Making moves to survive torture

[struggle4progress]

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
ARMINTA WALLACE

... WHAT DOES A torture survivor look like? That's what choreographer John Scott asked himself in 2003, when he was on his way to give a workshop to a group of clients at the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture (CCST) in 2003.

"I walked into the room," he says, "and I saw about 12 beautiful people smiling at me. And I thought: 'This is the wrong room. This is some planning meeting, and these must be people who work here.' "

We all laugh. We are sitting at a table in Sheries restaurant in Middle Abbey Street, Dublin. Four Irish citizens drinking herbal tea, a choreographer, a journalist, a woman who has come here from Romania and a woman who has come from Africa. The latter two have been introduced as "Nina" and "Kiribu" respectively. Neither wants her real name to be published in the newspaper, because although they've lived in Ireland for quite a long time, they still don't want to draw unwanted - and potentially dangerous - attention to family members back home ...

The first workshop turned into a regular group session which, in turn, produced a 10-minute dance show, performed in June 2004. That should have been that, except that nobody, neither Scott nor the group, wanted to stop. So they created another show, Fall and Recove r, which played at the Project Cube in September of that year. They performed it at the SFX, then did a tour of Ireland ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0512/1224246310798.html