Biography
Dr Jenny Roche is a dance artist who has worked as a contemporary dancer since the early 1990s performing with a wide range of choreographers in Ireland and internationally, including Michael Keegan-Dolan (Ire), Janet Smith (UK), Rosemary Butcher (UK), Jodi Melnick (NYC), John Jasperse (NYC), Yoshiko Chuma (NYC) and in work by Dominique Bagouet, re-staged by Les Carnets Bagouet (France). She has danced for Daghdha Dance Company, Dance Theatre of Ireland, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, Cois Ceim and was a founder member of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre. She co-founded Rex Levitates Dance Company (now Liz Roche Company) with her sister, choreographer Liz Roche in 1999 and has performed extensively with the company, most notably in the Meet in Beijing Festival, China, in 2006 and the Baryshnikov Arts Centre, NYC, in 2011.In 2001, she completed her Masters degree in Dance Performance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, at the University of Limerick and in 2010 she received her doctoral award from Roehampton University, London. Her thesis title was Moving Identities: Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer and her area of research continues to be the dancer's creative practice within choreographic processes.From 2007 to 2011, she was Dance Adviser to the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaion. She served as a committee member of the Step up: Dance Project, Ireland, a professional development programme for recently graduated contemporary dancers and was project manager of the inaugural year of the programme. She is currently completing her final year of Amatsu soft tissue therapy bodywork. Jenny continues to work as a performer and choreographer. In recent years, she performed in Time Over Distance Over Time, a collaborative work with Liz Roche Company that took place between Ireland and Australia, with performances in Dublin Dance Festival, Dance Bytes in Sydney and The Brisbane Powerhouse in 2016 and Alternately Terrific Gentle, a collaboration with Liz Roche and Jodi Melnick, performed in Lightmoves Festival of Screendance, Limerick (2023). She has recently collaborated with choreographer Carol Brown and digital artists Gibson/Martelli on a dance film/installation presented in the Pah Gallery, New Zealand in 2017 and Ars Electronica in 2020. She collaborated with Gibson/Martelli and composer Mel Mercier on the performance installation Expanded Fields, Limerick City Gallery of Art (2019), Gazelli Arthouse and Live Collision Festival (2020). Her mongraph, Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer: Moving Identities was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015 and Choreography: The Basics, with Stephanie Burridge in 2022.Research Interests
At the core of my research are questions emerging from the phenomenological perspective of dancers who are both live self-aware participants in the choreographic process and the material through which the choreography is realised and the dance formed. Through practical enquiry and experimentation based on my own experience as a dancer and the experiences of other dancers working within this genre, I continue to explore how contemporary dancers' embodied knowledge unfolds through the choreographic process. My research extends into the fields of dance and somatic practices, particularly in relation to the influence of somatic approaches on dance training. I have had an international career as a dancer, choreographer and artistic director for over twenty years and continue to work on projects within arts practice research contexts.I have a broad range of skills as a researcher, moving between academic scholarship, arts policy and creative practice contexts. I have published extensively on a range of subjects including creative practice and dance training. Aside from publishing, I have also worked as a collaborator on interdisciplinary creative practice outputs with international artists in recent years. Most recently, Time Over Distance Over Time, which received highly competitive Australia Council funding, was performed in Australia and Ireland and brought together artists and researchers from Ireland, the UK and Australia to develop a new creative work, which was also funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland. It involved an international collaboration across a range of venues, festivals, production companies and funders in a highly complex project. In January 2017, I worked with digital artists Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli and choreographer Carol Brown (Associate Professor from the University of Auckland), to develop a film installation, We Are Here And We Are Everywhere At Once, filmed in Central Otago, New Zealand and presented in galleries in Auckland and London. In 2019, I collaborated with Gibson/Martelli and composer Mel Mercier on Expanded Fields, presented at Limerick City Gallery of Art (2019), Gazelli Arthouse, London and Live Collision Festival, Dublin (2020).