Performance
As Persephone / The High Priestess in the Main Hall at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
My performance practice
moves through bellydance, spoken word, and live ceremony. The body descends, transforms, returns. Grief as engine. The sacred and the transgressive as inseparable forces.
This work has taken many forms: solo ritual performance rooted in the Persephone mythology and the Eleusinian Mysteries, work with the Morrígan, installations such as the Lucid Dream Chamber, performances drawing on other archetypal goddesses and fairy tales.
The descent is interior. What is staged is the inner world entering visibility, not as place but as the psyche's own dark ground, and the performance the act of receiving its surfacing. The body becomes the instrument of listening: feeling as a mode of knowing, distinct from thinking, a way of apprehending the world that the practice trusts and follows down.
My work is a research enquiry into the language of the underworld: the tongue we find when the daylit, controlled self makes contact with the transgressive and ineffable. I listen for it across the registers where it surfaces: myth, the surrendered body, fantasy and dream, power exchange, poetry, bellydance, not separate media but dialects of one language. When the self is overpowered, what is repaired rather than wounded, and what does recovered speech look like in word and body?
Bellydance is central, a diasporic form displaced and contested across cultures and centuries. I practice from a foundation in classical and fusion forms of Oriental dance, trained with Alia Thabit, Josie Conte, Dunya, Elena Lentini.
The spoken word reaches for the descent, visceral and fragmented, collapsing invocation into intimacy.
My research has taken me to the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece and into dialogue with Ireland's sacred landscapes, places where myth and ground are not yet separated. I have studied Butoh, the Japanese postwar dance of darkness, with Vangeline, and Yumiko Yoshioka.
The audience is called in to become witness: to desire, to rite, to what is usually kept hidden.
This work has taken many forms: solo ritual performance rooted in the Persephone mythology and the Eleusinian Mysteries, work with the Morrígan, installations such as the Lucid Dream Chamber, performances drawing on other archetypal goddesses and fairy tales.
The descent is interior. What is staged is the inner world entering visibility, not as place but as the psyche's own dark ground, and the performance the act of receiving its surfacing. The body becomes the instrument of listening: feeling as a mode of knowing, distinct from thinking, a way of apprehending the world that the practice trusts and follows down.
My work is a research enquiry into the language of the underworld: the tongue we find when the daylit, controlled self makes contact with the transgressive and ineffable. I listen for it across the registers where it surfaces: myth, the surrendered body, fantasy and dream, power exchange, poetry, bellydance, not separate media but dialects of one language. When the self is overpowered, what is repaired rather than wounded, and what does recovered speech look like in word and body?
Bellydance is central, a diasporic form displaced and contested across cultures and centuries. I practice from a foundation in classical and fusion forms of Oriental dance, trained with Alia Thabit, Josie Conte, Dunya, Elena Lentini.
The spoken word reaches for the descent, visceral and fragmented, collapsing invocation into intimacy.
My research has taken me to the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece and into dialogue with Ireland's sacred landscapes, places where myth and ground are not yet separated. I have studied Butoh, the Japanese postwar dance of darkness, with Vangeline, and Yumiko Yoshioka.
The audience is called in to become witness: to desire, to rite, to what is usually kept hidden.
At the Cairde Festival as part of Wandering Voices, at the Model, Sligo, Ireland.
"I Guard Your Death" at the Irish Georgian Society, as The Morrigan as interpreted from the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
As part of Soul Noir curated by Sinéad Keogh.
As part of Soul Noir curated by Sinéad Keogh.
Lucid Dream Chamber
"Lucid Dream Room" live interactive installation. Trans -States, University of Manchester (featuring Alan Moore). curated by Dr. Cavan McLaughlin. |
"Lucid Dream Room" live installation at the Star and Snake, New Hampshire, US.
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Intimate
Poetry-dance piece "Intimate"at the Irish Network for the Study of Esotericism Conference in association with the UCC study of Religions Department, curated by Dr. Jenny Butler,
and at the Chocolate Factory, Dublin as part of Soul Noir.
and at the Chocolate Factory, Dublin as part of Soul Noir.
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Aepril's performance work is mentioned in The Theatre of the Occult Revival: Alternative Spiritual Performance from 1875 to the Present (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History) by E. Lingan
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