-based interdisciplinary artist of Irish/Dutch descent with a fine art and extensive movement background (in contemporary, break, folk, jazz, ballet, poetic/authentic movement, butoh, body weather, tightrope, vertical/aerial dance, acrobatics, physical theatre, mime, clown, object manipulation, swimming, rowing, yoga and tai chi). Her current practice embraces performance, lens-based media, installation, archive, drawing, and sound. Bourke is an Arts Council 2020 Next Generation artist and has presented work, solo and collaboratively, in numerous events across Ireland/Europe. The artist’s life/roots often underpin the work contemplating themes of self/society including identity, isolation, institution, legacy, transience, perception, polarity, pathos and play. With a surreal, spectral and sincere aesthetic, Bourke continually refines the strands of her practice and poetic language, whilst maintaining an open process.

Since 2014, Bourke has created a body of live/filmic works with Coneface, an absurd performance alter ego, including Rubblebubble at IndieCork 2019 and her first feature, Concrete Keys, which had a sell out premiere at Cork International Film Festival 2022. She has since been invited to screen this work at the Experimental Dance Music Film Festival 2023, Irish Film Institute, Sirius Arts Centre, Midleton Arts Festival and Phantascope, Triskel, Cork.

Water-based work has become integral to Bourke’s ongoing inquiry using different spatial modalities to explore physical and psychological states of suspension. She devised T.U.G! Litter Womb in a derelict sea bath in Dublin for Kirkos Ensemble’s 2020 Biosphere and on a 40-foot currach on Lough Foyle in Derry for Echo Echo 2021. Natasha is developing an ambitious multidisciplinary swimming pool-based performance vision, Kilter, Matter and Ghosts, which, pending funding, she hopes to premiere in 2024. As part of research for this work, she trained as a Yoga NAAD practitioner. Bourke is also researching towards 2 new short films, one of which is supported by the Sirius Arts Centre.