Biography

Emma 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, 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.

“I try to make dances and pieces to be felt- movement and ideas that inspire emotion and open up a porous exchange between performers and audience, honouring the invisible cellular energetic connective tissue the joins us, all of us pouring out reaching for that thing beyond our grasp, sharing the same air, dreaming into new realities together.”

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 now produces work through her company United Fall since 2018. She created Birdboy in 2019, and since then it has been performed in Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, Young at Art Belfast, Baboró, Young Radicals Dublin Fringe. 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. Previous works include Night Dances, I AM IRELAND, Orfeo ed Euridice, Girl Song, Dancehall, Tundra. Her work has been shown at Dublin Theatre Festival, Dublin Dance Festival, Galway International Arts Festival, Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival, Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art and Dublin International Film Festival. United Fall is generously supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Emma is an associate artist at Visual Centre for Contemporary Art and Dance Ireland.