Presented by The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, and Liz Roche Company, in partnership with Dublin Dance Festival, Lime Tree Theatre Limerick and Dance Limerick.

The theme of the symposium was an exploration of the various means of capturing creative process to engage with the layers, threads, fragments and memories that interweave throughout the process of dancemaking.

This was situated in relationship to the possibilities afforded by the archive, including the idea of the ‘anarchive’ (Manning and Massumi), which rather than seeking to document a past event, endeavours to create a ‘feed-forward mechanism’ for process traces which continue to inform future creations, and ‘Living Archives’ (Kozel) which explores means of mobilizing the archive through technology and site related work.

The symposium invited perspectives on how dance artists document process and deal with questions of transfer and legacy. Situated in Ireland, where the performative and dancing body has often been elided from mainstream narratives, this exploration has particular resonance when questioning what may be lost through prioritising the artefact over lived experience. Therefore, a key aspect of this symposium was what performers in particular could contribute to knowledge about dancemaking, while at the same time, opening up channels for participants to interact outside of the boundaries of either theorist or practitioner according to a variety of logics of practice.

​The event invited proposals for scholarly presentations, workshops, process showings and low-tech performances of various formats and was open to experimental or interactive modes that would intersect with the themes or processes in other ways.

The keynote presentation was delivered on Friday 21st June by Professor Susan Kozel from the University of Malmö, Sweden  on the topic of Affective Choreographies and was followed by a performance of I/Thou by Liz Roche Company at the Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick. 

​Symposium committee: Dr Jenny Roche, Liz Roche and Dr Róisín O’Gorman.

An introduction to MOCS 2019 took place as part of Dublin Dance Festival on Sunday, 12 May at Project Arts Centre.

Dr Jenny Roche hosted a panel discussion with Dr Linda Murray, Curator of the Dance Archive at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts; Dr Finola Cronin, Lecturer in Drama Studies at University College Dublin; and Val Bourne CBE, Founder/Artistic Director, Dance Umbrella, London and Founding Board Member of Dublin Dance Festival.