How do things develop from this point in your life?
I ended up going to Romania and I worked in the orphanages there, not as a dance person to begin with, but as a care worker. It was the time of the Ceausescu regime, where children in the orphanages were being tied to their beds and the conditions were absolutely appalling. For example, if you could not be sick the first time you walked in just from the smell, that was considered an achievement. I started working in an orphanage which cared for children who were HIV positive.
They had a little playground which an NGO had built for them, and the children only got to go to the playground if they could walk and a lot of the children couldn’t walk. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it physically, they had just never been stimulated to walk, and they had never even been put on their feet, the way you would put toddlers on their feet to help them to learn to walk.
I taught the children action songs, encouraged them onto their feet and celebrated when they took their first steps and then could go outside. That was the start of a shift towards the work I would eventually end up doing. The basis of that work is that physical activity, particularly dance, can make a difference.
How do you get to Belfast?
I came to Belfast in the late 1980’s, and I worked directly with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. They had set up Footwork Dance Company and it was through this work that I met Royston Maldoom. He ran Ulster Youth Dance and at a summer school for that we started working together. We did many projects together all over the UK and Ireland.
In 1995 Royston was invited to go to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to work with street children, and he invited me to go with him. I think it was because of the work I had done in Romania, and I had been back and forth to Romania during that time, that he thought I would be able to emotionally handle the work in Ethiopia. He knew I had worked in difficult situations.
We started work and 5 years later we had delivered a dance training programme for those street and working children.
See more of the work of Mags Byrne at the link below