Orla Barry is one of the artists presented in If I Can't Dance's Programme of performances. Barry's performance Mountain has been commissioned by Corpus – a collaborative network for commissioning performance-related work.

Mountain takes as its starting point the premise that every sentence that we utter is an improvisation. Barry has worked with 57 words, an actor, a dancer and a musician to devise a work in which chance, fate, and a little witchcraft play equal roles in a performance that is never the same on any night.

For Mountain Orla Barry, now shepherdess as well as artist, uses her new knowledge of primal materials and customs. She connects this to her longstanding interest in language, playing with different forms of text production such as speech, monologue, interview, poem or song to create a series of intentionally unplanned crossovers between text, meaning and performance.

Mountain

90 minutes, English spoken
Concept & text: Orla Barry
Performance & music: Derrick Devine, Marcus Lamb, and Einat Tuchman

Mountain has been commissioned by Corpus. Mountain is produced by Playgroundfestival (STUK & Museum M), Leuven and presented by If I Can’t Dance i.c.w. The Veemtheater, Amsterdam, South London Gallery and Bozar Brussels. Mountain is financially supported by the Irish Arts Council and the European Union.

Biography
Orla Barry’s work focuses on language, both written and spoken, as well as on visual deconstruction and displacement of language; via frequently associative techniques, she researches the semantics of her mother tongue and its cultural imbedding and implications. Orla Barry lived in Belgium for sixteen years and has now returned to live and work in Wexford, Ireland. She has recently had performances at Tate Modern, London; Playground Festival, STUK, Leuven; and De Appel arts centre in Amsterdam. She has also had large solo shows of her work at the CCB, Museu Bernardo, Lisbon (2011, with Rui Chafes); Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2006); SMAK, Ghent (2005); Camden Arts Centre, London (2005); and W139, Amsterdam (2005). She has taken part in Manifesta 2 and in group shows such as Sense and Sensibility in Sao Paulo and Some Parts of this World in Helsinki. She has been awarded the prize of the Palais de Beaux Arts in the ‘Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge’ in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Prize in 1999.