CATHERINE Young Dance brings its sold-out debut production, Ciseach: An Embodied Manifesto, to Dance Limerick on Saturday 25 April at 8pm, in a performance presented in partnership with Lime Tree Theatre.
Following a sold-out world premiere at the Project Arts Centre in 2024, the work is now touring eight venues across Ireland.
The Limerick date marks one of the most anticipated stops on that tour.
The production urges audiences to remember and reconnect — with the land, with nature and with one another — drawing on native wisdom, myth and collective memory.
Artistic Director and Choreographer Catherine Young said the work grew from a desire to return to what she sees as the root of many of the world’s current crises.
“Once we ‘other’ something, we distance and separate ourselves, and this makes it easier for us to commodify, neglect and destroy,” she said. “Ciseach is a way to look at how we rekindle that relationship, learning from native cultures — including our own — and ways of being where that interconnectedness is at the heart of everything.”
Young cited the influence of the late writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan, whose work she described as helping many reconnect with Ireland’s indigenous wisdom. She also drew on the writing of Native American environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose observation that ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural restoration informs the spirit of the piece.
Ciseach is the latest in a body of challenging work from Catherine Young Dance, whose previous productions include A Call to You, Floating on a Dead Sea and State of Exception.
The company, which is presenting the tour in association with Backstage Theatre, has built a reputation for thought-provoking performances that resonate long after the curtain falls.