The Monthly interviews dance practitioner Dylan Quinn – Part 4 – Finding ways to make interesting, contemporary artworks

You work in community settings but you also create your own projects. What are the key ideas you look at in your own work?

I remember having dinner with a friend and Lloyd Newson was also there, and then I met him, at one of his shows, a couple of years later. I was walking through the theatre, and he was going down the stairs and I was going up, and he said, “I heard you had retired and had gone back to Ireland to work on a farm,” and I thought about that. That was what I thought reflected the general perception. If you moved out of the metropolitan areas then you weren’t considered to be taking the arts seriously. I don’t believe he thought He may not have thought that but that was my perception of what he had said that thinking

And that just isn’t accurate. I actually want to make contemporary, quality work and we have just produced a really contemporary programme, “Anything to Declare” in Swanlinbar. We introduced serious, comprehensive, contemporary art for an audience in rural Cavan and Fermanagh looking at the question of the border.

Creating your own work is a crucial part of your practice?

You could say that that has been the driving force behind me staying in Fermanagh, because it has allowed me to do that. And I have done it against the odds.

Too often the arts here is forced into doing community work, because that is the way everything is set up with regards funding. And I love that, but it can’t be your only vocabulary. We as artists still have to be able to produce our own artwork.

I find the political, social, cultural and economic issues which arise here interest me and I need to be able to look at those issues through my arts practice.
I have created material using different processes. I made a piece of work a few years ago called “Funk” which was simply pure movement. I really enjoy the play of movement, the physicality of movement. It wasn’t really my forte and there are a lot of people who do that kind of work better than I do, but I would like to invest more time in that kind of work, but I really don’t have the space to do it.

I tend then to work on a more cognitive level using themes and ideas.

And “Anything to Declare” would be an example of that approach?

It was made of five pieces of artwork, it was about the border, and I had 2 pieces which were part of the five. The show before that was, “My Grandfather’s House”, a physical theatre piece created for four audience members in a purpose built living room.

“Fulcrum” was a piece about a sense of belonging and loss but it was very much an abstract piece of work. There was no narrative to that. Some of my work has a clear narrative and some doesn’t.

“Questions of a Man”, which we did recently at The MAC, was about misogyny.

I am interested in making art which says something about the world in which we live. I work with various different forms, but I am always trying to produce contemporary artwork of quality.

Where to now?

I am not one hundred per cent sure because I’m wrestling with a lot of things at the moment. I just turned 50 this year. There is something to work out regarding what that might mean.

I have been involved in the “We deserve better” movement which I established to get people talking about the lack of political leadership in this place. That raises the question of going into politics although I’m much more interested in the arts, both as a form of community engagement and as a way to comment on society.

There is also the approach of making art which shapes our society through its cultural confidence, which I think too often we fail to do here. We have to build our cultural confidence.

I do feel the need to serve the community when people ask me to take classes and be part of community projects, but I am getting older, my body is changing and recently I have said no to a couple of small community projects.

I want to concentrate on making and presenting work I want to do. I want to think about how I, as a getting older man, can make contemporary work, possibly as a solo performer, possibly in collaboration with other people, which is about looking at the exciting and interesting things which emerge from this place. I think that the people living in the rural west are entitled to access that kind of work.

Finally, I would say that I am being dragged towards the South because the support for interesting contemporary work there is much greater than the support we get locally.