Intersection is a work-in-progress performance by visual artist Arlene Caffrey, developed during a month-long residency at A Little Room.
It explores how a vernacular cultural form – pole dancing – can become a movement methodology for investigating embodied experience and expressing the self within a performance art context.
Merging her Fine Art practice with her award-winning pole dancing skills, Arlene is creating something exploratory as part of a larger body of ongoing research. She explores the space between past and present, personal and cultural, academic and embodied – asking can this create a space of becoming; a site for embodied expression and transformation.
Pole dancing has become an increasingly popular modality of embodied expression; this performance aims to form a starting point for further arts-based research on the use of pole dancing as a medium of self and identity expression within contemporary Irish culture.
About the artist
Arlene Caffrey is a visual artist, dance artist and educator from rural Ireland, now based in Kilkenny. Her interdisciplinary practice spanning performance art and sculpture is informed by her 19 years of experience with pole dance as a cultural phenomenon.
Rooted in the exploration of embodied experience and identity, her work reflects the shifting cultural, artistic and socio-political landscape of post-Celtic Tiger, post-colonial Ireland. Through performance and sculpture, she examines her position as a rural Irish woman in relation to these ideas, seeking to provoke thought around constructs of femininity and gender identity.
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