SOLVING YOUR PROBLEMS BY TOUCHING THE FLOOR
DAVID McGOVERN
VIDEO WORK:
1:29 mins.
2018
Solving Your Problems by Touching the Floor
It’s not easy, is it? When we can’t progress with clarity and ease, we can slip into an unpleasant state of uncertainty and doubt. It can feel disorientating and overwhelming. Whether we are making a new piece of work, invested in social change, or tackling the climate crisis, we are likely to face problems and feel stuck.
Solving Your Problems by Touching the Floor, with performer Daisy Smith and sound designer Angus Kemp, demonstrates thinking through a problem with movement. The body is intelligent. Could the psyche mimic the body’s way of problem-solving? Is there a way our thoughts can perform twists, releases and inversions? Barriers, resistance and stuckness are not signs to give up. They do not reflect the quality or importance of the work. We must not lose hope. There is a way forward. There is always a way.
DAVID
McGOVERN
David McGovern is an Irish socially-engaged artist and educator. He works with moving image, audio and text to create space for self-enquiry, reflection and speculation. His work centres on deeply personal, complex moments of human behaviour. He is passionate in exploring what is common in our experiences, even if that commonality is ambiguous and niche. Themes in his work include creative block, masculinity, memory, care, and queer
futures.
David is currently developing new work entitled ‘HARD CARE’. This socially-engaged project explores non-normative experiences of care, working towards crip, queer and feminist futures for medical and self-care. In 2021, David began working on What Does He Need?, a long-term project by artist Fiona Whelan, theatre company Brokentalkers and Rialto Youth Project, exploring how men and boys are shaped by and influence the world they live in. David is a member of A4 Sounds artist studio in Dublin, and a recent graduate from Limerick of School of Art and Design.
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david.mcgovern1@gmail.com
SOLVING YOUR PROBLEMS
DAVID McGOVERN + DAISY SMITH
Solving Your Problems
Solving your Problems is a live performance with bodies that both complicate and simplify things. Three dancers of different disciplines, in a surround of soil and dirt, will demonstrate bodies using movement as a problem-solving technique. Barriers, resistance and stuckness are not signs to give up. They do not reflect the quality or importance of the work. We must not lose hope. There is a way forward. There is always a way.
Solving Your Problems is a new piece of work by Daisy Smith and David McGovern, with sound design by Angus Kemp. The work features invited performers Yves Lorrhan & and is supported by A4 Sounds.
Two peformances of this work will take place on Saturday 13th Aug. Each performance is 10 mins long and will be followed by a conversation between the audience and artists. This event is seated and takes place in our gallery.
DAISY
SMITH
Daisy Smith is a Choreographer and Movement Director from London, with a first class degree in Dance Theatre, comprising of formal training in classical ballet and contemporary dance.
Daisy weaves contemporary dance techniques through film, theatre and art. Her work draws on the power of the human body in its inexhaustible capacity for story telling – its ability to express the conflicts that lie within us, deeper than the words we have to describe them. Daisy typically works with actors, musicians and models – coaxing out their unique movement expression and folding in her own, to build on a movement language that both draws their individualism to the surface and leverages the artistry which comes to light.