Abstract
This essay examines Triúr Ban (Three Women) a work of American-born dance artist Cindy Cummings, created with photographer Amelia Stein and poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. The premise is that Cummings, as peregrine or resident alien in Ireland, brought a unique perspective to approaches of collaborative transdisciplinary creative processes that supported the three artists probe representations of women in Ireland. Applying Peggy Phelan’s thesis that the image is always only partial and never a ‘true’ representation of the ‘real’, I argue that Cummings’ choreography of presence in the photographic images disorientates the relationship between viewer and image. Cummings’ agency in the image invites instead a ‘dialogic mode of vision’ (Mieke Bal) between viewer and image that displaces essentialist connotations of woman and nature.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere thanks to Cindy Cummings for her time and for her support of my writing this essay, and for her work that inspires and moves.
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Cronin, F. (2018). On Peregrine Collaborations—Cindy Cummings’ Choreography of Triúr Ban: Woman, Disorientation, Displacement. In: McGrath, A., Meehan, E. (eds) Dance Matters in Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66739-3_3
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