The Monthly talks to Alistair Livingstone and Talitha Maslin about the dance project – “Lucia Dances” – Part 2 – From Australia to Europe to Rostrevor

Could you tell us about your experience working on this project, Talitha?

Talitha

Alistair and I had spoken about this project before he started working with a local dancer, Maeve McGreevy, so for me the project was just there in the background.

Then the time came around when we were able to work together because I was coming to Europe, and Alistair needed a dancer because Maeve could no longer commit to the project. I was very happy to work on the project because I wanted to work on something while I was in Europe.

I wanted to do something creative because I just hadn’t had a chance to work on creative projects for a little while, or really, I had limited opportunities to work creatively in Perth, Australia. So if there was an opportunity, I wanted to take part in it.

What happens then?

Talitha

Initially, before we looked at the script, we talked about creating a character. We were thinking about an approach where, rather than the project being about Lucia Joyce’s life story, it was going to be less about her and more about how her life could be the influence for a character in a story about an artist with mental health difficulties.

I think because we worked on a character initially, it gave me a little more scope to think about how we could use Lucia Joyce’s story as a vessel to tell a universal story about a character with a talent in something, but because of a mental health issues, the character has difficulties realising their full potential. I think there may have been a point where I thought the character could realise their potential in a number of ways, not just through whatever their specific talent was.

But, once I received the script, and we could talk about the scenes and what each scene meant, and how the scenes related to Lucia’s life story, it suggested to me that the story pretty much had to be an interpretation of Lucia Joyce’s life. I did think it was a pretty special project to work on once we were clear about the direction we were taking.

Lucia Joyce –

Alistair

There is another factor in that the Light Theatre Company had been invited to put in a submission for a live performance at the Full Dome Festival (FDUK 2026) in Cardiff in October. It became pretty clear to me that we didn’t have time to start afresh because we already had a lot of material, the sound track, the visuals, and the script, so quite a bit of development had already taken place.

Rather than go full tilt to create something separate to what we already had, and not refer to James Joyce or Lucia, we had to work with what had already been developed. I thought that to do anything else might be a little foolhardy given the time we had available to us. From there, we started to work with the existing script and four particular scenes.

It is important to say that Talitha has never seen the work that Maeve did. I thought it was important that she created her own work for the project and wasn’t just interpreting Maeve’s work.

Talitha’s interpretation had to be uniquely her own, and that is what she created.