SlowMo: Connecting Cloughjordan Ecovillage to continental Europe via land, sea and dance

For the partners behind SlowMo – Instant Dissidence (Ireland), Ipogia Skini (Cyprus), Fondazione Romaeuropa (Italy), Helsingør Teater (Denmark), In Between Time (UK), Västsvenska Turnerande Sommar Teatern (VTST) (Sweden) – slow travel is not merely a way of traversing geography and saving on carbon emissions: they have turned it into a framework for creating their work.
SlowMo is a participatory work: the presenting partners in destination countries will identify people who, whilst residents of that country, have connections to cities/countries on the routes Instant Dissidence are slowly travelling through to reach presenting destinations. Maybe these people were born there, or they fell in love there, or they studied there. They will be co-creators of the work and the artistic work will be about their memories of those cities, as the partnership travels through them.
Yet as time is money, SlowMo has re-thought the traditional financial model for dance creation and touring because, if one were to operate on a consecutive creative/touring model, the costs of the project would double. So by collapsing the creative process into the travel journey, the cost is cut in half, making the project financially viable.
The partnership will tour with a troupe of six from Cloughjordan Ecovillage (Ireland) by land and sea to destinations in Cyprus, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and the UK. The final presentation is an outdoor promenade performance: the “mapping” of the project’s travel route directly onto a section of the city, and audiences ‘travel the project’s journey’, encountering the different dance works/cities as they journey through the work.
By creating participatory dance as a travelling gift for audiences, and by presenting via mapping it onto a neighbourhood, SlowMo doesn’t impose work on a place and people. Instead, SlowMo works with the stories, people, and geography of a place. As a work co-created with non-professional artists, the partnership is also empowering voices of underrepresented professionals offering people who might not be considered “creatives” the opportunity to be seen as such, giving visibility to their stories and experiences.
SlowMo is also trialling a digital version with their presentation in Rome to see if it could provide a future model for the touring of SlowMo without any travel.