- This event has passed.
Cloud Study – Live Dance Performance by Irish Modern Dance Theatre
Cloud Study – Live Dance Performance by Irish Modern Dance Theatre
October 11 @ 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm IST
A dance work by John Scott with music by Ryan Vail for dancers Mufutau Yusuf and Salma Ataya.
Using clouds as a metaphor for travel, memory, storms and home, the performance explores movement, communication and identity through English, Arabic and Yorùbá.
Book Your Place
Artists
Mufutau Yusuf, dancer
Salma Ataya, dancer
John Scott, Artistic Director, Irish Modern Dance Theatre
Full Event Details
Cloud Study by John Scott, with music by Ryan Vail, is part dance, part dream, made for two compelling dancers. Mufutau Yusuf, an Irish dancer born in Nigeria and Salma Ataya, a Palestinian/ Irish dancer, use the idea of clouds as a traveling dreamy mass that float above everything, witnessing, dissolving, and carrying storms. The dancers are running to somewhere or to something, speaking English, Arabic and Yorùbá, communicating with their bodies, hand signs and dance, chasing dreams, memories and home.
Irish Modern Dance Theatre – Pioneering Transformative Dance
Founded in 1991 by dancer and choreographer John Scott, Irish Modern Dance Theatre is one of the most original and responsive dance companies working in Ireland today. A Dublin-based ensemble, Scott and international guest choreographers create distinctive dance works with diverse casts, mixing virtuosic Irish and international dancers with African and Middle Eastern refugees and torture survivors. Key works include Lear, Inventions, Actions and Fall and Recover – all recognised for their intelligence, honesty and humanity. The work of Irish Modern Dance Theatre crosses disciplines, subverts expectations of dance and dancers and finds new ways to explore contemporary issues. Irish Modern Dance Theatre is Strategically funded by the Arts Council.
Festival Racconti di Altre Danze, Livorno, Italy
Racconti di Altre Danze was born in the February/May 2017 season, a festival with a clearly contemporary focus, dedicated to artistic realities both resident in the Livorno area and included in the national and international contemporary dance scene. In this new space, choreographers and dancers have the opportunity to showcase their artistic and research journey to our city. Tales of Other Dances marked the beginning of a different approach to the promotion and dissemination of performance and entertainment activities that explore contemporary body languages, engaging with the present, and making the vision of contemporary dance in Livorno independent, authoritative, and contextualized.
In subsequent editions, RAD broadened its vision of signature dance by inviting, in addition to local artists by birth or adoption, artists from the national and international scene, who engaged with the city through both performances and actions and practices aimed at citizens. From this perspective, the idea of giving places an unusual presence, redeveloping them through the presence of site-specific creations, has become increasingly evident, returning spaces to the city with a renewed perception, making it possible to create new venues for culture and art. The festival has chosen to address the relationship between the different arts on the level of adjacency and proximity, producing suggestions and shared aesthetics and creative processes that abandon the idea of interdisciplinary teaching of performance, to contribute to the growth of that creative humus that encourages dialogue with the now, convinced that it is not enough to see dance; a reflection is necessary that accompanies the audience along the path traced by contemporary art.
Thus was born the Poetic Observatory, a small group of interested observers, poets, and professionals in other arts, who support the works of the festival’s guest choreographers throughout their development, seeking to create a sentimental, almost live, chronicle, to create a genuine perspective that supports the community acting for the community that enjoys it. In this place of elective affinities, a protected territory has been created where dance can be shared with the community.
The collaboration between artists, cultural associations, and companies that work through the languages of the body and dance, who, with different approaches and methods of intervention, engage transversally with the cultural fabric of the city, has established a network of relationships and exchanges with musicians and visual artists, allowing the Festival to transcend the confines of spectacle and enter the very cultural connective tissue of the city.
Artist Biographies:
Salma Ataya is a performer and choreographer. Growing up in Ramallah, she was first introduced to dance through Dabkeh (Palestinian traditional dance) and afterwards discovered contemporary dance through workshops delivered by international guest artists organised by Saryyet Ramallah Ramallah and the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival. Salma took part in local and international performances from 2012 to 2016. She has worked with Les ballets C de la B, KVS, A.M. Qattan Foundation, performing and touring in Belgium. Soon after that she came to Ireland to study at the University of Limerick and in 2017 graduated with a MA in Contemporary Dance Performance. After that Salma worked with John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Catherine Young Dance, Séverine Chavrier, Théâtre d’Orléans, Paris, Justine Doswell and Mary Nunan.
Mufutau Yusuf is a Nigeria-born Irish choreographer, performer, and teacher based in Ireland and Brussels. His acclaimed works, including Òwe and Impasse, have toured across Ireland, Europe, the US, and Nigeria. In 2025, Mufutau was elected to membership of Aosdána, a body which honours artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the Arts in Ireland. He has worked with artists and companies such as Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez, Liz Roche Company, Irish Modern Dance Theatre and Emma Martin/United Fall. Mufutau is a resident choreographer with Luail, Ireland’s National Dance Company and shares his practice through teaching and improvisation internationally.
John Scott is a Dublin born choreographer, performer, founder and Artistic Director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre, a founding board member of the Dancer from the Dance Festival and a member of Aosdána. He studied and performed at the Irish National College of Dance/Dublin City Ballet from 1982 to 1985 in works by Anton Dolin, Anna Sokolow, Pearl Gaden and Babil Gandara.
John founded Irish Modern Dance Theatre in 1991 which is one of the most original and responsive dance companies working in Ireland today. A Dublin-based ensemble, Irish Modern Dance Theatre features work by John and by international guest choreographers who create distinctive dance works with diverse casts, mixing virtuosic Irish and international dancers with African and Middle Eastern refugees and torture survivors.
John’s choreographic works include Divine Madness, Inventions, Cloud Study, Everything Now, Lear, Fall and Recover, Actions and Dances for Inside and Outside, the latter a cycle of dances, large and small, created for our times and presented in a range of venues including the Complex, Dublin, and for Culture Night and Dance Limerick with the work nationally and internationally recognised for its intelligence, honesty and humanity.
John’s work has appeared in the Dublin Dance Festival, Galway International Arts Festival, Kilkenny Arts Festival, Dublin Fringe Festival and internationally at the John F Kennedy Center, Washington DC, New York Live Arts, La MaMa, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, PS 122, New York and Dance Base, Edinburgh, Sounded Bodies Festival and Queer Zagreb, Croatia, Les Hivernales, Avignon, Tanzmesse Dusseldorf, Forum Cultural Mundial, Brazil. He danced in Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft, Meredith Monk’s Quarry (Spoleto Festival) and for Yoshiko Chuma, Sarah Rudner, Anna Sokolow and Thomas Lehmen. He has collaborated with Pan Pan on Beckett’s QUAD.
John was awarded African Refugee Network’s Culture Award for his work with Refugees and Survivors of Torture and is a subject of Sadlers Wells’ 52 Portraits by Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion and Hugo Glendinning. He has taught dance and choreography at the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick; The Body in Performance, Drama Department, UCD; Drama Department NUIG; Drexel University, Philidelphia; University of Colorado at Boulder, USA and San Jose State University, CA, USA.
John was a founding board member of Dublin Dance Festival and Dance Ireland.
Organisations Involved / Partner Organisation(s):
