Siriol Joyner Residency

Siriol Joyner is an artist working within the field of dance and choreography. She is obsessed with language and its relationship to dance and dancing and the material and political implications of this connection. She is creating movement, text and object works that focus upon the notions of mutation, translation and code-switching. Her interests are informed by her Welsh identity and the minority status of her mother tongue, Cymraeg (Welsh). An interest in site and site specificity is always present in Siriol’s work. In 2021 her solo piece “Listening to-“ was presented by Cullberg, the national and international repertoire contemporary dance company in Sweden and she is currently making a new group work that begins from asking ‘what is a site specific dance?’; ‘what is the dance of this place?’  She holds an MFA in Choreography from Stockholm University of the Arts and a post-graduate qualification from the Royal Academy of Art Stockholm. As well as making her own work, Siriol performs with/for artists such as Mette Edvardsen, Hana Erdman, Ruarí Donovan, Dora Garcia and Alice Mackenzie.

About Siriol’s work at Köttinspektionen

At the moment I have two strands of work that I’m developing, they organise to two distinct paths in my thinking but are very intertwined. One path is that I’m expanding on my interest in site specific dances and asking what a site specific dance can be? Do places have dances? Can we dance the dance of a place? Who can dance this dance? How do we host the dance of the place? How to we call to the dance of the place? How do we turn towards a place? Most recently I have been revisiting a work called “Listening to- a work in which the dancer chooses a place, and over time returns to the place daily to practice scores that focus on listening and dancing to the soundscape of the place. Over time, the dancer makes a collection of ‘objects’ that they hear/experience while dancing in that place and they perform the collection for an audience. The work is interested in questions of place and site, soundscape and movement.. There is a keen interest in exchange and reciprocity between place and person, this reciprocity is palpable in the dancing: a skill that the dancer practices over time. I am very interested in collection (not archive) as a choreographic procedure and as a way of thinking about the intersection of dance/place/art/history. Also dance as a material that can be handled, shown, put in relation to another material, collected. 

The other strand is that of dance and memory (or history). I draw on Toni Morrison’s approach to memory in her writing: “Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation……The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.” Morrison’s term “Rememory” is also central to this project; “rememory as is recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.” Memory as a deliberate act, willed creation, re-collection, re- assembling. This notion of memory as a deliberate act, willed creation, and of appearance is very much alive in my dance making. I am interested in collecting, making memories (recollection) and this is what I work on in the ‘Listening to-‘ score and its’ development. My interest is on the moment of the “appearance” of a dance – the way it appears and why it appears in that particular way. Not of dance as the artwork that disappears but one that appears.

These thoughts have brought me back (again!) to Morfa Rhuddlan, a historical dance score that I have been researching for many years and dancing for around three. Morfa Rhuddlan is a historical Welsh folk dance and lament that commemorates the death of Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, the last Prince of Wales in 1282. As well as being a historical dance score, the dance itself memorialises and engages with the national history of Wales. When I first came across Morfa Rhuddlan it was described as a ‘lost dance’, however, I discovered that there is indeed a record of the dance, an account by an elderly woman Catherine Margretta Thomas who, as a child in the 1890’s, saw this dance performed. Catherine is described as having a photographic memory and recounts being able to still ‘watch’ Morfa Rhuddlan in her mind. The dance is recorded in handwritten descriptions and a drawn score by Catherine’s daughter Ceinwen in the 1960’s. The score requires that the dancer engages with knowledge, embodiment, representation and action: essential to the dance is that the dancer must both ‘Embody the Nation’ and also ‘know and feel Welsh history’. It is a demanding dance, that engages the dancer on many levels. Since 2018 I have been performing Morfa Rhuddlan as a dance performance, a choreographed walk and as an open studio where I welcome questions and requests from the audience. Morfa Rhuddlan is said to have been a dance that the audience would request when they needed to cry, grieve or be somber.