The Vintage (2022 – 2023)
The Vintage 2022 – 23
The Vintage is Jools Gilson, Mary Nunan and Cindy Cummings. We are fine and extraordinary women, with a decade or four of experience in professional dance and choreography in Ireland, in which we have mostly been very well behaved, and we are seriously done with that. It is our conviction that wise (and perhaps wizened) older women have a bad rap in fairy tales for good reason.
In September 2019 the three of us met in Cork to work for two days in open enquiry into The Secret Project – a dance theatre work we had premiered twenty years previously in 1999 (choreographed / directed by Jools Gilson and Richard Povall). The Secret Project was an Arts Council funded co-production between the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada and (what was then) the Institute for Choreography & Dance (ICD – now Dance Cork Firkin Crane). The work premiered in Banff and ICD and was also performed at The Project and the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam. The Secret Project was about the idea of the secret – personal, cultural, political and Irish, it pioneered motion-sensing technologies internationally and received critical acclaim (a positive mention in The New York Times).
Working closely with Cindy Cummings and Mary Nunan in Sept 2019, we found rich seams of remembering, as much as we found the present tense of our cackling and playful older selves. In 2022 and 2023 The Vintage developed choreographic research during two Ceist residencies at Dance Cork Firkin Crane, both funded by Arts Council Agility Awards. In 2023 The Vintage worked with renowned choreographer Bebe Miller as mentor.