Sites of Significance

Sites of Significance is a research project that develops understanding of how dance facilitators and artists working within the territorial rural border area of Cavan and Fermanagh-Omagh experience the nature of, and pathways to, engagement and work in dance. The research was funded by Cavan County Council Arts Office (Cavan Arts) and Creative Ireland and focused on experiences in the Cavan and Fermanagh-Omagh local authority areas. Led by Aoife McGrath (Queen’s University Belfast) and Victoria Durrer (University College Dublin) and supported by Research Assistant, Argyro Tsampazi, the study was carried out in 2023. Through a mixed approach that brings dance practice-as-research together with social scientific methods, the project captures traces of the largely “unseen” dance activity that occurs in rural regions that might not be represented in official “counting’ or “mapping” exercises of dance activity within broader dance, arts, and cultural policy research on the island. Sites of Significance emerged from the experience of Cavan Arts Officer, Catriona O’Reilly, as a partner on Building Capacity for the Cultural Industries: Towards a Shared Island Approach for Dance & Theatre, a research project led by Durrer with McGrath and funded by the Irish Research Council through the Department of Taoiseach’s Shared Island Unit. Cavan Arts was interested in having a greater understanding of the interdependencies and shared potential of arts in the Cavan Border Space. An opportunity to connect with Fermanagh-Omagh District Council’s (FODC) Arts, Culture and Heritage Service staff was identified based on the two arts services’ previous collaborations and their engagement in workshops held for that research.