Launch: Thursday 03 July 2025 at 7:00pm
Strule Arts Centre Omagh is delighted to announce the Opening of ‘Moving through and around’, an exhibition by Helena Hamilton, Aoife McGrath, Sorca McGrath, and Simon Mills in collaboration with eight dancers working across the rural border regions of Cavan, Fermanagh-Omagh and Monaghan: Ruth Clarke, Marion Crowe, Jamie Fagan, Jessie Keenan, Tina McGurren, Rebeca Sanchez, Aysha Treanor, and Dylan Quinn.
The exhibition invites you to experience the diverse range of dance practiced in this border region through sculpture, sound, video, photography, drawings, and movement capture. Taking inspiration from the unique geological landscapes formed by the movement of water through and around rocks above and beneath the territorial border, the exhibition celebrates connections between people and place forged through dance; honouring embodied sharing of movement and cultures.
From Sean-Nós, hip-hop, Flamenco and set dancing, to contemporary, Scottish Country, jiving and line-dancing, the exhibition shares personal, affective, interrelational, and location-specific experiences of dance connections that would not normally be recorded in mapping of dance on the island. It allows an alternative cartography and sensory landscape to emerge that offers new perspectives on how dance is practiced, shared, and valued.
Through a wide range of media, the exhibition allows your moves to join the dance through a visual, sonic and choreographic encounter with the steps, sounds, and significant sites for dance in this rural border region.
Dance Connects
This exhibition is part of the Dance Connects in Rural Border Regions project funded by Creative Ireland’s Creative Communities on a Shared Island scheme (Creative Ireland Programme, 2023-2027). Dance Connects (2024 – 2025) partners local authorities of Cavan, Monaghan, and Fermanagh-Omagh with practitioners of diverse dance communities working in their border areas, and researchers Professor Aoife McGrath (School of Arts, English and Languages, QUB) and Dr Victoria Durrer (School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD).
Employing an innovative, creative engagement approach combining dance practice-as-research and social science, the project responds to the main areas of development identified in the research partners’ Creative Ireland/Cavan Arts funded pilot project,Sites of Significance (2023). Working together, partners are building a sustainable cross-border exchange that informs policy and is meaningful to the unique dance ecology of rural, cross-border areas.
The exhibition runs until 5pm on Saturday 26 July, and can be viewed Monday – Saturday, 9.30am -5pm. Admission is Free
Strule Arts Centre, Townhall Square, Omagh BT78 1BL
