Fifteen years and counting!

2024 marks our 15th anniversary. Tipperary Dance Festival is now a teenager: hypersensitive, tuned into the rustle of the world, and full of dreams!

Through a particular vision of dance, Tipperary Dance expresses its perplexity towards the hegemony of disembodied thinking. This year’s programme gives pride of place to a body that quietly bears the complexities and contradictions that shape our humanity, and in a sense its coherence. With In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Moment, Alexandra Waierstall (DE) magnifies the legitimacy and power of human presence and human connection.

We embrace dance as a remedy to the dominance of ready-made ideas, disembodied shortcuts, or the fantasy that objectivity and technology solve everything. Solène Weinachter’s wonderfully humorous After All (UK), a reflection on death, draws laughter from our deepest source of fear and grief. This is contradictory only in appearance, and feels like an attempt at reconciliation.

This 2024 festival edition also inaugurates the SPLASH alliance, Tipperary Dance’s new impetus to build community with partners and artists from Ireland and abroad. First of many upcoming encounters, the 2024 SPLASH Lab led by Murielle Élizéon (FR/US) creates a dedicated space & time for artists to uncover, express, discuss and experiment with their visions and ideas, as well as their questions and doubts. Artists often feel isolated, SPLASH will nurture a sense of belonging, solidarity and meaningfulness.

Tipperary Dance Festival 2024 also hosts artists in residency from Germany and Luxembourg, proposes a Death Café, brings dance shows into schools, brings together children and seniors for a day of workshops and shows.

Our view is that where we seek clarity and security solely through rules, boundaries, policies and categorical opinions, we find division, disconnection, exclusion, and loneliness. Tipperary Dance Festival gathers to acknowledge the multiplicity of threads that link us: material, rational or not, cultural, affective, emotional… With LUMEN, Maria Nilsson Waller & Stace Gill (IE) express their urge to loosen boundaries between earth and living beings. Another attempt at reconciliation.

The breath of existence carries a truth made of flow, potentialities and diversity, through which the potency of life unfolds. What is true is also complex, elusive, vulnerable, and dance knows this.

Alexandre Iseli, Artistic director, 28/08/202