Dance Performance on Flu Jab Day at the Mater Hospital Belfast

Belfast-based Maiden Voyage Dance Company installed a stunning and energetic dance performance work in the Atrium of the General  Mater  Hospital, Belfast on 21st October 2011.

Maiden Voyage Dance Company partnered Arts Care to host the special performance of Stevie Prickett’s Dance exposed commission Not Now!… Later! to staff, patients and visitors in atrium at the Mater hospital in north Belfast on Friday 21 October. The performance was staged as part of Arts Care’s Dance on-going Dance in Health programme at the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust.

The organic backdrop for the dance performance was the on-going activity of hospital life on a Friday morning and involved hospital staff passing the dance space on their way to get their winter flu injection at the nurses station installed temporarily alongside the dance installation in the Atrium. Large cumbersome trollies full of laundry bags and screeching wheels trundled parallell to the dance space adding incongruously to the existing dance soundscape.  The incidental dance audience was scattered across adjoining glass, enclosed corridors that provided excellent viewpoints for the dance performances. One member of the unsuspecting audience was a young child nose pressed poignantly against the glass window, peering down at the young dancers. Other visitors, staff and patients in the hospital meandering down three levels of stairwells halted every now and then to catch glimpse of the on-going dance. Others sat in the small group of audience chairs surrounding the performance space.

The energy of the young fit dancers as they explored space, relationship and levels within a wonderful natural lit atrium, brought a specific energy of well-being and intention that illuminated the clinical hospital environment for 30 minutes out of the busy 24 hour incessant hospital activity. Arts Care continuous to provide regular music/dance performance within healthcare environments as an integral part of its arts delivery programme.

Arts Care would like to take this opportunity to say a very big thank you to Artistic Director of Maiden Voyage, Nicola Curry and the dancers for their commitment to realising this dynamic dance performance in such a vital environment.