Feeling Impact
8/27/2024
Pair of mule-style shoes with wooden soles — National Museum of African American History and Culture (Open Access/CC0).
Overview
What does it mean to dance impact? Is it to be struck by violence, or to strike against it? In the traditions of stomping floors, slapping bodies and snapping air, dancers confront legacies of trauma, recalibrate their nervous systems and shift our very sense of time. I write from a Romani perspective, where these practices thread through thousands of years of dis/place. I write from Ireland, where both academia and my community in North Clare offered me a dance through which I could carry this story into English.
Abstract
Intimate Violence is a practice-based study of Irish step dance that asks a simple question with radical consequences: what if the truth of percussive dance lives not only in what we see or hear, but in what the body feels at impact? Drawing on a psychometric (object-reading) perspective and an Arts Practice methodology, I read both material and immaterial “objects”—from 18th-century dance manuals and wooden-soled shoes to recurring gestures, memories, sites and systems of oppression. The book traces how impact, attention, and identity co-produce technique and meaning across the 17th–18th-century Atlantic world and today. Along the way, two performance case studies—The Querist (2017) and AngelAI (2023)—map a haptic, impact-driven practice that confronts legacies of colonization, oppression, and intimate harm. Written from my position as a Queer, Romani, disabled dance artist-researcher, Intimate Violence reframes percussive traditions—Irish step dance in dialogue with Tap, Flamenco, and Ballet Folklórico—as embodied archives where bodies negotiate history and violence one strike at a time.
Pre-order
I’m preparing a trade-readable adaptation of the dissertation.
- Join the launch list to get the pre-order link the moment it’s live: https://newsletter.timedancers.org
- Interested in institutional orders or bulk copies? Email me: info@timedancers.org
Methods
My project combines studio experiments, live performances, activism and critical writing. Methods include somatics, traditions in Irish step dance, Romani dance and comparative analysis with Ballroom/Fogue arm work.
- Impact drills (floor strikes, body percussion, breath)
- Attention routing (fashion, haptics, timeline threading)
- Witness protocols and post-performance notes
References & availability
- University of Limerick Library catalogue: forthcoming listing.
- UL Institutional Repository (ULIR): post-exam deposit, forthcoming.
- Book adaptation: pre-orders opening soon (see launch list above).
Keywords
Decolonial Dance Studies, Critical Romani Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Queer Disability Studies, Trans Studies, Black Performance Theory, Irish Step Dance, Percussive Dance, Impact-Driven Dance, Somatic, Embodiment, Arts Practice PhD, Psychometry, Object-Reading, Posthuman Performativity, Barad, Atlantic World, Tap, Flamenco, Ballet Folklórico.
Contact
Speaking, workshops, or publication inquiries: info@timedancers.org
Image credit
Pair of mule-style shoes with wooden soles — National Museum of African American History and Culture (Open Access/CC0). Accessed: 2025-09-12
