 Taken during the In-Between Residency at Live Art Ireland. July 2026 I am grateful and so very pleased to have my residency at Live art Ireland kindly supported by the Sligo County Council Arts Department via the LIVE/WORK/PLAY Artist Bursary Scheme ✨
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 Pomegranates I left as an offering at the Plutonion at Eleusis, Greece I'm very pleased that I’ll be taking up a research residency with Live Art Ireland in Co. Tipperary this July.
A few years ago I traveled to Eleusis, and that journey re-calibrated me. It opened a creative season I’m still inside. That pilgrimage was the first cycle of a focused artistic research inquiry into her Mysteries, and this residency is a call to the next. Persephone: the Greek Kore, the Girl, abducted into the underworld by Pluto and transformed through that undoing into Queen, returning each year to bring the world back into bloom. Eleusis was the sanctuary where her story was enacted as a secret rite, the Mysteria, for nearly two thousand years. Initiates processed through an ancient cemetery, then went down into darkness and came back changed. What they saw there, they were sworn never to tell: dromena, deiknumena, legomena: things done, things shown, things spoken The residency sits on land being allowed to return to itself, rewilding ground, and that is part of what draws me to it. If you’ll let me bring you closer to the living shape of it, here is how the work names itself in my proposal: Persephone Mysteria 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, erotic power exchange, poetry, bellydance, not separate media but dialects of one language. The Persephone myth is relational at its core, a descent that restructures bonds: mother and daughter, chthonic god and maiden, Plutonion and congregant, where what was taken becomes sovereign and the wound is not unmade but inhabited. When the self is overpowered, what is repaired rather than wounded, and what does recovered speech sound like in word and body? I don’t yet know exactly what the days will hold. But the rhythm I’m bringing is as Persephone’s own undoing and becoming: dancing on the land as a form of listening, writing poetry from that inner listening, in response to the place and the states it opens in me. What I hope to come away with is a deepened fluency, a body of images, poems, and movement that speaks this language back. 🖤 I'm offering a four-week journey through the elements, where belly dance becomes a gateway to embodied magick and reconnection.
Registration Each class focuses on one element, earth, water, fire, and air, weaving together belly dance technique, expressive movement, and alchemical exploration. Whether you're returning to movement after time away or deepening your practice, this series invites you to dance with intention, discover what each element awakens within you, and work with tarot, meditation, and energy-raising practices. You'll learn accessible combinations, move with purpose, and explore the transformative power of conscious dance. No experience necessary, just show up ready to move, explore, and awaken. Recordings available for all classes. 4 Tuesdays: July 21, July 28, August 4, August 11 2026 90 mins, 7 PM - 8: 30 PM Irish time Zoom This class welcomes all bodies and all abilities. Movements can be modified. https://www.aeprilsastrology.com/store/p70/TheFourPathsBellydance.html   I'm so pleased that my poem, "at the end of the dark river I released my mother" will be published in Issue 2 of Oscail magazine:
from my spinal fluid I pull her out of my neck my back a pearl string of mother-lines millions of silken eggs I am wobbly soft boned black water running past gurgling like a girl newly hatched and hungry dropping leaden tailored shoulders I am proud to be included in this "literary magazine dedicated to celebrating and highlighting neurodiverse and queer voices in contemporary Irish writing". Read the full poem in Issue 2: https://www.oscailmagazine.com/ A very short bit from my performance of spoken poetry, dance and ritual for Wandering Voices at the Cairde Festival. At The Model, Sligo, Ireland. After my performance of my work: down, black, down, black, down at A Tide of Ghosts conference at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
It was a wonderful privilege to perform my poetry/dance/performance art in the gorgeous main hall. Thank you to Kasper Opstrup @kasperopstrup and Tim Rudbog for having me. And so good to spend time and bond with friends known and newly met. It was a fantastic, enriching event. This photo was very kindly taken by Emil Asprem using my phone PS. I'm holding a pomegranate ♇  I'll be performing poetry at the Constallations event created by Rebecca Massey, October 31, 2024 at the Yeats Society, Sligo.
I am thrilled to be scheduled to perform at A Tide of Ghosts: Esotericism and Art beyond Fact and Fiction this October 24th, 2024!
"A two-day multidisciplinary conference exploring how the use of fictionings, in various entanglements of art, politics, and esotericism, bleeds into the real and how the two relate, if they ever are truly separate. The conference marks the first conference of the Scandinavian Network for the Academic Study of Western esotericism (SNASWE). It is co-organized by the Novo Nordic funded research project Twisting the Fabric of Space: On the Art and Politics of the Hidden which has Kasper Opstrup as its PI and The Copenhagen Centre for the Study of Theosophy and Esotericism headed by Tim Rudbog." I'll be performing a 20 minute piece down, black, down, black, down: "An interdisciplinary performance of poetry and dance. I give testimony to my encounters with Underworld Kings: Fionnbharr, King of Connacht at Cnoc Meadha and Pluto, at the Plutonion at Eleusis. I will give a devotional performance that invites you, the audience, to experience what I experience at these sites."  At the Oscar Wilde House for the Poet's Salon. Lovely night performing and listening to poetry seance style! Thank you Caoimhe LaVelle.
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