A tribute to all the weird kids left on the sidelines. Using the metaphor of a bird and its perceived freedom, the piece burrows inside the chaotic and vivid inner world of someone who doesn’t fit in. Through a child’s eyes and combining dance, sound, and objects, Birdboy is a journey through a frenzied and sometimes beautiful landscape of fear, isolation, fantasy, and letting go, performed by dancer Kévin Coquelard.
Birdboy is the first work that Emma Martin has made for both young and adult audiences. For ages 8+.
More informationEmma Martin started out as a ballet dancer. As a choreographer, her work spans dance, theatre, opera, and film. She creates multidisciplinary work, often combining dance with live music and theatre, creating distinct visual universes with each piece, always with a raw style of dance as its heart. She’s interested in the friction between rawness and refinement, high art and popular culture, past and future, order and chaos, homage and intent.
She graduated from the John Cranko School in Stuttgart, and has a BA in Russian and Drama & Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin. As a choreographer, she made her first show in 2010 and has produced work through her company United Fall since 2018.
She created Birdboy in 2019, and since then it has been performed in Aerowaves/Spring Forward 2023, Edinburgh International Children’s Festival 2022, Young at Art Belfast 2022, Baboró 2021, and Young Radicals Dublin Fringe 2020. Her most recent work is a performance and installation called KING/SHRINE, which is the first part of a new body work called Dark Days Need Ceremony.