Discover Dance, Digging Deeper: Eilish Shin-Culhane
Discover Dance Host, Dainty Smith, has written about her experience of the July 2023 edition of Discover Dance, with artist Eilish Shin-Culhane.
Dainty’s experience
The Childlike Wonder of Eilish Shin-Culhane
“Watching the performance of dancer and choreographer Eilish Shin-Culhane is an invitation to welcome joy as an integral part of dance and as a necessary part of life.
Eilish Shin-Culhane is a Tkaronto based queer artist of Koren and European ethnicity.
The intersections of otherness and difference that live in her body shine through in her commitment to the pursuit of reclaiming childhood joy in our adulthood.
Her work includes elements of theatre, improvisation, playfulness, and humour. She creates an environment where both the audience and the performers can engage in dance, movement, and embracing silliness without embarrassment and self-consciousness.
In her new work ‘’Peel Me’’, the performers use grapefruit and fortune cookies to drive the story forward. The dancers are earnest, open and move with delicate abandon and vulnerability. Playing and balancing with the grapefruit. There are fortune cookies deliberately placed on the floor, in front of and in opposition to the dancers as they dance. What happens if the fortune cookie is crushed? Or stepped on? Or cracked open, on purpose? As a mixed-race artist of Koren and European descent, you can see the dueling identities of Eilish’s lived experience and lived questions come into being this performance.”
“In her work, she dares you to reclaim joy as something vital and deeply healing.”
“Eilish is asking you the viewer to suspend your disbelief and move through the dimensions of space and time, childhood and adulthood, and the contractions of race and the multiple intersections that we carry in our bodies and our personhood.
And she wants you to join her on the journey and find relief, hope and letting mistakes happen if they happen, not seeking perfection but instead seeking fulfillment and releasing shame and self-judgment.
In her work, she dares you to reclaim joy as something vital and deeply healing.
Who can say no to an invitation like that?”