Angie Smalis trained and worked professionally as a dance artist in Greece before moving to Vienna, Austria in 2001 to join the Viennese Opera (VolksOper Wien). She relocated to Limerick in 2003 to join Daghdha Dance Company. She is an independent contemporary dance artist, Artistic Director of Limerick Youth Theatre, and Founder and Director of Patterns Dance Collective, a group of dance artists with intellectual disabilities under the auspices of AVISTA, Limerick.
Angie’s professional work focuses on developing a methodology to express contemporary and universal concerns, through a character/place-based dance vocabulary. Her interest in the narrative potential of dance is based on exploring how the limitations of “persona” can be shown and to provoke the kind of ethical imagination a story addresses. Recent research into “performed persona” and place-based narrative has explored public and private morality, and beauty as an expression of the sublime.
Jürgen Simpson is a composer, performer and academic. His work is performed internationally and spans the area of dance, electronic music, film, opera and installation art. His most recent large-scale work “Air India [redacted]”, a setting of poems by Renée Sarojini Saklikar to music and video, was premiered in Vancouver in 2015. In 2003 he received the Genesis Opera Project’s principal award for “Thwaite” with librettist Simon Doyle.
He has written extensively for film including six works with director Clare Langan (including “Metamorphosis” which received the principal award at the 2007 Oberhausen Film Festival) and seven screendance works with director Mary Wycherley, including the feature length film “In The Bell’s Shadow” (2015) composed for the Irish Chamber Orchestra.
His works for the gallery include “Within You, Without You” with architects O’Donnell & Tuomey and digital artist Nicholas Ward for the 2008 Venice Architectural Biennale. His work has been supported by RTÉ, The Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, The British Council, The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Read about Spiral in the City here.
