Clara Grosjean
Choreography / Performance
Ecology and Performance Practice
Residency at Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland
January 2024
In January 2024, I was lucky to do a one month residency at Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Ireland, hosted by the choreographer and PhD Rita Marcalo / Instant Dissidence, and funded by Culture Moves Europe. This residency took different aspects, exploring the thematics of performance and ecology and understanding what is to 'work' sustainably but to also 'live' sustainably.
Together with the second artist in residence Jatun Risba, I “slow traveled” from France to Ireland with trains and ferry, as a process to create
SlowMo: Cloughjordan, a performance invented and directed by Rita Marcalo. The slow travel wasn’t only a way of traversing geography and saving on carbon emissions: it was the framework, the space-time for creating the work. We were in connection with members of the ecovillage community through letters sent by post, in which they describe memories, stories or connections with the countries we are passing by on the way. Therefore, SlowMo is also a participatory work, as the audience is the co-creator of the work, and the performance was a response to those letters, a choreographic gift, an embodied postcard.
I got to learn about how an ecovillage can function, its successes and its failures, understood what it demands to grow your own food in a community farm, and reflected on the role of the artist regarding the “cultural footprint”: What do I leave behind me when making work in a new place? I gain a lived experience in eco-living, enlarge my reflection about the relevance and coherence between creating art and the climate crisis.
I gave workshop for professional dancers at Dance Ireland in Dublin (many thanks to Louise Costeloe, director of Dance Ireland), as well as to the community members of Cloughjordan Ecovillage, and was very happy to share some meaningful movement practices that are accessible to anyone.
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Pictures above: Benedict Hutchinson
Pictures below: Clara Grosjean
