John Scott-Cloud Study
Artist: John Scott
Medium: Video
Cloud Study is part dance, part dream, part theatre, part athletics. Two compelling dancers – Mufutau Yusuf, an Irishman, born in Nigeria and Salma Ataya, a Palestinian contemporary dancer who has also danced Dabka – attempt to run 1,000 kilometres in circles and lines through the space, chasing dreams, memories, and home. John Scott, creator of the stunning ‘HYPERACTIVE’ and award-winning migration themed ‘Fall and Recover,’ has created a wild explosive running dance: running away, running in circles, which become turns and then falls. Each fall and run generates beautiful, frantic wild movements, lifts, wild shapes in the air. The specially created score by Northern Irish award-winning composer Ryan Vail features everyday sounds blended with voice and electronics culminating in huge orchestral textures, then dissolving into sparse piano. Cloud Study premiered at Galway International Arts Festival in July 2018, then ran at Smock Alley Theatre Dublin in November and at Dance Limerick in December.
Biography
John Scott is a Dublin born choreographer, performer, founder and Artistic Director of Irish Modern Dance Theatre, founder and Artistic Director of Dancer from the Dance Festival, and member of Aosdána. He studied and performed at Irish National College of Dance/Dublin City Ballet from 1982 to 1985 in works by Anton Dolin, Anna Sokolow, Pearl Gaden and Babil Gandara.
His choreographic works include Divine Madness, Inventions, Cloud Study, Everything Now, Lear, Fall and Recover, Actions. His work has been presented at Dublin Dance Festival, Galway International Arts Festival, Kilkenny Arts Festival, Dublin Fringe Festival and internationally at John F Kennedy Centre, 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; Queer Zagreb, Croatia; Les Hivernales, Avignon; Tanzmesse Dusseldorf; and 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, Philadelphia; University of Colorado at Boulder, USA and San Jose State University, CA, USA. He was a founding board member of Dublin Dance Festival and Dance Ireland.