MATCH MAKE – YELLOW
Match Make is a new Maiden Voyage commissioning initiative that brings dance artists and artistic collaborators together to work apart on short commissions during lockdown.
The third commission, ‘Yellow’, is a collaboration between dance artist Emily McDonagh and composer Neil Foster in response to the architecture, frames and colour of the Harland and Wolff cranes and the surrounding location in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter.
‘Yellow’ can be viewed here:
Emily McDonagh trained in dance at Sallynoggin College of Further Education and in Musical Theatre in London and winning the Dance Award in her final year. A member of Vault Studios Emily is a codirector of ponydance and has toured with the company worldwide. She created her own work ‘HOODIES’, a dance work featuring live original music that debuted in the Shaftesbury Square Theatre, (Accidental Theatre) Belfast and has also been touring with YUCK circus, a multi-award winning, all female circus company in Australia, that took the fringe circuit by storm in 2019 and is part of SHARKTANK an award winning collaborative piece made by The Movement Collective. Emily has been choreographing for various artists such as Helen Ashton and Ross Anderson-Doherty and performs regularly at the Cabaret SupperClub, Belfast.
Neil Foster is a musician, composer and music therapist based in Northern Ireland. He composes cinematic, expansive music inspired by trances, landscapes, horizons and meditative spaces. He then trained as a classical percussionist in Glasgow and Amsterdam, going on to perform and record with some of the world’s leading orchestras and ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Neil trained as a Music Therapist, qualifying in 2006. In this role he pioneered new music and health approaches for a range of organisations including Combat Stress, The Royal Marsden NHS Trust, Mencap and the National Autistic Society. Following a move back to Northern Ireland in 2015, Neil joined the Belfast Bankers collective (now Vault Artist Studios) and released his debut album ‘Hiraeth’ in 2018 while working as a music therapist for Lifeline and Victim Support NI.
Maiden Voyage are principally funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and supported by Belfast City Council.
